Trip to Vancouver Island and back to Tucson, 1998

1997 Fred Allebach   Trip to Vancouver Island and back to Tucson     1/11/98

9/2 leave Tucson

9/12 leave Seattle for Vancouver Island

9/24 return to Seattle

9/26 leave for Olympic coast

10/2 return to Seattle

10/7 leave Vashon

10/13 arrive Sonoma

10/14 start work w/ Shambhala

 c. 10/19 Esalen for four days

11/13 -16 Portland WFR recert.

11/20s Nevada

!2 /3 Arrive Tucson

Journal:

9/2/97 Cliff Dwellers/ BLM Soap Creek trail head, Arizona Strip

For a definitely good cheeseburger, north of Phoenix take Black Canyon City exit, go L over 17 and L again to the Rock- something- Café and store.

It is 6:PM at Soap Creek trail head. The parking lot is just dirt in the middle of sage brush to every horizon. The Vermillion Cliffs make a giant horseshoe around me. Dark thunderstorms are socking it to the north rim. I’ve always wanted to camp around here and this is a good traveling, road camping spot. It’s nice to be out here after Labor Day. There were no fresh tire tracks down here. My tires are covered with beautiful red, wet, sandy soil.

There is a thick cloud cover and while it is still light bats are out. The released condors are around here somewhere. Just knowing they are here adds a Pleistocene sense of mystery. This is an isolated area. Wide open. The Colorado River has carried away all the rock and soil inside my horseshoe. With some imagination I could be encased deep under massive sedimentary rock, locked and frozen back in time but the present is revealed. I am here. I am standing at the threshold of earth’s history. It is all right here in front of me. (The roots of rock)

There is evidence of recent rain and sheet flooding and gully washing. This is not too far from where all those European tourists got swept away by a flash flood. The ground is wet but I am not worried about saturation and increased flooding because this area is so incredibly arid. With such a low annual rainfall if my spot here has already had rain chances are it won’t again any time soon. I could get a freak hit by El Nino...........later: a fairly large and strong front of thunder storms started to build up and come at me. I had to bail out of the trail head area and get back above all the gullies. Now I am on high ground and closer to the road. There are abandoned shacks and broken down cattle loading pens, all way junked out. The thunder in the Vermillion Horseshoe echoes like amazing! This is a great rumbling, deep, substantial thunder experience with so far no close lightning.

Standing outside and getting drizzled on with a good breeze I started to notice a sensation I hadn’t felt in a long time, being cold ! I am actually feeling cold. After baking for months and months in Tucson I am in a great high desert menacing and cold monsoon. This is great! It has turned into a big time storm. Very widespread with heavy rain. Lightning as far as the eye can see. Illuminating the whole cliffs. The sage. Lightning burning straight into your soul.

I’m glad I bailed. I may not have bailed far enough. It is all definitely enough to feel a sense of beginning adventure. Wind buffets the car. The Messiah plays on the tape deck. Lightning and thunder intrude and amaze. Demand attention. Here at the Vermillion Cliffs is the perfect monsoon. I have been waiting years for one like this.

The ground is already saturated and gullies will run more quickly. Some of this lightning is like getting beamed up. The entirely intense clear flickers light everything in a pulsing strobe of incredible brilliance and if you happen to be looking at a strike it sucks you in.

9/3 In the mountains outside of McGill, NV

It rained almost all day up through Arizona, Utah and into Nevada. It was unusual. I had to stop numerous times to get out and walk around a rainy desert. It was too novel. I turned 200,000 miles today on my Toyota and stopped to take a picture of the odometer. Out of McGill I started looking for roads up into the mountains and found a nice isolated spot with coyotes yapping and bull elk whistling and bellowing. After some good guitar playing I slept like a rock under intense clear sky and brilliant stars.

9/4

The oil appears to be low. A 9:AM check confirms it only appeared low, the old more apparent than real. A 6:30PM check confirms the same, Toyota!

