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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. A house 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 the highpoint found at the end of a short pathway, with views looking south 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 broad summit has been left undeveloped, or mostly so. There is a large underground reservoir just south of the highpoint and a cell tower 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 a large patch 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 we followed 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 steeply up 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 left one near the more open part of the summit under a small cairn of rocks Jackie constructed. We returned much the same way, the whole outing taking about 40min.

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