Gold Butte Lookout: Getting There

Last summer we did not let a lack of time or money prevent us from having a memorable family vacation. We figured a stay in a retired fire lookout would provide affordable novelty and getting-away-from-it-all-ness. We picked the location by a simple process of elimination: I was not willing to sleep in a structure on stilts, nor did I want to drive for hours and hours. Gold Butte Lookout in the Willamette National Forest fit the bill. 

Getting a reservation for Gold Butte requires the same sort of luck and dedication that buying tickets to see a massively popular band in a small venue does, but Shaun got up early a few weeks in a row and eventually secured us a three-night stay for the end of August.

The lookout's website bears this well-merited warning: "Note: The last two miles of road access is rough gravel and dirt with 10% grade, and is not maintained for low clearance vehicles."

I will say that Shaun did an admirable job of driving our minivan up that crazy, bumpy road. We were bounced and jostled enough to make it feel like we'd just barely crossed over from everyday life into adventure mode. It was the first "we are all in this together" moment of our trip, but it wasn't the last.

We had booked our trip for August in order to avoid rain. But the road was worringly muddy. And the air was ominously misty. By the time we pulled into the parking space at the trail head, it had started to rain in earnest.

Rain had not been forecast, so we had not prepared for it. Rather than arrive at the summit with soaking clothes and sleeping bags, we decided to wait out the downpour in the car, as time ticked away and daylight grew shorter. The boys had had enough car time, so they ran around in the rain for a good long while and got the ants out of their pants.

All of our family camping trips to this point would best be described as car camping. It was hard to know just how much we would need to pare down our stuff for this trip, so we didn't, really. We should have. There were wheelbarrows available for use, but we didn't need them. Shaun had modified our dolly (he calls it a hand truck, which I'd never heard before we were married) in order to more efficiently cart our things up the hill. 

We lugged everything four people would need for three nights (including water) up a trail that was "about a mile." Our GPS put the distance at closer to a mile and a half, which may not sound like a big deal of a difference, but, oh, it was. Every step was uphill. The website describes the hike as "difficult," and I would not argue with that.

This is insane. Shaun was basically a human pack horse. About 20 steps into the hike we were all seriously wondering if we would make it. And I was concerned that Shaun was going to have a heart attack. In fact, when I went to bed that night I dreamed for for the first time in our thirteen years of marriage that Shaun had died. Of a heart attack, of course.

Nels lent a helping hand as best he could. At one point there was a sort of landing before the trail narrowed for the final ascent. We had to leave many of our things there, and Shaun and Nels made two trips back down to bring the rest of it up. I would not normally describe Nels as the stoic trooper sort, but he sure was in this case, and I couldn't have been prouder.

We made it! Don't you love our cheerful body language?  

It was almost dark by the time Shaun and Nels made their last trip up the hill. The campers before us had left behind a bit of water, which Shaun decided to use for his one shower of the trip. He had certainly earned it. He told us that he would be stepping outside, removing his clothes, and dumping the water over his head. The boys were simultaneously alarmed and intrigued. Adventure!  

I had wondered what the boys would think of our setting; would they appreciate it, or would they would think it was boring to be so isolated?  I got my answer when hates-to-be-alone, never-stops-talking Willem made a beeline for this bench and sat in quiet solitude.

Remarkable. In every way.

Family

I know, it's weird to be posting about summer right now. For whatever reason, I have been avoiding my blog. But I didn't want to get back to it without covering a few of the great things that happened last year. Last year. Gulp.

In August my family came to see me. My sister, her husband, and their two kids live in Boston. After high school, Annalaura moved from California to Cambridge to go to Harvard. She met her now-husband Cliff Chuang there and never moved back. So a visit from them is a big event. 

Our dad and step-mom Juli wanted to see the Chuangs too, and it seemed more fun to be all together, so we planned to have them come down from Bellingham for part of the Chuangs' stay. Of course my mom in Bend needed to visit with them as well. And so did my sister Hillary in LA. And the time frame included Hillary's birthday, so her boyfriend should come for that. And Hillary pointed out out that my step-sister Kim and her kids in Grant's Pass would also like to see everyone (a major oversight on my part.) I may have felt a bit of panic at some point.