The main difference between northern Nevada and Idaho, (the Sawtooths,) is the presence or absence of glacial history. In Idaho there are horns, moraine, u-shaped valleys with big flat bottoms. My camp now would be under heavy ice if this was 12,000 years ago. I like the buried metaphor. Now there is aspen, spruce and fir. Even though it is technically still summer this place exudes cold. The plants and trees look chilled even now. Geographically this spot is almost an exact mix of the Boise Front and Clearwater National Forest. Sage is still strong but higher elevation plant groups are thick on the north sides and assertive and entertainingly visual on south sides. The sage cascades out below, contrasting it’s color and texture with the rock and alpine plants above.

9/5

Galena Pass, the headwaters of the Salmon River, the hatchery where only two salmon returned, Stanley, Sunbeam Mine, the long dirt road through the mountains , Boot Hill, the grave signed “unknown”, Challis, cowboys, nasty trucks and eking a living out on the northern frontier, washboards shake my tail pipe loose, I camp by a lazy section of the Salmon River with big trees, sandy banks and slow water.

9\6

Tonight I’m by the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. I explored back roads heading down this way and found a Forest Service campground, it was unsigned and I just stumbled in. My sense of intuition is getting better, to know how to get just far enough out of town, then study the terrain and the roads and hope for a spot. This place was nice and quiet until a family came in with two jet skis and motor bikes. Then a crew came and camped right next to me, two mothers with four young kids and a baby! What a zoo, you can’t believe the noise. And then squirrels start going nuts chirping and squawking. In Missoula I need to fix exhaust and change oil.

9/7

You get out of the mountains around Spokane and start in on rolling hills. The area is heavily irrigated. I liked Sprague, a little two bit railroad town with some fantastic architectural gems. Spokane has a lot of vintage, fairly large brick buildings. There is a sizeable area of older architecture. I was impressed by the old downtown and that stands out as something worth checking out later. Spokane also has entirely awesome levels of strip development which serve not to distinguish it but rather to make you feel you could be in anywhere America.

The road follows right along with the Clark Fork. There is a road sign by Lake Pend’Oreille about how glaciers dammed the Clark Fork and created the prehistoric Lake Missoula. There was another glacier dam which formed a lake around Grand Coulee called Coulee Lake. The dam on Lake Missoula broke over forty times and when the dam broke absolutely huge quantities of water went blasting down the Clark Fork, into the Columbia and into Coulee Lake.  The river jumped it’s channel, scoured out the Grand Coulee and created massive flood damage which can now be seen in the channeled scab lands of eastern Washington. So much water went down that it backed up the Snake River as well. At Dry Falls you look at where unimaginable quantities of water burst over the now dry cliffs. The over all volume was something like half of Lake Michigan in one or two days. In the Grand Coulee you can see gravel bars way up on the side. When the flooding was done the Columbia went back into it’s old channel. This is another variation on the theme of being enveloped and buried by huge forces out if the past.

There is a campground close to Grand Coulee Dam with swimming access and it is quite pleasant except for all the jet skis and speed boats making whining obnoxious noises while you try to enjoy some quiet and the splendor of the second largest concrete structure in the world. The grand Coulee Dam is one high powered mother fucker. I don’t understand why some people just aren’t recreationally happy unless they have motors running. Jet skis, ATVs, motorcycles, mini-bikes, speed boats, jacked up trucks, RVs, it is a big culture of mechanized entertainment.

My driver’s seat collapsed and a main support spring broke. I made a great comeback by removing the seat, taking the upholstery off the bottom and somehow with tape and an epoxy, fixing compound, managed to join the broken ends and secure them permanently together. The fix has lasted five months so far.

