Dismal Nitch

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Here are a few photos from a place called Dismal Nitch, a historical site and highway rest area on the Washington side of the Columbia River, across from Astoria OR. The name comes from the Lewis & Clark expedition; the explorers camped here on November 12-14, 1805, taking shelter from a nasty winter storm, and apparently didn't have a good time here. The site of their "dismal nitch" was only recently identified; anyone who's ever been to the Oregon-Washington coast in November knows the entire coast can be pretty dismal that time of year, so the name and description aren't great clues.

The historic campsite area lies just west of the modern highway rest area, and now belongs to the National Park Service, as one unit of the large Lewis & Clark National Historical Park. There isn't a lot there that evokes the year 1805 though; a busy state highway hugs the shoreline, and the shoreline itself is covered in riprap stone, I suppose to protect the adjacent highway. I'm not sure if there's even a trail or other access into the historic site. The NPS page says they're thinking about adding a trail someday, which suggests there isn't one now.

Ft. George Garden, Astoria

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I was rummaging through an old iPhoto library a while back and noticed I had a few photos of of the Ft. George Garden in Astoria, an overgrown rose garden surrounded by an ornate iron fence, on Exchange St. behind the Fort George Brewery. These photos were taken several years ago, shortly before the brewery opened. Apparently they've employed a gardener to look after the place, so it may not be as overgrown as it was the last time I was there.

The garden sits next to a small city park marking the site of Fort Astoria, a fur trading post founded in 1811, which happened to be the first American settlement on the Pacific coast. After only two years in business, the fort was sorta-captured by the British during the War of 1812, and spent the next 33 years as Fort George (as in King George the 3rd), an outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company. The post was later abandoned as the Hudson's Bay Company moved its main operations inland to Fort Vancouver. I don't know whether the garden itself has any particular historical significance. Based on the fencing I'm going to guess the garden (or at least the fence) dates to the late 19th or early 20th century, or later if someone was aiming for a retro look.

Doughboy Monument, Astoria

A few old (2007-ish) photos of the "Doughboy Monument", the slightly odd World War I memorial out in Astoria, at the corner of Marine Drive & Columbia Avenue, just east of the Astoria-Megler Bridge. The slightly odd bit is the low building that forms the base of the statue. It doesn't seem to have any obvious purpose, but it does. Any guesses? No? Why, it's a public restroom, of course. Really, it is. It dates back to the 1920's, when there seems to have been a mania for adding public restrooms to various improbable things, like the Oregon City Bridge for instance. I've never seen a good explanation for this. Did people just drink a lot more water than they do today? Beats me.

Astoria, Oregon Daily Photo has a nice post about the monument, including the various inscriptions around it. Which is nice, since they're are too small to see in my photos. The author expands on that in "Astoria's Doughboy Monument: Finding an angle", in which she tries to figure out a good angle to shoot it from. Busy backgrounds in most directions, and wayyy too many overhead wires. I remember running into this problem too when I took the photos in this post, and thanks in advance for pretending you hadn't noticed.

Portland Public Art covers the doughboy here, calling it "dull and mechanical". Also a mention of it (and the sculptor's many similar works) at ~westr. (Scroll down to the "Soldier's Monument" bit.)

The statue on top is titled "Over the top at Cantigny", by the sculptor John Paulding. Cantigny is a small town in France, and the site of the first WWI battle involving US soldiers. The town now features a large memorial to US troops, and another smaller one outside of town. Among those who served at Cantigny was Col. Robert McCormick, later the right-wing owner of the Chicago Tribune. I mention this because he had a 500 acre estate outside Chicago (now a park), which he named "Cantigny". The battle also lent its name to an Army transport ship of the 1920's.

Astoria-Megler Bridge

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From deep in the mini-roadtrip archives, here are a few photos of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, which crosses the mouth of the Columbia out in Astoria. I just did a post on Portland's Interstate Bridge, so it seemed like a good time to post these. That way it almost looks like my posts here aren't completely random, I guess.

I'm not going to bother with a "pictures from the interwebs" section. It's on the coast, and a large chunk of the coastal workforce is employed making pictures of various bridges along the coast. Go ahead, check Flickr, or do a Google image search. You'll be inundated.