I needn't have worried, though. We only had EVERYBODY all at once on one day for Hillary's birthday. Hotel rooms were arranged, mattresses were dragged out, my sisters cooked, and people were easy and kind. I get a little anxious when I see any of my family members (even the ones I'm closest to) because it reminds me of some of the messier aspects of being raised in a very blended family. But what I realized this summer is that I am very blessed with a bunch of caring people who are FOR me. I know plenty of people whose families are intact who have to deal with undermining in-laws, or grudge-bearing siblings, or any other number of problems. The people in my family wash the dishes and do the grocery shopping when they visit me, and bend over backwards to not be any trouble.  

I didn't realize the historic import of this picture when I took it. This was the day we let Minecraft into our lives. My dad loaded it on his portable device so all the boys could play together. It's been Minecraft ever since.

Here are my dad and Nels chatting in the afternoon shade. I couldn't pick just one of these pictures of the two of them. Nels is so engaged and glowing from having the undivided attention of his Grandpa Scott.

All four sisters in one place! This pretty much only happens at weddings. Hillary is (voluntarily) cooking her birthday meal, as she usually ends up doing. Annalaura is working alongside her. Kim and I are catching up with each other, drinking beer, and being an appreciative audience.

Fried chicken!

Here's the birthday girl with her adoring niece and nephews. The kids have all grown so much since then that none of them really look like this anymore. 

Bonus points to Hillary's boyfriend Denis for mixing up some lovely cocktails, and to the two of them for introducing us to one of our new favorites (not pictured here), The Laphroaig Project. YUM.

The Chuangs stayed with us for a week so we got a chance to do a lot of local things. We visited Multnomah Falls...

and took a trip out to Shaun's folks' tree farm and log house, a trip which wouldn't be complete without journeying on to eat at Camp 18.

Shaun took the interested (big) kids to the flying field.

He built this plane from scratch. I'm starting to lose track of how many planes he's made at this point.

My friend Patty lent us her badminton set, which provided an excellent outlet for the astounding amount of kid energy our combined children produced. Uncle Cliff is supervising here. Let it be noted for the record that Cliff, due to his severe cat allergies, ended up sleeping outside on our deck for several nights. He is the definition of a good sport.

It was especially fun watching Willem and his cousin John-Luke enjoy each other's company this year. They are two odd little peas in a pod. I still haven't gotten over the novelty of being able to walk through our neighborhood to a lake.

After several snowy, stormy days, it's nice to look at pictures of the sunshine and know it will come again. I hope my family will too.

Neighborly

It's been a strange few days. We celebrated Christmas at our house this year. That part was not strange, but nice. My mom and Shaun's folks joined us for crab bisque and church on Christmas Eve, and presents and roast beef on Christmas Day.

My mom left at 11 on the day after Christmas. I didn't think I'd been feeling a lot of stress, but I settled into an instant state of profound "down time." I didn't get dressed. There was nothing that had to be done and I had nowhere to go. I must have been more tired than I realized, because I didn't hear a single siren or notice the smoke billowing outside our windows.

"Our neighbor's house is on fire," said Shaun. I would have said it with an exclamation point, but it takes more than a fire across the street to get an exclamation point out of Shaun.

We have two large windows in our kitchen that look onto the street. It looked like someone was filming a movie outside. The house next to the house directly across from us had orange flames coming out of an upstairs window. The wind was blowing the flames towards the house next door, where our fastidious neighbor (the one who occasionally scrubs his driveway on his hands and knees) was standing on his roof, spraying it with a garden hose.

The fire chief's truck was parked in our driveway. There was a fire engine in the middle of the street exactly in front our house (with two more farther down the street.) A small crowd of neighbors had gathered in front of our house as well. It seemed to take an eternity for the firemen to pull the hoses out and get the water going. We watched the corner of the burning house's roof blacken. Our across-the-street neighbor was asked to come down and his roof was saved by the professionals.

