Saturday, October 25, 2014

Fruit Loop Day

Striated apple
Cooling nights. Rain. Brightly hued leaves blaring a final trumpeting of color for the year. Apples. This is the time of harvest in Hood River county. Hoping for drier weather on the eastern side of "the line" we head for apple and pear land in the hill country south of Hood River. Winds buffet our car as wipers swipe the raindrops from the windshield. Large leaf maples splash brilliant gold swaths through the dark green fir and pine trees of the Columbia River Gorge. Towering basalt cliffs line the freeway on the south, a white-capped river rolls towards the ocean on the north and across the river a hundred-car train chugs its way east.

The Vista House, with its familiar silhouette standing guard high above the freeway, is a landmark on the Old Columbia Highway. We'll save that for another day when the sky is clear. Passing by the famous Multnomah Falls we see the surrounding trees there showing off their fall tints to the steady stream of visitors who stop to watch the cascading waters of Multnomah Creek free-fall 620 feet over the cliff. The bridge below the falls has been repaired to allow access to the trail taking hikers above the falls. On the Washington side, Beacon Rock silently faces the weather in the Gorge, awaiting brave hikers who will scale its scaffold-enfolded western side to reach a view point at the top. Perhaps another time. We're on a mission to acquire apples today.

Young apple trees
Entering Hood River we exit to connect with Highway 35, a roadway that heads south and eventually joins Highway 97 to Central Oregon, provides an encircling route around Mt. Hood and joins Highway 26 back into Gresham. But the fun of this route is the Fruit Loop, an elongated loop that takes in most of the apple and pear orchards of the area, many of which have stores or stands where travelers can purchase fruit, cider, pear brandy, local wines and other treats and memorabilia associated with the fruits. Our destination is Kiyokawa Family Orchards, a well-run operation with bins of apple and pear varieties lined up under cover at the store, a fuzzless kiwi arbor loaded with clusters of purple fruit for the picking, a tasting tent housing over 100 varieties of heirloom and little-known apples and Asian pears, an open orchard for self-picking, a pumpkin collection and on a clear day, a view of snow-capped Mt. Hood.


Parking our car alongside the orchard, we stroll the damp, grassy paths between endless rows of apple and pear trees. Varieties are marked at the ends of each row, fallen fruit lies in pools of gold, red and green at the base of trees and a lone picker for hire reaches deep into a tree for the premium fruit near the top. We marvel at the range of size and colors in the apple world: tiny crabapples with their extremely tart flavor, pink-fleshed apples with a hint of strawberry, striated Gravensteins and Galas, russets like Newton Pippin or Cox's Orange Pippin, the gigantic Hanner's Jumbo, weighing up to three pounds each, and Asian pears which are really a fruit of a different sort. All told, there are over 7500 apple varieties in the world!

Tasting tables
Working our way around the tasting tables we sound much like other product connoisseurs in our mouth-smacking, mmmming, sniffing and commenting on each variety. Orchard personnel keep busy slicing thin pieces of each fruit onto plates where they are rapidly stabbed with toothpicks by eager tasters. Marking our tasting chart we compile a list of our favorites and head for the store. Most of these heirlooms have extremely limited availability so must be purchased directly from an orchard. The more plentiful apples and pears, along with fingerling red, white and blue potatoes, various squash, a few cases of very late peach varieties and the trendy but expensive honeycrisp apple are binned for public collection. Shoppers mill throughout the open-sided store, filling bags and boxes with their favorites while a specialty pizza trailer pumps delicious baking odors through the air. One featured pizza was topped with pepperoni, thin apple slices and feta cheese. Word had it that it was a winner!

Small size! 
Bagging my choices, I made for the cashier station to ransom my 60 pounds of apples. This was a light year as I still have pie filling and canned applesauce to consume. In years past I have been known to pick and process up to 300 pounds of apples. Slogging to my car through the increasing downpour I begin to dream of all the apple-centered dishes I would begin to make once home in my cozy kitchen. The journey home required battling with big rig splash-back, hydroplaning, gusty winds and torrential rain. A breather stop in Cascade Locks for a tall twisted cone calmed us down a bit and we were able to successfully finish our apple trek.

