Continued...
A rest day. The family was comfortably residing at an AirBnB in Beaverton,
doing nothing in particular before the coming eclipse. I got up late, messed
around catching up on news and some trip reports, then started looking at some
easy summits I could do around the area. The first three were the closest ones
I could find to Beaverton which Jackie and I did over the course of an hour
around noon. Later, back at our place, I noticed the Washington County highpoint
was rather easy and not too far away so we set off to do that one in the
afternoon before dinner. All of these have been extensively discussed and
written about on PB, CoHP.org and elsewhere. I'm not really adding anything new,
just summarizing our experiences.
Bull Mountain
The least interesting of the summits we visited today. The entire hilltop has
been paved over for residential development. on the corner may
be the highpoint. So might the road we drove past it on.
Sexton Mountain
This one
could have been as bad as Bull Mtn save for the fact that the
very summit was spared the bulldozer treatment and was converted into a small
community park. There are several benches at
found at the end of a , with views looking
and east with a nice vantage from
which to see the state highpoint, Mt. Hood, almost 60mi away. Bravo to whoever
came up with this land use idea.
Cooper Mountain
Like the other two, this one is found in a residential area but the
has been left undeveloped, or mostly so. There is a large
underground reservoir just south of the highpoint and
just to the east. The
grassy, tree-dotted summit area had been recently mowed to reduce fire danger.
One of the PB trip reports mentioned yummy blackberries, so Jackie and I found
them in
just south of the tower where we picked a few pounds.
Some of these would end up in the pina coladas I made later that night. I
convinced my wife this was a popular fusion of Oregonian and Hawaiian cultures.
Long Mountain
Not residential, but a decidedly rural area devoted to the traditional Oregonian
pasttime - logging. It was Jackie's first up close and personal experience with
clear cutting. This temperate rain forest region is far different from the
drier Sierra where logging can take hundreds of years to regenerate. Here, we
could see various plots recently cut, others with trees five or fifteen feet
in height, still others even taller. All of them cycling through in less than
100yrs before they might be harvested again. We followed directions gleaned
from SummitPost which happened to nicely match those produced by Google Maps,
getting us to within half a mile of the summit after about six miles of driving
on gravel logging roads. A gate blocks access to a road
that gets
even closer, though downed trees along the way would have been just as effective
as the gate at stopping traffic. The last 300-400ft went
through
cut forest, cross-country travel that had Jackie putting her long sleeve shirt
back on for the brushiest parts. At the top we found no obvious highpoint, but
three or four various piles of dirt and forest slash that may have constituted
the highest point. Finding no register at any of them, we
near the more
open part of the summit under a small cairn of rocks Jackie constructed. We
much the same way, the whole outing taking about 40min.
Continued...