The Bradism Top Ten Things about the Pacific Northwest

As I travel through time on my flights from Portland back to Adelaide I reflected on my top ten highlights of the Pacific Northwest.

Elk Meadow, Mount Hood

There are many great day hikes in the Pacific Northwest, and Elk Meadows on the southern slope of Mt Hood is where we'll start. The moderate trail first offers a river crossing under the looming gaze of the Hood summit, before switchbacks take you deeper and higher into the forest.

Elk Meadows wildflowers.

The trail loops around the meadow, which opens up from the trees to a wide expanse of (depending on the season) grass, a carpet of wildflowers, or a plain of snow). If you are very lucky you may also see Elk.

Mt Walker Summit

Steeper than it looks.

Somewhere on the drive between Olympic National Park and Seattle is Mt Walker, an hour south-east of Port Angeles. Walker is short, relatively, compared to some other Olympic peaks but the walk to the top is one of the most challenging. Over 625 metres of elevation is achieved over just three kilometres of switchbacks through towering Douglas firs and flowering ferns.

The reward at the top is panoramic views of the Olympic mountain ranges on one side, and ever more panoramic views of Puget Sound to the east, as well as the satisfaction of conquering the brutal incline. Just be careful stepping off the track to pee while descending, because you do not want to slip on a wet log and take the shortcut down.

Voodoo Doughnuts

Blue Star Donuts' attempt.

If you're ever researching things to do in Portland you will uncover online debates about whether Blue Star Donuts is better than the longer established Voodoo Doughnuts. I figured I'd be willing to eat both to decide for myself
In my opinion it's not even close. Yes, Blue Star's gourmet donuts can be described with words like "hints" and "dashes", but while that's all very grown up Voodoo Doughnuts is plain fun. I understand why the line up goes around the block any time of the day.

The pink store, and its giant menu, produce huge, delicious doughnuts with toppings ranging from sprinkles and chocolate, to Captain Crunch, Graham Crackers, Oreos and Peanut Butter (together). The dough, icing and custard cream has all been perfected. The apple fritter, cinnamony and crispy and packed with flavour, was exceptional.

Second Beach, La Push in the Mist

The Pacific beaches on the west shores of Olympic National Park have an edge of the Earth feeling to them. Shrouded in mist, protected by dense, towering trees, before ultimately crossing a field of driftwood logs each the size of a whale, by the time you reach the sand you have left the world behind.
Second Beach at La Push is one such beach. A short descent through coastal forest leads to the ocean, swirling around the archipelago of tiny, teeth-like islands crowned with more firs that somehow survive the salty winds. Visit at low tide, so you can stroll further into isolation, and at sunset, if you're lucky enough for the fog to lift enough to notice.

Flatstick Pub, Pioneer Square

If you love historic districts, mini golf and craft beer, Flatstick Pub in Seattle's Pioneer Square will bring you joy. Not far from Pike Place Market and the waterfront, the Pioneer Square neighborhood streets are lined with late 19th and early 20th century buildings including Smith Tower, one of the oldest skyscrapers in the USA.
Flatstick Pub hosts a huge, rotating collection of local craft beers on tap, and a challenging 9 hole course of mini golf to enjoy with your drinks. There's also board games, mini-basketball and other mini games to try.
There's also a Flatstick Pub south of Lake Union, close by to some of Seattle's big tech offices. The course there is different, and good, but the location has more of a corporate team building vibe there.

Deer Lake and Sol Duc Falls

In the temperate rainforest and old growth forest around Sol Duc hot springs is a day hike with nearly everything. Starting with a temperate rainforest stroll to the beautiful Sol Duc River falls and canyon, the trail turns up the mountain through more spruce and ferns and increasing elevation.

All kinds of flora is on display as you climb, crossing streams, fallen forest giants and rocky inclines. Then, inexplicably, a lake appears through the trees. Already over 1000 metres up the mountain, the still lake is surrounded by meadows climbing up a ring of even taller peaks, with a little glimpse of snow, and maybe in the blue sky a bald eagle circling. A short trail loops around the lake, passing camping and lunch spots, plus a long drop latrine. The way down is easier, and the ferny, dappled rainforest corridor known as lover's lane follows the Sol Duc back to the hot springs resort. There, if you don't mind other people's skin cells, you can sink into the mineral pools and watch the sunset play across the tree covered slopes all around.

Portland Bookstores

There's a famous bookstore in Portland named Powell's which you may have heard of. I visited it, and it was fantastic, and I even got $2.75 credit for my copy of a JG Ballard paperback at their buying counter. It also made me happy to see so many people in downtown Portland carrying books from Powell's.
That said, Powell's felt a little sanitized, particularly by Portland standards. It sold a lot of classics and stickers and quirky greeting cards. There was a Wholefoods a couple of blocks down.
Half a neighbourhood away, in a tiny store with fading signs was the best bookstore I've ever visited. Cameron's Books & Magazines is an eclectic collection of books and stacks of magazines consuming almost all available space. The prices are cheap, the range unbelievable. I bought a bunch of old Asimov's magazines ranging from 1975 to 2016. If you love words, check out both.