I probably ought to apologize for having so few photos of the bridge here. In my defense, these were taken the year before last, using a puny compact digicam, and I had no idea at the time that I was about to get sucked into an ongoing bridge project. If only I'd known, I'd have taken more photos, and some of them might have even been good. It's possible, but now we'll never know...



Continuing on... As far walking goes, sadly we're faced with the same situation as with the Fremont & Marquam bridges in Portland: Generally speaking, pedestrians are banned from the bridge. The bridge was built in 1966, back when people thought walking was obsolete, and so there's no sidewalk on the bridge. However once a year they do offer something called the "Great Columbia Crossing", where you do get a chance to run or walk across the thing. It's scheduled for October 11th this year (2009) and I've thought about driving out and having a go at it. But I probably won't get to it this year, so don't hold your breath. You're free to try it without waiting for me though (in case you didn't already realize this), although I should point out that the bridge is four miles long, and no guarantees can be made about what mid-October weather on the Oregon Coast will be like. In the meantime, here's a good blog post about a trip to Astoria which included last year's Columbia Crossing, also with pastries and herons (though not all at the same time).

Actually I'm going to go ahead and violate the "no photos from the interwebs" rule I just made, briefly, to pass along a couple of photosets from the 2007 edition of the event: one on Picasa, the other on Webshots. Also, here's the Flickr set that goes with the blog post I just mentioned. Ok, there, we're done.

You might note that I don't have any photos from on the bridge itself. I was on a solo mini-roadtrip at the time, so I didn't have someone to drive as I took photos, or to take photos as I drove. And driving over the bridge is a white-knuckle experience if you don't do it on a regular basis, so I didn't seriously consider driving and taking pictures at the same time. I suppose you get used to driving the bridge if you do it regularly. Either you do that, or you drive way upstream and take the ferry at Westport. Which is kind of interesting, but it's not what you'd call fast. As it turns out, I actually drove across the bridge on this trip just so I could drive upstream and take the ferry back to the Oregon side.



As for the semi-obligatory "links from the interwebs" part, a couple of the usual suspects come through for us again here.

• There's a Structurae page for the bridge, although it mostly repeats the info in the Wikipedia article.
  
  
• There's also a page at Columbia River Images that gives a bit more background on the bridge, and on the ferries that preceded it.
  
  
• The same site has a page about Megler, which (unlike Astoria) isn't a city or even a proper town. The usual phrase for a place like this is "wide spot in the road", but I tried to find the place and didn't even notice a wide spot in the road. There isn't even a ghost town full of picturesque ruins, since abandoned wooden buildings don't last long in this climate. I suppose it could've fallen into the sea similar to Port Royal in Jamaica, and someday some lucky marine archeologist will find the drowned city and its fabulous piles of pirate booty. There might even be mermaids and mermen guarding it. But I wouldn't bet on it.
  
  Other than a few old pilings in the river, there seems to be nothing right on the Washington side of the river, and as far as I can tell this "Megler" place is purely mythological in nature. Or if not purely mythological, perhaps the town appears in the coastal mists just once a century, like a sort of flannel-wearing redneck Brigadoon, with banjos instead of bagpipes. But I wouldn't bet on that either.
  

Astoria Column, then & now

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Here are a few pics of, and from, the Astoria Column out in (you guessed it) Astoria. Some were taken on my mini-roadtrip last month, and others are from the only other time I've been there, wayyy back in February 1979.

Regarding the 1979 pics, the originals actually look better than what you see here. The scanner I used on these is about a decade old. It doesn't do an overly professional job of figuring out colors, and its dynamic range is pretty limited, so if you have a photo with light parts and dark parts, you can get one or the other to come out somewhat decently. But not both. And it puts ugly vertical bands on everything it scans. And square objects come out a tad on the rectangular side, like photo #2 above. On the other hand, the scanner was free, and Ubuntu's default install includes a driver for it. So that's something, I guess.

The first couple of photos in the slideshow are more or less the same view of downtown Astoria, taken 28 years apart. The two roughly squarish photos were taken with a 126 camera, which you basically can't even find film for anymore. I'm not 100% sure whether I took those or not, since my own camera was a little 110 just like this one.

Here are a few of the column itself.

The old photos show the column was looking quite ramshackle in 1979. Just like everything else in Astoria back then, if memory serves. I'm afraid we have to thank the rich Californians for the city's recent revival... but don't tell them I said so. They're plenty smug enough already, the bastards.

