August 21, 2017

Our campground is at the eastern end of the Columbia Gorge on the Washington side- essentially a desert! There are irrigated vineyards and other farms, but everything else is brown and very few trees except along the river. The river is warm enough to swim in, and when it gets windy the windsurfers and kiteboarders come out.
We visited two dams- Bonneville was the biggest- we checked out the power plant and watched fish go up stream in the fish ladders through huge windows into the ladders- Chinook, steelhead trout, and lamprey.
We could see snow covered Mt. Hood from our arid campground and decided we should cool off. The ski area was still open; they ski every month of the year! One slope is treated with salt to maintain it for the months. It is glacier snow and we could see the blues layers in places where the snow had been there a long, long time. On the way down we found a back road around the mountain; even though one map said it was paved but we knew better- 12 miles of gravel roads and many miles of single lane on gravel and paved! However, we had spectacular, close-up views of the other three sides of Mt. Hood.

On the was to Vancouver, WA we stopped at Beacon Rock and hiked it- 860 feet up and not even as big around. 100 years ago a man decided to build walkways up and around this rock to the top- look at the pics: