Pacific Northwest Backroad Adventures

VANCOUVER, WA - Join us this fall for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest’s tenth Annual Pick Up the Pinchot (P.U.P.) clean-up events.

There are three P.U.P. events scheduled for Saturday, September 27. These events are part of National Public Lands Day events scheduled across the country in late September.

“On National Public Lands Day, we all have a chance to contribute to the well being of our public lands for this and future generations of Americans,” said Al Matecko, Acting Forest Supervisor. “Last year, more than 150 people participated in PUP events, and worked on projects to remove trash and help restore the East Fork of the Lewis River. We hope that people will continue to join us and volunteers around southwest Washington this year.” (more…)

What were you doing the day Mt. St. Helens blew it’s top?

I realize that anybody under the age of 28 wasn’t even born so this question does not apply to you.

I was 16 at the time. I was with my dad and cousin Frank at a bass fishing tournament with the Evergreen Bass Club on Silver Lake in Cowlitz County (only about 30 miles West of Mt. St. Helens). It was a beautiful clear sunny morning (much like it is this morning as I’m writing this). All weekend, we were hoping to see a puff of steam or a small ash plume, but all was quiet. I has witnessed several before on my frequent trips to Kelso.

Sometime around 8:30 AM, my dad had to head back to the resort to use the facilities. So he powered up the motor and we were heading back to the resort and he pointed at the mountain and when I looked up, we watched the initial blast and then Mt St Helens disappeared (just like the footage you always see of the initial eruption and landslide).

So we continued heading back to the resort. When we arrived, a lot of people were freaking out that they were going to die. My dad just calmly observed the chaos and decided to wait a little while until all the drama died down. Eventually word got to us about the I-5 bridge over the Toutle River was closed. That’s when my dad made the decision that we were staying for a while longer.

So what did we do, we motored the boat over to a store on the lake where one could dock a boat, he went inside the store and bought a case of beer, and we motored the boat into the middle of the lake and watched the ash plume (obviously this is nothing I would recommend doing today - time were different then).

After a few hours, we eventually got word that the Toutle River bridge was open again, and that’s when we loaded the boat on the trailer and headed home.

We never got any ash on us. I think most of it ended up in eastern Washington. The sky got dark (because it blocked out the morning sun) and the coolest part was all the lightening in the ash cloud. We never heard the explosion from our location. I’m not sure if that was because the motor idling or not.

This experience is something that I’ll never forget. I feel very lucky to be in the right spot at the right time to actually witness history and see the actual initial explosion and landslide occur.

What were you doing that day?

Each time I venture to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in the South Cascades of Washington state, I am simply amazed at the beauty of the country. In this region, not only are you are surrounded by four major peaks of the Cascade Mountains (Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Hood), there is an extensive variety of terrain ranging from deep valleys and canyons to exposed buttes and cliffs, alpine meadows to old growth forests, and of course, the Mt. St. Helens blast zone. I could easily spend days or even weeks just exploring the region.

With that in mind, I decided to host a Backroad Drivers Northwest tour in the area just south of Randle, Washington. This region is an area which I am fairly familiar with having spent a lot of time hunting, camping and exploring with my father while growing up. The tour would follow one of my favorite routes in the area, Forest Road 77 from the Burley Mountain Lookout along the ridge past Pinto Rock and Mosquito Meadows. From Mosquito Meadows, we would would take FS 99 to the Windy Ridge Viewpoint at Mt. St. Helens and follow FS 26 back to Randle.
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In case you missed it on the forum, I posted an announcement for a tour of the Mt. St Helens area south of Randle, Washington.

The plan is to visit the Burley Mountain Lookout, drive the ridgeline between Greenhorn Buttes and Mosquito Meadows, visit Windy Ridge at Mt St Helens and more depending on time.

Read more of the trip details at Burley Mountain to Mt St Helens Tour

With an actual weekend off, and knowing that I would probably soon be selling my Jeep Wrangler to buy a larger adventure vehicle, it was time for a three day Jeep adventure.

Our first goal (my son Steven and myself) was to travel from I-90 near Cle Elum, Washington to Highway 410 near Cliffdell, Washington via logging roads. I heard people talk about such a road in the past, but have never attempted to locate it.

Our second goal was to travel from Highway 410 to Highway 12 over logging roads. We would then travel Highway 12 over White Pass to Packwood. From Packwood, we would head South on logging roads towards Mt. Adams and locate a campsite for the night.

