Just got back from my first sailing class. It totally got me worked up to go to the coast again…argh, and I have plans this weekend!!

Last weekend I did some preparing for the upcoming adventure season. I drove to Eugene and got myself a nice backpacking pack so I can do some longer distance multi-day hikes this summer, aaaand…a new tent! I looked at one of these last year and held off, but now that I’m a lot more used to the outdoors’y stuff (and under the weight limit, hehe) I decided to get one:

I took it out to the woods at Applegate and tested it out, and it’s awesome. The whole thing weighs less than 2 lbs, scrunches down to about the size of a Kleenex box, and takes about 3 minutes to put up. I’m working on a set of straps and rings that’ll make that more like 1, but I’ve gotta get the right kind of straps. I got these little sleeve things that when you want to take it down you just release the guide lines and pull from each end and they wrap the whole thing up in a little tube – takes about 30 seconds to take it down and have it back in the pack. I’ve totally been geeking out on different ways to do it this week.

After shopping, I went to the North Umpqua River area, and saw some waterfalls. The first one was Toketee Falls:

I couldn’t get any pictures closer than this or from straight ahead of it. The waterfall is down in kind of a giant bowl with very steep sides. There’s a staircase built down the side of the cliffs with a little viewing platform where I took the picture. It’s actually a really nice setup, but it’s also all fenced in, so you can’t wander off the path to get closer. I was actually going to hop the fence and go anyway, but just as I as getting ready to, a little girl with her dad came out onto the platform and she was begging to go down to the water and he told her “No, you’re not supposed to, that’s why they put up fences” so of course I then felt like a horrible human being and just went back to the car.

After that, I hit Watson Falls. Next to Multnomah, these are probably the most impressive falls I’ve seen – 293ft!

I of course wasn’t happy with the view from here, so I dragged myself up to the base of the falls and got soaked:

And finally, I passed here on the way home and took a couple of pics since the peak was clear for once. Hopefully I can do some hiking around here this summer. This is Mt Thielsen, the lightning rod of the Cascades. Apparently the peak gets struck so often that a special kind of mineral formation called fulgerites form there. I’ll have to see if I can find me one some time.

Okie, time for the wrap up picture spam! Here’s a bunch of the random pics I took over last weekend.

I stopped by Thor’s Well again Friday on the way to the first hotel. The tide was pretty low, but it was windy so there were some good waves coming in, causing the Well to spout pretty good:

This is the first beach I stopped at on Saturday. I love how so many of the beaches over here are right up against cliffs.

I passed this group of rocks around lunchtime on Saturday. You can’t tell from the pic very well, but those rocks are actually huge…I’d guess that arch was a couple of hundred feet high. There’s a state park and campground on a little spit of land that ends way closer to the rocks than I was able to get. It looked to be about 2 miles long. I was going to try to walk to the end and get a few better pics, except the whole durned thing was just piles of broken rocks, and it would have taken forever to cover that ground.

This is Haystack Rock, at Cannon Beach – made famous by The Goonies! I drove around here and Astoria a bit, where they filmed the movie. It was a neat little town, perched on some really steep hills looking over the mouth of the Columbia river. The bridge that crosses the river and puts you in Washington is the tallest, gangliest looking thing I’ve ever seen. You’d swear a couple of strong waves would knock it right over.

This is The Big Cedar, from Olympic National Forest on Sunday. There were several signs for ‘such and such big tree’ along the way, but this was the only one I stopped at. It’s definitely pretty huge – bigger than a lot of the Redwoods I’ve seen out here.

This is Ruby Beach, along the western edge of the Olympic Peninsula. This is officially my new favorite outdoor spot. It’s completely gorgeous. It’s about 100 yards downhill through some thick forest from the parking lot, so you feel pretty secluded once you’re on the beach. You’re surrounded by cliffs with this calm little – lagoon? Lake? Puddle? – I don’t know what to call it…then you climb over some driftwood, and there’s the beach with all kinds of neat rock formations up and down the coast. The beach is pretty rocky, and a lot of the rocks are agates with some kind of cool sparkly crystals in the cracks, so little spots on the ground sparkle when the light is right. Even the driftwood is cool, some of it is HUGE and piled up in nifty ways.

Not long after this, I passed through Forks, where the Twilight series is set. It’s a pretty small little town, and at least the part of it I saw was pretty run down. Twilight is EVERYWHERE – I stopped at a grocery/hardware/sporting goods store (yes, all in the same store) and they had cardboard cutouts everywhere, it was kinda’ creepy. I counted 7 stores with Twilight-related names just on the main strip through town and even the Subway had ‘Welcome to Twilight country’ or something like that. The best though was the Twilight movie tour bus that operates out of one of the local businesses. I was really curious to see what exactly they toured, since from what I’ve read not 1 single thing in any of the movies was filmed in that town.

Anyhoo, moving on from the land of sparkly vampires, to Cape Flattery. I posted a couple of pics from my iPad last weekend, but here are better ones:

Here’s some purty birds I saw leaving the indian reservation Cape Flattery is on. I’m pretty sure they’re swans, though they could be some other white flappy thing. My nature skills are still a bit lacking…

This is just a random pretty spot I stopped and took a picture while heading off of the peninsula. This is Crescent Lake:

And finally, the whale watching tour. First up, some sea lions. I like how he’s found himself a pillow:

Between my camera not really being cut out for this, my lack of camera skills, and the fact that grey whales are amazingly dodgy bastages for weighing 40 tons, I didn’t do so great on whale pics. They had a lot better pics around on the boat, and one of the guys there had some kind of uber camera worth about as much as my car was new and he got some pretty cool ones, but sadly enough this is the best picture of a whale I got. I eventually just gave up trying to take pictures and just enjoyed the boat ride and watching the whales.

One more sea lion taking a nap:

All told, I saw 1 seal, 3 sea lions, 3 whales, 3 bald eagles, and a handful of sea otters on the trip. Not bad for critter count.

After the whales, I just headed home. On the way, I passed Mt Saint Helens! I didn’t realize how close I am out here. I wasn’t able to get any pics ’cause I was in a hurry and there wasn’t anywhere quick to stop, but I think that’s going to be my next big destination. It’s about 6 hours away, so I should be able to do that in a weekend trip here soon.