I don't watch the news anymore, but when I did I always felt so bad for the people whose houses were on fire and who just had to stand there and watch with everyone else. You would want to grieve in private, but you can't go in your house. So there you are.

I took a few pictures from our kitchen, but it felt intrusive to take pictures outside. The burning house belonged to our neighbor, S, and she and her teenage son were standing there on the sidewalk with us. They had come home to find their family room couch on fire and called 911. They were watching their house burn. They were crying.

Most of us on our street don't know S very well, apart from one neighbor who works at the school district with her. I hadn't even realized that her husband had moved out of the house earlier this year until he'd stopped by to grab some charcoal out of the garage that morning. But it didn't matter that we hardly knew her, because we were the ones who were there.

Her son had his arm around her, but we came around as well. A shoulder squeeze, a hug, a touch on the arm. Phone numbers and offers of help.

"Is your jacket warm enough?" I asked, because I was cold.

"Blankets! We just stopped in to get blankets and pillows. We were on our way to the beach," she said.

The house doesn't look that bad from the front, but it is uninhabitable. All of the windows on the back side of the house blew out. The skylight melted in. The smoke damage is extensive. We thank God no one was hurt. Eventually family started to arrive, and we neighbors backed off, gave them space. The owner's teenage daughter. Her sister. Her parents. A white-haired woman put her arm around the boy's back just as he'd done for his mother. He cried on her shoulder.

After a while all of the onlookers and even the homeowner dispersed. Only the firefighters were left, laying out and spraying off their hoses. I had no idea how long it takes to clean up the equipment after a fire. Shaun said, "I feel bleh." And of course I thought he meant that he was feeling bad about what had just happened. Because I was thinking about feelings.

But what he really meant is that he was achy and fever-y and getting sick. He's been in bed with a stomach bug ever since. So the days after the fire have been quiet. Very quiet.

I'd been thinking about neighbors even before Christmas, for some reason. Many of the people I love most live far away from me. But the people who are physically near us shape our lives, and we theirs, just because they are there. And thinking about that made me see Christmas a little differently this year.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. - John 1:14a

He made his dwelling among us.

Immanuel, God with us.

Or, as I like to think of it,

Neighbor.

Imnaha Out and About

Oh hey! Here's part two of our adventures in the Rouge River-Siskiyou National Forest this summer.

We did a lot of driving on the extensive network of Forest Service roads, which was something I had only vaguely realized existed before. 

When we turned onto the Forest Service road that leads to Imnaha, we were greeted by a surreal landscape. There had obviously been a fire there in the recent past. Smoke from the current wildfires tinted everything orange, and the effect was much more extreme than we could capture on camera. It looked like a Seussian version of the Australian outback. At times it felt like another planet altogether. 

On our first full day at the cabin, Shaun took the boys fishing in the Rogue River. He STRONGLY ENCOURAGED me to stay behind and enjoy some alone time. Yes, it was difficult for me to transition from the solitude of the school year to summertime's all-boys-all-the-time, and it may have made me a little crabby. Shaun reported back that they are both very good at casting. I am glad they have skills.

While the boys were gone, I explored the campground in blissful ignorance. It wasn't until I came back from from my wandering that I picked up the guest book and read about all manner of bear sightings. It had occurred to me while I was out alone that I'm not really up on my "what to do if you encounter a wild beast that can harm you" knowledge.

We did a lot of driving around on this trip, which I enjoyed because I haven't seen much of southern Oregon. All of the tall skinny trees made me feel like an ant in a giant lawn. I liked that. We have lots of trees here, but they are not so tall and skinny and densely packed.

One of our outings took us to the world's tallest sugar pine tree. Willem now owns a very long pine cone from the world's tallest sugar pine.

A bigger thrill than viewing the sugar pine was watching (and hearing) a pileated woodpecker do his thing in a nearby tree. (He's smack-dab in the center of this photo.) It sounded like someone was driving nails into wood with a hammer on a construction site. Very loud.