I asked the Bureau of Reclamation desk guys about salmon and the effects of the dam and one fellow became defensive and said 98% of salmon go up the Snake River drainage and only 2% up the Columbia. He said the Columbia runs are most productive around Wenatchee and historically not that many salmon went past the Grand Coulee area anyway. I have to wonder about that. All I know is I see dams on just about every river in Idaho and plenty more in the region. I go to a hatchery on the Salmon River and they have only two wild fish that made it back this year! What at first may have seemed like a good idea to control floods, generate electricity and stockpile water for irrigation has in the end turned out to be the death knell for the salmon. The salmon are a big force to wipe out but that is what is happening. To remove so many animals from an ecosystem which grew up with them has got to have serious effects.

10/9 Umpqua Lighthouse State Park, OR

There is a strong storm parked off Vancouver Island.  It rained all night at Grayland Beach. It rained all the way up to Nehalem. After Nehalem and up to Umpqua it was very windy with heavy rain. Driving conditions were quite bad. Water collects in the road and then gets plowed up for all the vehicles behind. Trucks are monstrous in this kind of weather, very menacing with giant clouds of spray coming off all wheels, pushing air, tail gaiting, difficult and dangerous to pass because you can’t see shit around them. The rain is tremendously intense and insistent. It is coming at you in waves upon waves with short respites to shuffle your stuff before running for cover again.

This has been my wettest trip to the northwest ever. My stuff is wet and it has been wet for weeks. The inside of my car is wet. There is no escape. Being dry is only a dim memory. It is hard to fathom that I was so hot and dry a mere month ago.

I stopped at “........Chasm, like Clark’s or Chris’, something with alliteration, it was a cool place with waves surging in through channels and then bursting up, like La Bufadora in Baja. With this storm the surging was particularly intense. I met a nice high school biology teacher who came out just to witness the waves here and we watched until the rain started up again. The Oregon coast has a lot of cool little stopping places. There are too many to do on one trip.

I visited the Tillamook cheese factory and got a sense of the local watershed and how important the local watersheds are to the people along the coast who depend upon these resources. If the cows trash all the streams and send muddy cowshit laden water down into the bays and estuaries then that messes up the shellfish and the fishing. I have the sense that the more enlightened communities are looking at their watersheds as whole systems and how to maintain them for all the folks involved. It is enlightened self interest for all the players because if they don’t get together and work on it in a regional way, some will lose the traditional resources that they are all tooled up to exploit.

There are a lot of big trees along the west coast and a group I like a lot is the Taxadiacae, sp? which includes redwoods and cedars. As the redwoods reach the northern most limit of their range in coastal southern Oregon the Port Orford Cedar steps in as the local representative of the Taxadiacae.

Date unknown

The Vancouver Island hike was: hard, fun, novel, crazy and incredible.

$200.00 Tucson to Seattle

$379.00 Canadian/ $270.00 US : costs from Seattle to BC and back

$233.00: cost to replace boots/insoles after BC hike

$400.00 return trip to Tucson

The hike on the Olympic coast was totally stormy, rough and wild. I can handle rain and I can be wet but jeez after being wet half the time in BC I just got tired of it. After six days we bailed out and it was just as well because I had sciatica in a bad way. My left foot was numb and I could hardly sleep at night. My leg was saying to four ibuprofen “...can’t touch this...”

On a six day ride from Vashon to Sonoma I discovered Grayland Beach State Park just a bit south of Aberdeen, WA. I would recommend it. It is a big, long, flat beach and you can drive your car out there just fine and load the shells and sand dollars and driftwood right in. It is a shell junky’s dream. Too bad there is not a lot of driftwood out there. I guess the locals are selling it to the tourists.

To sum up, through Oregon I was in a big storm, a monster low pressure zone: 12,000 people without power, 6000 more with temporary fluctuations of power, chains required in the mountains, 33' high waves by Coos Bay, gusts from 45 to 75 mph, waves 16' tonight dropping to 11' tomorrow. I was in that stuff and all my gear was wet from camping out. Rain was blowing in through the cracks in my car windows. I was buffeted heavily by the wind while at times being aggressively tailgated by logging trucks. To get out for any reason meant getting wet and rain in the car. It was pretty wild. I don’t get around that kind of thing too often. I had to stop at a laundromat and just throw a lot of stuff in the driers.

