Oregon

This is a very quick update, lacking details and elegant writing style. But what can I say, I'm sitting in a garage in Portland on my crash pad and I'm sleepy!

Where to begin? We’ve been on the road for about ten days now and a lot has happened! I’ll try to cover it the best I can. We left Tahoe late in the afternoon on Sunday, September 5th. We made it to Davis to pick up Casey and had to deal with the task of fitting everything into the car. We went through all of our things, asking ourselves, ‘do I really need this?’ Thanks to our spiffy new roof box, and some excellent packing, we were able to fit everything into the car and still see out the back window. Great success!

We hit the road at about 9 PM and drove straight through the night, arriving at Smith Rock in Oregon at about 5 AM the next morning. We looked at the temperature gauge in the car and were shocked to see that it said 27 degrees. Definitely not the hot temps we were expecting. We grabbed a campsite at Skull Hollow, slept for a few hours and then headed to the crag. The day turned out to be rather warm, despite the freezing temperatures of the night before. We spent all day at Phoenix Buttress climbing moderate climbs in the company of other fun climbers.

The dogs were very well behaved, and everyone at the crag loved them! Someone even said, “when I have a dog one day, I hope it is as cool as either of your dogs!” Wow, what a great thing to hear! Well unfortunately, I learned the next day that there is a rule at Smith Rock that you cannot tie your dog to a tree, rock or anything besides yourself while you are at the park. This proved to be a pain and put a bit of a damper on the rest of the week. Despite some doggy drama, it was a great week at Smith.

We met some really cool people, and met up with a bunch of Cal Poly people (now alumni) such as Alex, Vikki, Grant, Amy, Margot and more. We were plagued by three days of rain, but were able to climb a bit during those days. Due to the rain and dog restrictions, it was not ideal to get on any hard climbs and project them so we headed out from Smith on Sunday morning.

From there we went about 40 minutes north to Trout Creek. We camped by the Deschutes River and hiked the horribly long and steep hike up to the crag on Sunday and Monday. Trout Creek was really cool. It is a small buttress on top of a huge hill. It is all splitter cracks, not my style, but I am learning. This was a good place for the dogs because they could get lots of exercise hiking up to the crag and were free to roam off leash once there.

On Monday night, we got a fantastic lightening storm as we drove into town to go to a bar for some food and beer. More rain put us to sleep that night, and the next morning we packed up and headed for Portland. We started out going in the wrong direction somehow for the first 30 minutes of our drive, but were soon on our way to the city. I had no idea that Portland was so big, and so … strange. It is a really cool city but definitely has its quirks.

Today we went to a little crag called Ozone, which is just over the border in Washington. Fun sport climbing, followed by… you guessed it, rain! It seems that the rainy season has arrived in Oregon, Washington and Squamish. We are ready to move away from this rain, so tomorrow we are headed to the Tetons. We are absolutely stoked! After that we will head to City of Rocks in Idaho and on to Utah and Colorado. Well that is the update for now. It is time to get some sleep before our long drive tomorrow.