The easiest apple treat to make that doubled as dinner was a Dutch Baby Pancake. It is baked in the oven and can be topped with sautéed cinnamon and sugar apple slices, a drizzle of honey or a squeeze of lemon juice and a dusting of powdered sugar. It is easy to make, fun to eat and opens the door to more comfort eating in this chilly, damp season of fall. Tomorrow will bring an apple tarte tartin, perhaps apple cinnamon roll bread, apple slices with dried cranberries, feta cheese and honey-roasted sunflower seeds on a bed of greens. The applesauce can wait a bit. We'll dry apple slices tossed with cinnamon and sugar, eat fresh apples and gorgonzola cheese and dice apple pieces into microwaved oatmeal at breakfast time. Pie and crisp will follow next week and if I can find any space in my freezer, bags of pre-made pie filling will get stuffed in the gaps.

Take a run into apple country, buy a jug of cider, a bag of apples and enjoy the scenery. Loop around Mt. Hood for a day trip, stopping at one of the remote eateries on the way back into town. You'll make some great memories and bring home a little of Oregon's orchards.

Fuzzless kiwis

Kiwi arbor

Apple bins

Pears and other produce

Beautiful color and size

Anna's Hanner's Jumbo

Pears

Fallen fruit

Jonagolds

Winter Bananas



Queuing up

Rain-dashed orchard aisle





Thursday, October 23, 2014

Rainy Day Options

Intending to hike the Central Salmon River trail we met as usual to carpool to the trailhead. However, recent torrential rainfall had severely muddied the trail and made the rocky places slick and footing hazardous. Quickly turning to Option B we hustled up to the BLM Wildwood Recreation Site. Located about 15 miles east of Sandy, OR on Hwy 26, this lovely wooded setting serves as a multi-use recreation site specializing in salmon habitat retention through education. Parking is plentiful, pathways are paved and artwork adorns benches, lookout points and walkways. Service buildings are clad in rough cut cedar and sport whole log beams. Cast metal figures, mainly salmon, swim in frozen motion throughout the park. Bridges bow over the streams and a sunken viewing room with thick glass windows allows visitors to watch salmon swimming upstream right before your eyes. We saw a beautiful 24 inch specimen flash across the window at one point.

Picturesque stream
With miles of trails it is advisable to acquire a map of the site in order to take advantage of the planned layout and not spend time walking in circles. Despite the light rain of this morning we enjoyed the bright fall colors, the rising stream and the moss-coated tree trunks bending over water and trails. With temperatures in the mid-fifties, it was a pleasant time to be out-of-doors yet not cake our boots with heavy mud nor slip and slide along on a ledge above a roaring river.

To assuage our lack of heavy duty trail time we lunched at Rendezvous Grill a little farther east from the park. A warm setting with friendly service, innovative menu items and linen napkins made for a delightful midday repast at this more remote dining location. While not up to our usual adventure quotient, today was a satisfying time of updating friendship tales of travel. If you're out that way, the Wildwood Recreation Site is a great place to stretch the legs, take in a salmon run and enjoy a tame version of the Mt. Hood Wilderness.

Hardy hikers, undampened spirits
General layout of park


Running salmon

Streamside view

Artwork adorning a bench

Upstream

Downstream and rising waters

Vine maple 

Trail marker

Mossy railing over stream

Bow bridge

Up close and personal with stream!

Paved pathways

Carpet of leaves

Picnic table and grill 

Arched trees with moss

Lunch spot

Inside looking out


Rainbow

All's well that ends well!