At the same period of time there were earthquakes up to 3.9 off Eureka. I had three days in the northern redwoods and that is mighty fine, very nice, especially pleasant and really fun to cruise through slowly. I’m liking it all too much and unfortunately I have to go work to pay for my sorry ass and my upcoming bills and taxes.  Luckily I have the Mighty Mountain Man to be my patron in the Bay Area and give me a shack and a job. I’m cyber/migratory labor. I could be doing worse. Here I am on a two or three month travel/adventure/work vacation doing only what I want.

X had an affair and kept it secret from X for months. As my visit is immanent I dread the emotional tone of the X scene. X is living in trailer. He is in the dog house. His life is a mess. He fell for his dog trainer who as it turns out trains men too. It was destiny after the first training when X asked if dogs were the only thing she trained and X said “no I train men too”. I’ve only met X once in passing. I did see that she had a nice butt.

It wasn’t as bad as I would have thought. When I saw X and X it wasn’t weird. They were still my friends. Everything was on the table so there was no pretending that things weren’t screwed up.

What are some of my enduring insights here? Talk is cheap. The flesh is weak. Actions speak louder than words.

Sex and intimacy, passion and romance are extremely powerful and compelling enough to make a person do almost anything. Sex is so compelling because it is a deep down animal thing that we can’t shake off. Sex won’t go away like superstitious beliefs. There is a primal urge to do it. Marriage and commitment are cultural strategies to insure the success of the offspring. But any stability is played out against a constant back drop of potential other partners. If there are no social controls people will follow their desires. You have to ask what really does separate people from animals? What good is somebody’s word if they can just go back on it like that?

But as the day fades and the cool breezes of night blow in through the South Fork Eel River I reflect on years of experience and gracefully move into night with all faith that the sun will rise again. I’ve been the king of the beach for as long as I could and now with my sand dollars and sea shells I’m back to pay the pipers.

11/12 Ashland, OR

I stopped in Ashland and spent the night. I went out to a couple of bars and asked a lot of questions about the Rogue River Valley area and discovered that Ashland is pretty cutesy pie. Most of the folks who work for the rich in Ashland live in Medford. It is a nice area geographically. It bridges the high Sacramento Valley with the Pacific northwest coast. The climate is mostly temperate. (Some of the high country, especially over in California by Mt. Shasta and going down into the Trinity Alps can get very cold in the winter.) There is a state university. There is adequate culture. The one major drawback is that there are just too many white people. It is too homogenous. Having lived in Tucson for so long I need to see Hispanics and Indians and be around a rich tapestry of culture and history which you just don’t get up in Whitey-ville.

11/13 Champoeg State Park, OR

Here in the storied Willamette River valley it is very nice. Canadian geese are all about in stubbly fields and along river banks. At twilight as flocks fly over the stark outlines of leafless trees I had the sense that while I was seeing and hearing geese I was also seeing and hearing the rhythms and larger patterns of life itself. The geese show you the change of seasons. Their migration and honking tell you winter is coming. The geese act out the laws of their species, to migrate and follow water courses, find sustenance and suitable areas to breed and rear their chicks. Once I had made the insight that the sounds of the geese represented more than just geese I could marvel and look and listen to then with an enhanced sense of awe.

The trees make strange and beautiful outlines silhouetted against the twilight sky. One leaf hangs against a primal starkness. The valley has a sense of ancient harvest cycles. It is autumn. The growing season slows. Drab colors and leafless trees create a unique feeling of change in the season. It is death and the promise of renewal. The colors accent  rolling hills and fields of corn stubble, old barns and houses. The Willamette River has an omnipresent feeling, you know it is around even if you can’t see it. 

