Shakedown Cruise - We're Cruisin'

Thursday morning we were up and out early again, taking off from the Horsetail Falls parking lot and heading out to Oneonta Falls. Hiking here in the gorge is different because it’s the gorge – basically carved out of rock by the river. We’ve been basically skating along the edges of steep hills, sometimes with a pretty narrow path and a long drop off on one side. What’s fun is that the flora is pretty diverse, and we’ll be hiking along and come around a corner and things will totally change – a flowering groundcover showed up unexpectedly, and this morning on the way between horsetail falls and Oneonta creek we came to a grassy area that seemed to be where there’d been a relatively recent (past 20 years or so?) landslide. We also found an area that had the kind of shoulder- and head- high vegetation that is much more like what we’re used to at the coast. Then we turned another corner and found ourselves in the Oneonta gorge, which is a narrow slot canyon carved by the creek. The canyon is so deep and narrow that looking back along the downstream side of the creek there was an area with an undisturbed surface, perfectly reflecting the sky in a way I don’t think I’ve seen before. We crossed the creek on a nice bridge and climbed up the other side, where the trail splits into two directions – one towards Multnomah Falls and one towards Triple Falls, which we would have taken had it not been closed because of fire damage. It’s hard to comprehend the scope of the fire – it goes on for literally miles. You can get a sense of the damage in these pictures – normally the evergreens would be green from top to bottom.  

Stream runs downhill away from 
the viewer...

We knew that the trail to Triple Falls was closed, and we also knew that there’s a shuttle that runs between Multnomah Falls and Horsetail Falls. If we’d thought about it we would have done some more research and might have continued on to Multnomah Falls, but since we didn’t know 1) how far that was and 2) if/how often the shuttle was running, we decided to head back to the trailer for a short break and then off to Bonneville Dam.

Just a short digression here – the reason we came to Ainsworth for the shakedown was because it was one of the few campgrounds that had vacancies, and we’ve only stayed in the gorge once, for Ben’s first marathon. We thought it might be fun, but we figured this was a one-time thing. Our plan was to mostly hang out and relax in the trailer, because we didn’t think there would be much to do. We were so wrong. We love this campground (although we wish we were on the A side of the loop) and we could easily spend another several days here, and that’s without even going to Hood River.

After a short rest we headed off to see Bonneville Dam, which is amazing. We could have spent hours watching the shad (and occasional chinook salmon and pacific lamprey) swim up the fish ladder. Not to mention the fish hatchery and sturgeon center, the navigation locks and the powerhouses. As it was we saw as much as we could, and then continued on to Cascade Locks for a return trip to Thunder Island Brewhouse, where I’d made a reservation, although if we’d remembered how quick the service is I would have made a later reservation and we could have stayed and seen ‘em swim for longer. 

After a tasty lunch we went out to Thunder Island to hang out for a half hour or so until it was time to board the Sternwheeler Columbia Gorge for a 2-part cruise whose description was so confusing that we had no idea what was going to take place. But here’s what happens, you get on and cruise up the river (East) for a while, and then you turn around and go back to the dock and some people get off and some people get on, and you cruise down the river (West) to the Bonneville Dam, and then you turn around and come back to the dock. What’s confusing is that the part of the website I was on didn’t have a map and talked about two halves of the cruise, and it’s the same price if you do one half or two, but I didn’t understand how you would get back to your car if you got off halfway since I thought it was a single out-and-back. Anyway, we stayed on for both halves and even though it’s pretty warm today it was actually almost chilly on the boat. We love to be at sea and enjoyed ourselves a whole lot.

When we got back to the trailer it was shower time and then Dave made dinner – 10 cent chicken (so called because the recipe came out of a booklet I bought at a garage sale for, you guessed it, 10 cents). We haven’t done a lot of real cooking in the trailers and wanted to try it out. It worked very well, aside from a small mishap with the open bag of rice that we will probably be cleaning up from forever. While Dave cooked, I figured out how to play a DVD and set up the table for dinner. We weren’t crazy about the table solution the trailer came with, and Dave found a long skinny folding table we thought was the answer, and it worked ok but you have to sit up on the front edge of the recliner. We’ll do some more research. We discovered that the cupholders in the armrests will nicely hold a bottle of wine, and enjoyed our yummy dinner and reclining after while watching Bottle Shock and finishing off the bottle of rose’. In fact, the whole evening might have been the best part of the whole trip. 

Aside from the load leveling bars being almost impossible to attach, hitching up went very smoothly. Because we attached to the sewer system we didn’t even have to dump, and we were back home and fully unloaded by noon. We kept the trailer nice and clean, so minimal cleanup was needed – although we’re not sure if it was “Tabetha clean”.

That’s the end of the shakedown cruise.