Paradise in June

There's something magical about snow. Well, there's something magical about snow when it's summer and the sky is blue and you can go hiking around on it wearing shorts. (I myself did not wear shorts, but I saw more seasoned locals who did.)
There was plenty of snow near the peaks of Mt Rainier and Mount Hood. The Timberline Lodge was abuzz with skiers and snowboarders in the first week of July. But it was Paradise, on the southern slope of Mt Rainier that won me over. At the heart of a dozen trails, the Paradise visitors centre is spectacular in its own right. You don't need to hike far to find snow beneath your boots.

Replace with DSLR photo later.

The white trails lead to stunning vistas, glacial waterfalls, and lookout points worth the high altitude exertion. The snow is slippery, but safe to cross if you follow the rule of sticking to others' footprints. After watching your feet and fighting the slope, you can then turn around and see why they named the place Paradise.

Craft Beer

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say every small town in the Pacific Northwest has at least one craft beer microbrewery. And the ratio of one variety of IPA per thousand people in the country continues in the built up metropolises of Seattle and especially Portland. Everywhere you turn is a brewery or pub serving up seasonals and the Pacific Northwest specialty: the IPA. Beer is everywhere. You can even buy six packs of craft beers at supermarkets, pharmacies and gas stations.

The beer in this photo has a street value in Adelaide of half a million.

The craft beer market is saturated, but I did my best to dry it out. A full review will come shortly. Stand out places to sample include Fremont brewery, Deschutes, and Ten Barrel Brewing.

Hurricane Ridge at Dusk

There's a webcam feed which shows the visitors centre, perched 1600 metres high, at the top of Hurricane Ridge. You can use it to check if the skies are clear, and if there's space to park your massive car. If those conditions are true, take advantage of America's willingness to pave roads to the tops of mountains and visit right before the sun sets.

As the golden hour begins, take in spectacular, 360 degree views of the Olympic mountain ranges, watching elk crossing the alpine meadows, breathe the thin, crisp air and marvel at one of the most beautiful places in the world.

The White Suburban

I can post this now the car has been returned in one piece.

In January I made a reservation for a "mid-sized SUV" for three weeks of driving between the towns and the trail-heads of the Pacific Northwest. I'd expected a Ford Explorer, like the last time I'd hired a car in the US. Or maybe an ironic reunion with a Jeep Patriot after ditching my right-hand drive version a year earlier.

"We'll upgrade you to something more comfortable," the car-wrangler told me at the SEATAC rental car garage. This was the first sign something was wrong. Unless there are tips involved, when a service person says they're doing something for you it almost always means that they're doing something for themselves.
He handed me a key and said "Take the white Suburban."

I'd never heard of a Suburban before, but if you have you would know where this is leading. I was already nervous about interstates and national park navigation and driving on the wrong side of the road. What I didn't need was the biggest American car ever built. (An incorrect assumption, but that's how it felt at the time). 6 metres long, over two metres wide and nearly as high, the Suburban would have been big and wide enough to fit the old Jeep in the backseats. (Almost)

The Suburban in its natural habitat.

I requested an alternative vehicle from the car-wrangler, I.E., the midsize SUV I'd originally requested. The manager got involved. This was apparently not possible. I'd come at the point in the day when all they had left was Suburbans. It was true. There they were, dotted, unwanted, among the empty car parks.

I had to make a decision. I mean, it was just a car, I rationalised. Thousands of Americans drove chonking units like it daily. My anxiety had to be getting the best of me. So I agreed to take it. We loaded our suitcases into the trunk and I slowly, gently got it down the ramps of the parking garage and, sooner than I'd have liked, onto the highway.
It was there, at 65 miles per hour, I quickly realised I was out of my depth. The slow lane constantly turned into an exit lane, and I was forced to merge, maneuver and keep straight this titanic on wheels. A Jeep Patriot passed me, and it looked so small, like a red handcart spied out the window of an aeroplane. Nobody honked at me, but I felt closer to death than ever before. I reached over to squeeze Vanessa's hand but the car was so wide I could only reach as far as the second column of cup-holders between us.
The steering was sensitive, the V8 engine roared, but the Suburban weighs three tonnes. The hour of driving it took to get out from Seattle's web of freeways passed mostly in silence, some swearing, country music on the radio.