Monday, October 20, 2014

Owls and Salmon and Bears, Oh My!*

Owl
If you enjoy indoor museums, imagine pictures and carvings in an outdoor setting with room to ramble, explore and photograph at will. Throw in a vista or two, dry weather and an interesting mix of tourists and you have a trip to Dallasport, WA, to visit the famous Native American rock art display. Escaping a rainy day in Portland I ventured east across the invisible dividing line at Hood River where Douglas firs, deciduous trees and mossy green are exchanged for Ponderosa pines, sage brush and dried grass brown. Here the weather is often dry and sunny with Gorge winds rushing across the face of the craggy basalt canyon of the Columbia River. The rolling hills beyond the cliffs undulate like the folds on the skin of a Shar-Pei dog.

This day I had a (required) reservation to tour the petroglyphs and pictographs salvaged from the rising waters behind The Dalles dam, a hydroelectric project of the 1950's.  Located in Horse Thief State Park, part of the larger Columbia Hills State Park, it contains but a tiny sample of the extensive rock art created by local and visiting Native American Indians over 300 years ago. The bulk of the rock art is underwater now. Successive lava flows extruded a multi-faceted work surface of basalt for artists who lived or gathered in this stretch along the river to trade goods at the annual market event.  Grinding red ochre, clay, shells, charcoal and other substances the Indians produced red, white and black paints. They would prepare the basalt surface by sanding it smooth with river sand and sometimes grinding it into a concave shape or flake the edges of a pointed surface. They would then draw a picture of symbolic significance on the rock surface. Basalt is porous and would absorb the paint and then minerals would leach out of the rock through the paint to preserve the image. After 300 years these images remain clear and colorful despite the harsh weather of the area.

"She Who Watches"
The images are most often of a spiritual nature, drawn by a shaman/medicine person or a youth seeking a rite of passage into adulthood. Some of the images have been interpreted by Native American advisors but others remain a mystery. Images include a hand print, a tally, animals, spirit faces, water, salmon, owls and geometric shapes. The most famous image is seen at the end of the tour and is called "She Who Watches". It is a very large face with bear-like ears and huge eyes. It sits high above the trail and originally watched over a burial site. The remains were relocated to various tribal burial grounds prior to Lake Celilo forming behind the dam. Here is a tale of the icon.

Lewis and Clark journeyed through this land on their way to the Pacific Ocean in 1805-6. Despite their extensive journaling they did not mention much about the rock art of this area. They seemed more focused on surviving the Narrows, a place where the 450 foot wide Columbia passed wildly through a 45 foot wide slot in the canyon. They returned a year later on the south side of the river. Here, here and here are some interesting links to investigate. The geologic history of the Pacific Northwest is also a fascinating study.

Rather than spend another thousand words describing the petroglyphs (rock carvings) and pictographs (rock paintings), I will let the pictures tell the story. A first-hand viewing of these pieces far surpasses the pictures. Plan a trip east for an adventure into history.

* With apologies to L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz


Columbia Hills S.P. scenery

Signage at the display



Petroglyph examples

Concave surface

Elk



Story board?

Close-up view of sheep/goats

Eagle or owl

Petroglyphs' setting

Token of worship left on fence post

Reclining due to break in rock

River barge traffic: recycled trees and cars

close up view

Pictograph example



Basalt surfaces



Lake Celilo

Grass and basalt

Trains every 30 minutes

Train art


Tally marks in red (small finger sized)

Figure

Hand detail

Paula our excellent tour guide




Sacred offerings left at site


Juvenile's hand print



Trail

River waters



Unusual flaked edge

Obsidian flakes from "flaking site" area

Red image

Lichens around image



Figure with bow and arrows













Vandal's purple paint 

Rough fencing

"She Who Watches" on high

More sacred offerings

Passing train passengers would fire bullets into "She....'s " eyes

Flaking stations: a gathering work site

View upriver

Rocky burial site

Petroglyph carving

Site view

Petroglyph


View downriver




Pictograph

Petroglyph

A serious warning



Close-up of carvings







Basalt cliffs and rolling hills

Teepee at Columbia Hills S.P.

Private cemetery