MOUNT HOOD, Ore. — She's a lurker.
Mount Hood, the craggiest and mightiest of the Oregon Cascades, is a rock-and-ice presence that, on many days, you feel more than see.
Thanks — or no thanks — to cranky weather rolling in off the Pacific or barrel racing up or down the Columbia River Gorge, the majestic, 11,235-foot peak can be shrouded in clouds for days.
July 21, 2005
MIRACLE BEACH, B.C. The woman at the entrance booth, no doubt, thought we were nuts.
"We have a reservation!" I had proudly proclaimed as we drove our newish pint-sized RV, the White Rhino, up to the gate at one of Vancouver Island's finer campgrounds last Friday.
"Oh," was all she could say, flashing back the kind of polite smile usually reserved for crazy people who approach you on the street and ask you to watch their dog, which is nowhere in sight.
June 3, 2004
LEAVENWORTH With hindsight, it seems astonishing. But to Kjell Bakke, it was simply the way things were.
If you were a Norwegian tyke growing up in Leavenworth, not long after you learned to walk, you learned to fly.
Not in a plane, the way the Wright Brothers were doing it. Off the ground. On your own. With a little bit of the Cascade Mountains for a launch, and a lot of your own nerve as your navigation system.
January 29, 2004
HARRISON LAKE, B.C. — Every good escape needs a great escape.
That thought might strike you as you lay supine in a soothing British Columbia hot pool, staring up into the misty sky and forgetting about everything — until eight children from Surrey perform synchronized cannonballs into the water all around you.
June 9, 2003
SKAGIT VALLEY Midmorning, on one of those deliciously crisp, ice-scraper winter days. You stand shivering on a gravel knoll at the edge of a cornfield and peer across acres of flat, fecund earth, hoping for the telltale flash of white.
What were you thinking? There's nothing here but old stalks and brown dirt. Still, it's the first truly quiet place you've been in a month, so you thrust your hands deeper in pockets against the chill and wait.
January 30, 2003
Sometimes they're delightfully ahead of it (snowboarding, way before it was cool, or practically even invented), sometimes charmingly behind it (snow from heaven, not hoses), but the folks at
Mount Baker can never be accused of being right on the curve.
The tradition continues this winter, when Baker, in a world where resorts measure progress in new, multi-million dollar express lifts, unveils a $1.6 million ski-area upgrade which reduces its overall chairlift total.
November 21, 2002
PATIENCE.
It's the one thing local skiers and snowboarders just emerging from what must have seemed an endless, six-month, snowless coma typically lack in these fitful, final weeks between Halloween and that traditional first big dump.
This is not good. Because patience is likely what they'll likely need most this winter to make it all the way through to the first good, consistent powder dumps.
Sometime in January.
November 21, 2002
SUNRISE, Mount Rainier National Park You can't park. You can't find water. You can't find shade. And you can't wait to go back.
That's the typical emotional chain reaction experienced by visitors to Sunrise, the alpine summer playground on the northeast slopes of one of the world's grandest volcanoes.
Sunrise, at 6,400 feet, is one of a half-dozen or so places in the Northwest at which you'll arrive by car, get out and realize the truth: There's absolutely no way, in a just world, that you should be able to drive here.
August 25, 2002
If sand between your toes starts to feel as familiar as cellphone static, youre getting closer.
Closer, that is, to feeling farther away from it all. Which is probably why you'd be out here in the first place, leaving cares, concerns, worries and shoes behind as you partake in one of the greatest natural gifts our homeland offers up.
A beach walk, that is.
July 25, 2002
DARRINGTON "If a man speaks in the forest where no woman can hear," the T-shirt lettering wanted to know, "is he still wrong?"
In this case, the answer (most likely yes) is a lot less pertinent than the place in which the question is unabashedly asked: Namely, the Sauk River Tradin' Post in downtown Darrington, an old-school kind of Northwest town where "politically correct" means spelling the name of your congressman right on a complaint letter.
June 27, 2002
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