And as if that little interlude in the woods weren't magical enough, Shaun found a dollar.

The boys ate giant ice cream cones in a giant chair at Union Creek Resort's ice cream shop before we went to see the Natural Bridge.

The Natural Bridge area of the Rogue River is a spot where the water flows through a lava tube. It's right off the main road and has a paved trail, so it's a very accessible spot for folks who aren't up for big hikes or rough terrain. It's well worth seeing. Here's the one spot where the water comes out of the tube.

This is a different spot that looks more tube-y but isn't open on the other end.

The water is underneath the lava here. There are a few blowholes, but they weren't blowing much.

We'll have to go back some time and see how different the whole area looks without the smoke haze.

On the drive home we stopped at a charming spot populated by colorful locals and festooned with baggies full of water with pennies in the bottom. I'd noticed a tree in someone's yard similarly decked out earlier in the trip. I had never seen such a thing before, so of course we had to Google it ASAP.

We ate a tasty lunch and more giant ice cream and headed for home.

Here's Willem writing in the Imnaha guest book while Shaun and I cleaned the cabin before we left.

I hope he'll have happy memories of our time there. I know I will.

Imnaha Guard Station

One of the best things we did this summer was rent the Imnaha Guard Station cabin in southern Oregon. I'm the kind of person who drools over the National Park lodges built in the 1930's by the Civilian Conservation Corps, so I could hardly believe that we could stay in a cabin built by the CCC in 1939 (and now on the National Register of Historic Places) for $40 a night. 

When the government is not shut down, you can go to http://www.recreation.gov/ and find all sorts of places to stay: in addition to camping in a tent or a trailer, you can rent a yurt, a cabin, or a retired fire lookout.

Imnaha was a bit of a drive from where we live, but it was well worth it. Once we turned off the freeway, I enjoyed seeing unfamiliar (to me) parts of Oregon. Little towns popped up in the middle of what seemed like nowhere and it was fun to drive through and wonder about them.

A storm had sparked wildfires in the area the week before we came, so we saw a lot of firefighting activity. We drove by a field that held a varied assortment of helicopters (we got to watch one land), and we also passed the firemen's tent city, which was something I hadn't ever realized existed. It was an impressive sight. The cardboard signs of thanks to the firefighters alongside the country roads kept me tearing up. I'm sappy.

Here's our little cabin in the woods.

Here's the inside of our little cabin in the woods. The living room furniture is custom-made, except for the antique dresser in the corner which houses the guest book, some games, and the remnants of a mouse nest.

The boys shared this spartan (in a good way) bedroom, and Shaun and I took the futon by the fireplace.

An old horse pasture adjoins the cabin. It's not a bad spot for airplanes, both paper (Willem threw one) and RC (Shaun flew one.)

Here's an old water tower in the back yard. All of the smoke in the air made for lovely light. I had to include this picture because it looks to me like it should be one of those cheesy photo wall murals that gets used in an ironic way in a hipster bar in Portland. But also, it's pretty.

Apparently I walked right by this hornets' nest at the end of our driveway TWICE without even noticing it. Shaun drove by it when he took the boys on a fishing expedition without me and stopped to take a picture. 

One of the best things about staying at the Imnaha Guard Station is the spring that bubbles up just beyond the back yard of the cabin. It is other-worldly. It's like Tolkien, Lewis, and MacDonald all rolled into one. The sound is enchanting. I've never seen anything like it. Just glorious.

Perhaps because staying in a cabin with a full kitchen and a bathroom is so much less work than tent camping, we ended up playing more games before bedtime than we usually do. Shaun taught Nels and me how to play Solitaire, which is officially my new favorite way to unwind. And here is Nels playing his first game of Scrabble. 

Our only regret about the trip is that we spent so much time exploring the area (pictures to come) that we didn't sit around and enjoy staying put as much as we would have liked to. Next time we'll stay four nights.