By the time we reached the outskirts of Aberdeen, and my first American freeway parking lot, I was beginning to feel more comfortable with the Suburban. For starters, there were helpful safety features, like lane assistance guidance to vibrate the seat when you drifted into other lanes, and extra mirrors to provide visibility of all the parts of the road you couldn't see because of the girth of the ginormous chassis. Features that, you could argue, wouldn't be necessary if the Suburban had been built to normal proportions. But they helped, and driving almost became... Enjoyable.
Then I had to park it. There are more fun things to do than park a Suburban. Vanessa was very helpful.

Once I had the hang of the dimensions, the cruise control and the fuel consumption, the Suburban was, I guess, "comfortable." And as it accompanied us on drives through temperate rainforests, up mountains, along rivers and to misty beaches I realised that maybe the car was also out of its comfort zone of city streets and fast-food chain drive-thrus. Without the Suburban I would never have made it to the top of Hurricane Ridge, or the snowy vistas of Paradise, nor the canyons of Mt Hood and the trails of the Olympics.

And it hit me, as I reached the summit of the final ridge of our last hike - my unconditioned ankles tender from the climbs, my office-worker skin scratched and weathered, the remnants of a hundred spiderweb strands clinging to my hat - that I was a big chonker out in the world too. I was oversized, but getting it done in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.

I was also a white Suburban.

My Entry About Being Killed By A Bear

Plaster casts of bear prints from near the vending machines at the Hurricane Ridge Visitor's Center.

A few months back I was shopping for the upcoming trip to the Pacific Northwest. I stood in the camping store's dressing room, checking the fit of a merino shirt and the realisation suddenly hit me: This was the shirt I would be wearing when I was killed by a bear.

It wasn't the first premonition like this that I'd had. My new hiking boots were also the ones I'd be wearing when I was killed by a bear. My new hiking pants would be the ones I would soil when the bear's claws ended my life. Funnily, the previous marino shirt I had been wearing in the change room was also the shirt I would be wearing when I was killed by a bear. (Seriously, merino shirts are amazing for hiking.)

It may seem a little ironic to worry about bear attacks when I come from Australia and go into the ocean regularly. There shark attacks happen regularly. In Washington State you can count the number of bear attacks in the past fifty years on two hands (assuming you haven't survived a shark attack in Australia).

Why is it our nature to assume the worst? Does it help us prepare for the unlikely? I did learn the rhyming mnemonic for how to react to a bear's aggression. And I whistled occasionally as we walked, letting my boots crunch and thud a little louder than they needed to.
Or, are these kinds of fears a reflection of our ingrained narcissism? Why would a bear want to kill me? How would surviving a bear attack affect my character arc? Would hiking in the Washington wilderness have been less fun if there hadn't been at the edge of my perception the constant threat of bear attack?

When my nineteen days out of the city over, and presuming nothing would go horribly wrong in the Portland Zoo, or the San Francisco international departures terminal, I was a little disappointed to not even have seen a bear. On the plus side I hadn't been gored and eaten, but on the minus, there was no good journal entry in that.

Too busy napping to even try and kill me.

I wasn't killed by a bear, although I did get stung by a wasp when closing a hot tub cover. My instincts had proven to be wildly inaccurate. I'd lived on the edge and enjoyed it; death gives me no hints to its schedule.

Spicy Brown Mustard

This was Spicy Brown Mustard. It added flavour, salt and moisture to dozens of tuna, chicken and turkey sandwiches across Washington and Oregon these past weeks, all while never needing refrigeration on hikes or highways. You deserved better than to be tossed, half full, into a garbage can 50 miles out from Portland. But that's how you went out, because I need that free space in my suitcase for three boxes of cereal and longnecks of IPA.

American Sausage

Today's holiday breakfast was a 1100 calorie sausage holding in some eggs and tomato. There were some slices of toast, a beetroot pattie, and some onion in there too. I did pat that sausage down with some paper towel...

Luckily I followed this up immediately with about 9 kilometres of alpine hiking where I burnt around 1100 calories. Hiking at altitude is great because you get in less oxygen and (some science later) burn off more breakfast.

The air temperature up Mount Hood was around 4°C but the inclines kept me warm. The sky was crisp and the mountain air pure, but every time I exhaled I smelt only sausage. (It tasted great)

A Picture Says 5 Words

Castaway

How I looked after four days without internet...
And another week of holidays with internet.

We stayed in Sol Duc Valley - world wide web dead-zone - the past three nights and, surprisingly, I did not miss the internet all that much. It's not like I prepared with much offline content. I just did lots of hiking, listened to an audiobook, sat in hot-springs and drank $1.49 cans of craft beer from the resort store to get through.

By my second day offline, woodland creatures were literally visiting me.

This morning I ate breakfast at a waterfall. Eventually we emerged from the valley to free motel WiFi and a bunch of notifications that were almost all completely dismissable. What is the value of the internet, really?

Posting pictures of breakfasts at waterfalls I guess.

Worth It