We awoke to a home-cooked breakfast of scrambled eggs with onion and courgette, cooked up by Linda, our Airbnb host. We talked with her over breakfast about the day's plan, and she suggested that we should head up the Columbia River Gorge and check out the scenery before it got too hot. We had a list of places we needed to see given to us by Max (our Vancouver landlord), but they were mostly in the inner city.
We took Linda's advise and headed off straight after we finished eating. We drove along highway 84 until we reached the turnoff for a little town called Corbett, where the Historic Columbia River Highway begins. The gorge (and this highway) are one of Portland's natural treasures, and both are loved dearly by the local residents. The city had been dismayed when a 49,000-acre fire had ripped through the gorge in late 2017, destroying vast amounts of their prized possession.
The Oregon Government calls it the "King of roads," and has this to say about it:
Imagine crafting a national treasure on a landscape so beautiful that each viewpoint is protected and people come from all over the world to marvel at its perfection. This is the Historic Columbia River Highway. Whether you are seeing it for the first time or you know every inch by heart, each time you drive, bike, or hike along the Historic Highway, you begin the journey anew.[1]
The highway was built between 1913 and 1922 and was the first planned scenic roadway in the USA. It has been recognised in numerous ways, including a listing on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark, designation as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers, and considered a "destination unto itself" as an All-American Road by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation. It was modelled after the great scenic roads of Europe and was envisioned not just as a means of travel, but designed with an elegance that took full advantage of all the natural beauty along the route.[2]
We wound around cliffs and outcroppings along the tree-lined highway until we arrived at a viewpoint called Vista House. This is a grand hexagonal stone building set on a basalt promontory called Crown Point. It was constructed at the same time as the highway, and was intended to be both a rest stop and "an observatory from which the view both up and down the Columbia could be viewed in silent communion with the infinite." It certainly delivered, and we walked around the grounds for half an hour, taking photos up and down the gorge.
We carried on from there and visited two other falls on the highway; La Tourell and Bridal Veil. Both of these we impressive, and as they were easily accessible from the road, packed with tourists. Along the way, we passed some construction work, where an old stonemason was rebuilding one of the arches that formed the guardrail. I thought it was really cool that they were still building them from stone and not just cast concrete with a pattern pressed in. Unfortunately, because of the recent fire the road to the main attraction, Multnomah Falls, was closed and so only accessible by the main highway, and to get there would have meant backtracking for half an hour.
Instead, we returned to the city and visited the International Rose Test Gardens. These are a huge public garden on the edge of Washington Park where there are over 10,000 rose bushes planted, comprising about 650 varieties. New types of roses are sent continuously to the garden from all over the world, where they are evaluated on several characteristics, including disease resistance, bloom form, colour, and fragrance. The garden had been started back in World War 1 as a safe place to keep specimens of roses for Europe, as rose enthusiasts feared that many of the unique species would be destroyed by bombs. We walked around in the scorching heat for only 15 minutes before we were overwhelmed and had to retreat to the cool comfort of the car.
We went to find lunch at the Alder Street Food Cart Pod, which is an area where food carts and trucks have set up around the perimeter of a block-sized parking lot, all facing out onto the footpath. We did a lap of the block looking for something cold to eat but found that the majority of the food on offer was fried or toasted, such as grilled cheese sandwiches, burritos, kebabs, etc. We eventually found a Hawaiian/Japanese stand and bought a tuna poke bowl, which we shared sitting on the pavement in about a metre-wide sliver of shade cast by the building we leant against.
As we'd managed to find a nicely shaded (albeit expensive) carpark, we decided to walk from the food carts to Powell's City of Books. This place is insane, it's a bookstore that takes up an entire block of the city, spanning multiple levels of a building. We started off with a coffee and then lost ourselves in amongst the shelves for over an hour. I never made it out of the science fiction section, but Katie explored much farther, finding a kids non-fiction section, a whole aisle of pop-up books, travel, cooking, board games, and more. We could easily have spent days here, browsing the used and rare books, new releases, and reading anything we felt like at the tables in the cafe.
We finished the day off at Von Ebert brewing, where we had some beers and snacks and began planning what we were going to do about the next section of our trip. After experiencing the heat in Portland for a day and a half, we'd decided that there was no way we would survive camping where it was even hotter. Earlier today we received an email telling us that our booking at Wawona (a campground outside Yosemite) had been cancelled as the campground was closed due to fire, and after looking it up, we found that the entire Yosemite valley had been evacuated too. We checked the cancellation policies on our still valid campground bookings at Klamath Falls, El Dorado National Forest, Zion Canyon, and Moab, and also the hotel and Cirque show we'd booked in Las Vegas. Thankfully most could be cancelled with a full refund, and the few with a penalty would still refund us all but a service fee. We looked at many possibilities and routes for about three hours but ultimately decided that we were too tired to work it all out properly and so headed back to our Airbnb.