This region is a nice combination of Indiana rolling farmland midwest with a Berkshiresque twist of decent sized hills covered with deciduous trees. There is a strong Fall season with orange, red, green and yellow. With fog, mist, rain and clear days it is nice all the way around. The rural country side blends into urban Portland ever so gradually and I will be heading up there to recertify my Wilderness First Responder training .

11/16

At Lewis and Clark college where the course was held I had expected to be able to sleep in my car or maybe set up my tent in somebody’s backyard. No such luck. No one in the class was forthcoming with any help and the campus police would not allow me to stay anywhere overnight on their ample campus. I cruised the streets in the rain until I found an isolated spot by a stream that was not directly in front of anyone’s house. That was home for two nights of sketchy sleep.

Lewis and Clark has a policy to not permit any over night camping and I can understand that this is aimed at preventing trouble. However if policy is rigid and inflexible that does not allow people to be human and extend just the most basic courtesy to a traveler who is paying good bucks to take a course.

After Lewis and Clark I went back down I-5 to Yreka, CA and then cut over to the mountains to try and come out by Weaverville. A big storm was coming and I thought why not just go the way I want and if it gets too tough I’ll just camp out. Well I got myself right up to the top of the pass, afterwhich I would have been down in the Trinity Center area, but the wind was howling and blowing snow everywhere and I pushed it pretty good but when I started to slide and fishtail I just turned around and went back to Etna and got a motel and went out and slammed a few with the local homeboys.

Coming down by Mt Shasta later it was tremendously dramatic and picturesque, the clouds were mystical.  I didn’t get to see Shasta on the way up or on the way back; it was covered with clouds.

After a couple more days working with X and picking up dog shit at Whole Foods six or seven times by accident as we raked leaves, I headed out for South Lake Tahoe and was shooting to beat a storm so I could go over some scenic passes and down to 395 and Bishop. I beat the storm and noticed that Mono Lake was looking much higher than before. Again the snow and hyperborean stark, inorganic power of the winter was just amazing. The eastern Sierras were majestic and silent witness to giant and powerful natural forces.

Out of Bishop I went over towards Tonopah, stopping at the Cottontail Ranch on Sunday morning. I had driven by there many times and this time I really just wanted to see what was inside, what was it like in there? They had a cash machine right next to the bar but only had one professional ready at 9:30 AM. I had to decline; it was just too weird.  I got a pack of matches for a souvenir and they told me to save my pennies.

Back out on the road I was heading into high plains, the basin and range province. The savage, cold grip of winter was on the land. It was cold as shit. I went to Great Basin National Park and it looked like fun for later backpacking. In the middle of nowhere someone had put a horse skeleton all wired together as if it were driving and drinking a beer inside an old rusted hulk of a car. The same person had decorated the fence line up to Great Basin N.P. with all sorts of masks and art. It was fun to encounter this unexpected creativity.

I drove through some small towns with great old brick buildings. One old house had colored bottles embedded in the adobe.  I spent the night in Ely and it got down into the single digits. There was ice everywhere on the street. The weather was harsh but dramatically beautiful. The clouds were tremendous and as I drove over to Utah the next day and back into the Colorado plateau country; the clouds put on a spectacular show. Unfortunately for me what I thought were rolls upon rolls of award winning photographs turned out to be exposed wrong. I had an old camera cleaned and it turned out that the mercury battery the camera was designed to be used with is no longer available. The camera people said they could calibrate the light meter to work with the new style batteries and made it sound like it would all be OK. Well it didn’t work and twelve rolls of 36 slides were mostly no good, from Vancouver Island back to Tucson. I guess you can’t take it with you anyway.

It was nice to be back around Zion National Park and to be heading home after three months but it also meant that fun adventures would be temporarily ending as I would need to get an apartment and work to pay for being a member of society. I prefer being a traveler and being able to choose which way to go at the fork in the road, allowing experience to unfold as it may. I like to explore and see new things and this epistle is my latest testimony to attest to that fact.