RV trip 2006 - day 39

Day 39 (September 28, 2006) - Portland, OR

We spent the night just outside Portland, OR, but still in Washington state. We are going to explore the Columbia River Gorge area today, leaving Portland for the upcoming weekend. We check in at Ainsworth State Park and hop on our Vespa for a tour of the gorge. Our first stop is at Multnomah Falls, visibile from the street, the fall is over 300 ft tall and looks very impressive. It's early morning and very few visitors are around, we take advantage of the solitude and decide to hike up to the viewpoint at the top. We cross a bridge at about 1/4 of the climb, then we hike up. The trail keeps switching back and it's quite steep, we are huffing and panting all the way. I just remembered I hadn't had breakfast yet. The small terrace sits right on top of the waterfall and is certainly not for the faint of heart or for whoever is afraid of heights. It's suspended over the edge and the cliff goes straight down.

We then continued to the Bonneville Dam and Fish Hatchery. I initially was not so interested in seeing the hatchery itself, but since we had to wait for some barges to go through the locks before visiting the dam, we went there just the same, and I am glad we did. It was interesting to hear how they rear various types of salmon, rainbow trouts and sturgeons before releasing them into the Columbia river every season. It's a pretty high-tech place. We arrived at the dam in time to hook up with a tour inside the power room, where 10 turbines create enough electricity to power a medium-sized city. The most interesting part for me was to learn about the fish ladders, created to allow the salmons to swim upstream past the dam to spawn every year. We also see how some fish actually do swim up these ladders and how they are channeled through a small tunnel to bypass the dam. An undergound window lets you see the fish swimming by and there actually is a person sitting there in a special room in front of a machine, whose job is to count the fish swimming by day and night, recording the type, and the length of each of them.

We got to a town by the name of Cascades Locks, where we wanted to buy something to eat and go down by the picnic benches on the river to have lunch. Unfortunately the only grocery store in town did not carry any type of edible bread, not even to Petr's standards, so we skipped lunch in the open and settled for a buffet-style family restaurant at the edge of town. I had a grilled (orange) cheese melt on white (Wonder)bread... Everything else on the menu ended with the word "burger". On the way back to the campground we decided to explore other waterfalls along the gorge and stopped at Horsetail Falls, where we went on another hike to a higher Ponytail fall which you could actually walk under. Back to camp, we had dinner and since I had no signal for an Internet connection, I worked offline, updating the travel journal and then we both went to bed.