West Coast Adventures

Its not 100% finalized, but here's the 'best of' footage from our adventures in BC, Washington and Oregon this October. There will be minor tweaks for the DVD, but with all the Africa footage we have coming up in March this has to be put up now or it will be forgotten until 2011 ;)

Many of the places shown here have been featured in earlier posts so there's lots more information in the archive for anyone inclined to poke around a bit.

Multnomah Falls

The Columbia River snakes along the border between southern Washington and northern Oregon all the way to the sea. We ended up following along this stretch for quite a ways on our adventures this summer to visit a number of spots before heading further south.

One of these places was Multnomah Falls which is a gorgeous spot with a rather steep hike to the top of the falls consisting of a dozen or so switchbacks.
The hike is pretty reasonable except I was perhaps overfussing about the potential cold at the top and as such we were both bundled up in too many layers so the climb was more arduous because of the heat than any lack of physical fitness.

The view from the top was equally impressive, offering a commanding view of the Columbia River and both states.

The top of the falls was also populous enough that we were able to get someone else to take a picture of the pair of us, helping to prove that two people did go on this trip since most of the pictures only have one or the other of us.

Long Beach, Washington

Near the end of our west coast adventures this fall we happened to look through one of our guidebooks about horseback riding spots about 30 minutes before the turnoff to Long Beach in Washington.
We had not originally intended to stop there but Kathryn had been wanting some horseback riding for ages and the town boasted a Cranberry Museum to sweeten the deal, so we made an overnight detour.
Through a bit of last-minute panicking we were able to arrange seaside rides the following day and ended up having a 2 hour private ride along the beach.
We were also set upon on all sides by these young birds, which I will call Common Murres until my father corrects me. Its either harder to be a Murre than you think or they were not very good at it because the beach was littered with dozens and dozens of them that morning and perhaps a third of them had died.
Oddly enough over the course of our ride most of them set out into the water and by the end there were hardly any on the beach, even the dead ones having been carried out by the tide.
There were no oil slicks to have contaminated them and no offshore rocks nearby where they would have roosted, so any theories on what the hell they were doing and dying there about are welcome. (Turns out there is an algae bloom in effect on the West Coast currently. The algea strips the weather proofing like an oil slick and kills them. This phenomenon is very recent possible exacerabated by Climate Change- ed.)
Long Beach is essentially alive because of the tourist trade and is any child's dream. Aside from several kite shops, candy stores, toy shops and the like, there is a Curio Shop (read: kitsch souvenirs and stuffed animal heads) which seem to be more common in Washington than you'd expect.
One of their star attractions is Jake the Alligator Man (shown below) which is some sort of weird mummy from back when they had more dead kids and alligators around than copies of Photoshop.