The Real Oregon

People flock to see Oregon’s beautiful wilderness areas, where they can enjoy the natural world as it was, at least in theory, about the time of Columbus. Problem is, people really do flock to them. People arrive in flocks. Oregon’s wilderness areas, like those around the country, tend to be a little crowded, let’s just say.

What’s not crowded is the rest of the forest: those ordinary non-celebrity miles and miles of woods, which once held virgin trees but now are basically government-sponsored tree farms, laced through with logging roads. These are the woods that most people drive past to get to that little tiny, crowded, wilderness area.

Whatever you think of logging, ordinary logging roads can make ideal walking. They’re better graded than the best trail and they often go to interesting places.

Best of all, no one goes there — wherever it is you happen to be.

You can walk hundreds of miles on Oregon’s logging roads and never see anyone else.

This afternoon, for example, we set off on a favorite stretch of logging road, which led us up through the lower Cascades past a 10-year-old clearcut. Instead of seeing other hikers — and their ill-behaved dogs (”Oh, he’s friendly!”) — we watched two redtail hawks scolding us as we got too close to their nest. We saw a couple deer. We saw coyote poop. We saw a dead mole, of all things. We saw bear poop and bear tracks.

And then we saw the bear, galumphing across the road not 100 feet in front of us.

Forget it, in case you were even thinking of asking. We won’t tell you where that road is. Go find your own. There are lots of them.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Best places to go, Nature stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.