The recent one (top one, silly) really isn't that great, I admit. I was mostly taking shots of the view from the column, but as an afterthought I decided I needed at least one photo of the column itself and took a quick snap of it. (If you want to see better photos of it, there's no shortage of them out on the interwebs. There are even a couple VR panoramas, which are less vertigo-inducing than you might expect.)

The column doesn't actually lean like that, in case you're wondering. Although that would make the trip up the stairs even more exciting than it already is. It's a dark, winding, narrow, rickety, alarming little staircase, with lots of tiny little oddly-shaped spiral steps.

If I'd taken a better recent pic, you could see how the city completely renovated the exterior a couple of years ago. There wasn't much they could do with the stairs, though. It's not like they could've made them any wider or anything.

In my defense, photographically speaking, the camera wasn't shaking in these shots. It was me that was shaking. Oh, and the stairs were shaking, too. I didn't remember the stairs being that scary in 1979.

Several kids ran past me on the stairs going both directions. Who knows, maybe they'll come back 30 years from now and they'll wonder if it was always that scary. Or they'll just float up to the top with their antigravity boots, sneering at all the poor chumps of decades past who had to worry about stuff like "stairs" and "exercise".

So anyway, here's the very top of the column, taken from the balcony.

A few grain ships on the Columbia. Ships tend to park in Astoria temporarily on their way to Portland. I don't know if it's due to the tide, or they're waiting in line for a river pilot, or the Astoria visitor's bureau pays them to create some nautical ambience, or what it is, exactly.

Looking south, here's Saddle Mountain and (I think) the Lewis and Clark River.

Just across the parking lot from the column, and steps from the gift shop, is this odd memorial to a local Indian chief who befriended Lewis & Clark while they were here, 200-odd years ago.

The memorial only dates to 1961, and was put together by people claiming to be descendants of the aforementioned chief. Which is a nice touch, certainly, although I don't know how you'd ever be able to prove a claim like that. If you're running a cash-strapped city parks department, and someone comes along wanting to give you something for free, most likely you don't ask a lot of tough questions. They could say grandpa was the Shah of Atlantis, for all you care, so long as their checks clear. But hey, I'm always a cynic, in case you hadn't noticed.

Not Strictly a Beer Trip

During my recent mini-roadtrip, I tried to visit local brewpubs around the state whenever it was practical. That wasn't the sole or primary focus of the trip, but I managed to work a few in during the trip. My rule (ok, guideline) for the trip as a whole was to only go places I'd never been before, so I figured I'd try to apply that to the beerish portion of the excursion as well.

After my adventure at Saddle Mountain, I decided it was time for a beer. (If you read this blog regularly, you probably know I decide that quite a lot.) Luckily, in Oregon beer is never far away. So I made the jaunt over to Bill's Tavern & Brewhouse, right in the heart of Cannon Beach.



It turns out that Cannon Beach had held its annual sandcastle contest a few days earlier, so Bill's was out of everything except their Blackberry Beauty and Spruce Lager. I tend to be something of a hop bigot, and I'm sure I'd have gone with something else if the selection had been wider. But it was a hot day, I'd been out hiking, and both beers were light and refreshing. So it all turned out ok in the end. The fish and chips were pretty decent too.

Neither the blackberry nor the spruce brew hits you over the head with its namesake ingredient, which to me is a good thing.



Beervana has a review of the place, and there's more about the beers at BeerAdvocate, Beer Me!, and PubCrawler.

Pleasant as those beers were, what I really wanted was an IPA. One of their guest taps was something called "Vortex IPA", from somewhere called "Fort George Brewing". I hadn't heard of them or the beer, and although it sounded promising, I was on a mission to try the house brews. Rules (or guidelines) are rules (or guidelines).

Turns out that Ft. George Brewing is local, just up the road in Astoria. I thought about heading up there around dinnertime, since I was staying in Astoria that night, but I ended up just falling asleep instead. I left town before lunch the next day, since I had to go catch a ferry, so I haven't actually been there or tried their beer yet. But here's their building, for future reference:



My rule (ok, guideline) for the trip as a whole (not just the beer) was to focus on places I'd never been before, so I didn't drop by Astoria Brewing or the local Rogue outlet. Not because they aren't worth visiting, far from it. It's just that I usually always go to Astoria Brewing when I'm out there, and there's a Rogue outpost a short stagger from my office.