As in previous adventures, I turned to the book Washington Byways: Backcountry Drives For The Whole Family by Tony Huegel for some of my planning. The most likely route was to use Tour 43 - Quartz Mountain as a starting point for our weekend adventure.

Cascade Overland Adventure: Intro | Day One | Day Two | Day Three

I just completed an overland adventure by Jeep from Cle Elum, WA (I-90) to SR410, to US Highway 12, to Mt Adams, to Mt. St. Helens and posted the pictures at Photos from Cascade Overland Adventure - August 2006.

Enjoy.

This year (2006) marked the second year I attended the WEROCK Rock Crawl competition in Goldendale, Washington. Last year, I learned a few things not to repeat. First, don’t drink heavily and expect to function well without sleep and in the heat. Second, bring a lot of water when working on the course and stay hydrated throughout the day. I must be getting old because my body can’t handle the abuse that it used to.

In order to avoid the 100+ degree temperatures as long as possible, we decided to take the longer scenic route from SR12 in Randle, to the FS 25 road (we should have taken the FS 23 road), past Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, into Trout Lake, the Columbia River Gorge all the way to our hotel in Biggs, Oregon. This year we decided to get a hotel rather than camp at the Cottonwood like last year. Unfortunately we were a little late and we were unable to locate accommodations in town. Lesson learned for next year. At least we only had a 15-mile drive through the desert into our air-conditioned room with a shower.

After checking in and another stop for bottled water, we made a quick stop at the Stonehenge World War I memorial that’s about a mile from Highway 97 overlooking the Gorge. If you haven’t been there, this is a full size, true to scale reproduction of the original Stonehenge; all aligned to view the Summer and Winter solstice just like the original.

The first stop in town was the grain silo parking lot where everybody parks their trailer for tech inspection. We ran into and chatted with BZ and Dustin Webster. Walked around in tech inspection, checking out the rigs and then met up with the rest of our group.

On Friday night, the town scheduled a parade through town. Apparently the local police did not like the buggies driving through town. A big difference from last year when they had free reign throughout town. I heard a rumor that there was a new Police Chief in town. Just what you don’t want to do - piss off the competitors and spectators of the biggest money making event that comes this town. Anyway, the parade was lame compared to last year - just a slow speed cruise behind a city fire engine then onto the trailers at the other end. In 2005, there was junk cars set up in the street for the competitors to drive up and over which was a crowd pleaser for the locals. Not this year.

From the parade, we migrated down to the city sponsored beer garden where there was a beer trailer and a DJ. Interesting is all I have to say. After mingling for a few hours, the music was halted at 11:30 PM with the last call.

On Saturday, we were greeted by overcast skies that helped keep the temperature down just a little, but still over 100 degrees F. With my Camelback filled and batteries charged, I was ready for a day of photography.

Lil Rich did a good job of using the natural features of the land in laying out courses. There was plenty of action on all courses to challenge the competitors and satisfy the spectators viewing. Because of the number of competitors, in order to keep the event of schedule, both the Super Modified and Unlimited were mixed together and ran the A and B courses, while the Stock Modified ran on the C courses.

After the event, it was back to the hotel to wash off the dust before dinner. Once back in town it was on to a BBQ. Rob McKenney and Shannon Campbell provided an impressive spread of food for dinner including burgers, hot dogs, steak, salads and of course Tammy Campbell’s awesome homemade salsa.

Saturday night was a blast. We just hung out in the parking lot of the hotel and had plenty of entertainment. Lots of war stories throughout the night. No more biting on a dog’s ear for Nick Campbell.

The group almost had a guy from Bremerton (I forgot your name) walking through talked into eating a 10-pound bag of pasta salad within 30 minutes with his buddy for $50. Later that night, three Goldendale police cars and two troopers showed up at their motel unit because the people downstairs heard somebody “screaming like a girl”. Reports said it was pasta boy.

We made it through Saturday night on a few hours of sleep and onto Sunday. This was to be the hottest day of the year for Goldendale. Reports were that the temperature was 107 degrees. That’s a little too warm for us coastal people.

Sunday was another fun day in the dust. There was plenty of rock crawling action for everybody. There were a lot of hurting people that were casualties of Saturday night.

Thanks go out to Rob McKenney, Shannon Campbell their crews and families for the hospitality. I can’t wait until next year to do it again.

For a run down on the results and competition, you can visit http://www.we-rock.cc and http://rock.off-road.com (the article mentioned a guy in a kilt - I wonder who that was). There are also a lot of reviews on http://www.pirate4×4.com, http://www.snort4×4.com and http://www.nw-wheelers.com