Dear friends and family,

We spent several days in Portland and on the Oregon coast. In Portland we stayed with Kara and David Romero. Kara is a former student of mine from WJC. It was great to catch up with their lives and we really appreciated their hospitality and tips for getting around Portland. Portland is a fabulous city which has a very urban feel in spite of being kind of small. We took public transportation to visit the rose gardens, the Japanese garden, the Portland Art Museum, Powell's book store (the biggest book store in the world they say), farmer's markets, etc. We ate with Kara and David at Habibi's, a really fine Lebanese restaurant.

We were impressed by the beauty of the Oregon coast (see picture), and were fortunate to have two really clear days to camp and get views of the ocean. It was fun to see sea stars and sea anemones on the rocks at low tide and to watch sea lions play from the cliff viewpoints above. It's hard to describe the incredible beauty of the rocks and waves.

Next we stopped at Jedediah Smith State Park which is in the Redwood National Park. My friend Mark and I stayed at Jedediah Smith for 5 days on our cross country bike trip 31 years ago. It was great fun to find our old campsite, virtually unchanged. I called Mark from the site and described to him what I saw. It matched his memory as it did mine. The Redwoods are a marvelous mystical thing. Pictures cannot communicate the environment they create. On one of the pictures above I crawled into a fallen tree and took a picture of Ruth as I looked out. We were pleased to have some beautiful weather as relaxing among the Redwoods is especially nice.

Now we headed back to Oregon and some caves and Crater Lake National Park.

More later.

Hi Folks,

After crossing the boarder back into the US we spent one night on the Washington coast near Bellingham.  We had a beautiful evening and caught a great sunset.  Here is one of about 25 pictures I took.  But the rain returned and we woke up ready to go inland to get away from the seacoast.  We had planned on spending a day or two in Seattle but we missed a contact we had there and decided to visit Mount Rainier instead.  I am glad we did because it is a very impressive stand alone volcano.  They post "camp at your own risk" signs as you enter the campground with warnings to move quickly to higher ground in the event of an eruption.  The warning really sunk in two days later when we visited Mount St Helen which of course did blow up in 1980.  That was an extraordinary event and you can see the area that has been left alone is still a bit of a wasteland.  The stories of people who survived the blast are amazing.  One couple floated on logs down a mudslide and survived.

Now we are in Portland and headed to the Redwood forests in Northern California.  We still have been getting a lot of rain.  We shortened our trip to Mt Rainier when it started raining there.  It rained when we were at Mt St. Helen but it is clear now in Portland.

Blessings,

Brian and Ruth

British Columbia! What a beautiful place it is. We left Alaska and the rain behind and had two glorious days of sunshine in good old BC. Of course, we didn't even begin to do the province justice, with all the natural beauty we could have enjoyed. We stayed in two different provincial parks and both were on tranquil lakes where we enjoyed sunsets and mostly had the place to ourselves. We also found that most places were closing down by the end of September, a sure sign that winter is on the way soon to Canada. You know, even the most southern part of Canada is north of the US! But not north of Alaska, of course.

The most interesting economic feature of both BC and the Cascade Mountain region of the US is the dependency on logging for economic health. We had never seen so many logging trucks and lumber yards, and trains filled with lumber on their way south. I guess you don't really think about where all the wood in your house comes from, but this is big business here. We saw cleanly logged hillsides, trees in all different stages of growth, and saw the enormous difference between old growth forests and the neatly managed logging forests we drove through. There is definitely a tension between the desire to have natural lands where all species can thrive and the need for wood and jobs to fuel our economy.

Hello from Juneau,
We have been in Juneau for 4 days now and it has rained most of the time. We have not seen a blue sky yet. Still we have seen some beautiful things. We took a ten hour round trip boat ride up Tracy Arm. The guidebooks say experienced Alaskan travelers prefer it over Glacier Bay so we went. We saw the South Sawyer Glacier and saw/heard it calf which is means a piece of it fell into the water. When it does this it looks pretty cool but sounds fantastic. The sound is a combination of thunder and gunshots.

Tracy Arm is filled with beautiful waterfalls and blue icebergs that have broken off the glacier. We also saw several whales but my photos are not worth uploading.

We also hiked up a trail to get a good look at Mendenhall Glacier. It was the clearest day we have had and a pretty walk. We got high enough to see where the helicopters landed to take people out on the glacier. This looked pretty cool but we decided not to do that trip because it was pretty pricey or as they say here in Alaska it is "spendy".

Tomorrow (Saturday) we get on the ferry to go to Sitka. We are hoping for some clear skies. It has been cold and wet for a long time now.

Brian and Ruth

Hello from Juneau,
Our last day in Haines was was a good one though it started out a bit shaky. We were camping in town at a city park and for the second night in a row our neighbors were loud well after we went to bed. At 11:30 I got up to go into town to go to a Mardi Gras party that was being held at the local pub. After a half hour of checking out that scene I drove into the countryside in hopes of catching the Northern Lights. It was cold and clear and the night sky was filled with stars but no aurora borealis. When I got back at about 12:30 the campground was quiet and the only one awake was Ruth. We agreed we would try another spot the next night. After attending Church at the Prebyterian Church in Haines we went to Chilkoot Lake which is pictured behind Ruth. There were no trails so we took a walk along the road. We had a spectacular wild life walk. Bears feeding on salmon, eagles as common as robins in the Midwest, harbor seals swimming up the stream toward Chilkoot lake and countless ducks of a variety of types. That night our neighbors invited us to share their fire which was welcome because it is always damp and cold here. In the end we were gratetful our noisy neighbors chased us out of the city campground so that we had the day at Chilkoot Lake.