A couple of days later, I drove for hours in the hot sun to get to Crater Lake, and then I spent a couple more hours in the hot sun taking photos, so once again I decided it was time for a beer. The drive was a bit longer this time, but worth it. Klamath Falls has two brewpubs, believe it or not. I only had time for one, so I decided to visit Klamath Falls Brewing, since I knew the least about it. The other brewery, Mia's & Pia's, is primarily a pizza place and I wasn't in the mood for pizza just then, so that's how I made the call. Unscientific, I know, but that's just how it is sometimes.





Klamath Basin had their Crystal Springs IPA on tap, bless their hearts. I've since realized I've seen it as a guest tap here and there in Portland, but I'd always passed over it in favor of something else. That was a big mistake. I'd been missing out on a really great beer.

The beer menu says their most popular brew is their golden ale, and gently hints that the IPA is very hoppy and might be on the bitter side for some people. That's the sort of thing I love to see: They're making the beer they want to make, and aren't dumbing it down for the newbies. A good rule (ok, guideline) is to always order the beer the beer menu warns you about. I seem to recall the IPA ran in the 80-9O IBU range, at something like 5-6% abv. I really ought to have written it all down, but I didn't, and I'm sorry. It's loaded with nice citrusy Northwest hops, I remember that much. If you see it around town, or you find yourself in K-Falls, give it a try. And if you're in K-Falls, the grilled tri-tip sandwich is what to eat. You can't go wrong with fish on the coast, and east of the Cascades you generally can't go wrong with beef. Eating anything other than beef on that side of the mountains has really got to count as unpatriotic or something.

Yes, I'm afraid I only had time for the one beer, since I still had to head east another couple of hours to get to my hotel. Klamath Basin also had a red that sounded promising, but it'll have to wait until next time, I guess.

At the time I didn't realize the brewery runs on geothermal heat, possibly the only one in the world to do so. Is that cool, or what?

More about the place at RateBeer, Road Brewer, and GuestOnTap.

A couple of days after that, I'd spent an hour or two in the hot sun at the Painted Hills, and decided it was time for... cider. For a change. Actually I was under strict spousal orders to drop by Bad Seed Cider over in Bingen, WA, just across the bridge from Hood River. We'd run across their cider at a Spring Beer & Wine Festival a couple of years back. They don't have any distribution at all in Portland, so every now and then we have to make the trip out to Bingen to stock up. This time it was so we'd have something good to drink during the Tour de France, instead of our usual cheap French rose.

I unaccountably forgot to take a photo of the place. It's a little storefront right in downtown Bingen, and I actually missed it the first couple of times through town because their new sign now reads "North Shore Wine Cellars". They do wine in addition to cider, and wine is a much larger market, so I suppose that's an understandable decision. I mention this so a.) you can find the place, and b.) you won't be intimidated by the phrase "wine cellars".

You might've gathered by now that I'm rather fond of their cider. If you like your cider dry, you just might enjoy it too. If you don't, I really don't have any useful advice to offer you, except maybe to grow some taste buds, already.

And yes, I'd been there before, despite what the rules say. You see, there are rules (and guidelines), and then there are spousal directives, which are another matter entirely.

So as I've already said, the trip wasn't primarily about beer, and I strayed from the Path of Beer on a few occasions. So since we aren't being strict here, I might as well throw in something beery that isn't from the mini-roadtrip at all, while I'm at it.

I was out near Estacada the other day, doing a bit of exploring that I haven't posted about yet, and once again I decided it was time for a beer. This time it was really close at hand, since Estacada has its own brewpub. Seriously. You run across Fearless Brewing at a lot of the local beer festivals, always featuring their Scottish Ale. That's a good rendition of the style, I understand, but the style itself is not among my favorites. I figured I'd check the place out and see if they had something that suited my personal biases a bit better.



The IPA was pretty good. I think I may have liked the Klamath Basin one better, but it's not like I had the two to taste side by side. I mentioned this was unscientific, right?

Believe it or not, I didn't try the tater tots. Tater tots are fine, or way more than fine, usually. When you're having a bratwurst & sauerkraut, though, what you really want is a pile of onion rings on the side. But you knew that already.



You know, come to think of it, I think it's about time for a beer right now. Mmmmm...... beeeer......