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Published: October 7th 2007
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Turkeys?
Like little camp invaders! Obfuscator writes: 110 Miles of dirt and gravel roads. I can see why prior to the Interstate system, it took people forever to get anywhere in this country. Even with tires and cars that are far more dependable and safe, you can only drive so fast on roads like that, particularly when these roads are at 16% grade and curve sharply to hug cliff faces.
Onaxthiel woke up at about 5:30 when a neighbor turned on his radio and floodlight, and so forth. After a week indoors, this was a very cold morning. I had no desire to stand out in the cold while my hands froze, so we got moving toward Hell's Canyon. Just a bit before you hit the recreational area (which is very large), you come to Joseph, which is basically home to Chief Joseph's grave, as well as several bronze foundries. All through Joseph, you see Bronze statues of things. Apparently Joseph's economy largely consists of casting bronzes and sending them all over the place. We took a fortuitous wrong turn that led us to Chief Joseph's grave at (45° 20.184 N, 117° 13.335 W) and also to Lake Wallowa, which was very lovely.
After
Beady Little Eyes
That's how you can tell they're plotting something. that, a lot more winding roads took us up to the tiny intersection known as Imnaha, and into Hell's Canyon National Recreational Area. Once we entered the park, it was all steep and ugly dirt roads from then on. Well, to be sure, the views all around were stunning, but the roads were, well, dirt. There were several great turn-offs for photo opportunities, and we were fortunate(?) enough to be driving up the gorge as a big storm was rolling through the area, which made the views pretty dramatic. We also found a lot of trailheads and a campground on the summit ridge, so there definitely are options for using the park more thoroughly if you have more time on your hands than we did. There's also a whole separate side of the park in Idaho that looked pretty neat from our vantage point, but we didn't get a chance to get to it. Too many dirt roads between us and there, but I digress.
When we got up to the summit ridge, we drove a bit further to Hat Point Lookout (45° 26.200N, 116° 39.843W). Hat Point got its name from a cowboy hat that someone found and
State Park River
Isn't that descriptive? hung on a tree there many years ago. The owner never came to claim the hat, so it stayed on the tree for quite some time I guess, and became something of a landmark. Now Hat Point is home to a Forest Service fire lookout tower, and a lot of picnic tables and fire pits. By the time we got to Hat Point, it's worth mentioning, the ground was quite thoroughly covered with snow. This had been building for some time as we climbed, and it was a bit chilly up there. We were also quite literally in the clouds. They were low and stormy looking, and sort of swirled around us out on the point, which unfortunately limited the visibility quite a bit. We got to climb the tower though, and that helped get us over a lot of the lower clouds, so we could see further. After a bit of photographing and walking about, getting my feet wet, we started our way back down the long dirt road. We picked a good time to get moving again, since after we got back in the car, it started snowing, and then hailing on us. The hail was never terribly
large, luckily. As we descended the mountain, it sort of turned to rain, and then stopped altogether, such that aside from being on a steep, winding, dirt road, we actually had a pretty safe descent.
We thought we'd be all home free once we got out of the park proper, but it turned out that the road we had to take to the next town (Halfway) was basically 36 more miles of dirt. We did find a nice Hell's Canyon overlook though, and fuel in Halfway that wasn't as pricey as we worried it might be. It's worth mentioning that Oregon is one of the only states in the Union where you're not allowed to pump your own gas. Apparently a lot of Oregon has a weak economy, so they've mandated that there has to be someone getting paid to pump gas. It does, however, have lower gas prices than Washington. So I guess the small business owners are the only losers in that deal.
We decided by this point that we should be trying to get to a campground, and all the options we were looking at seemed to be along I-84, which was ok, since we
figured I-84 was probably the route we needed to take across part of Idaho anyway. Little did we realize that getting to I-84 would require another 40 or 50 miles of gravel road. The upshot of this leg of gravel was that the whole road ran along the Snake River, and it was stunning. Eventually, we did get to I-84, and passed the nearest campground in favor of getting to Boise to find Eagle Island State Park, which we figured would be a rad place to lay down for the night. Of course, what we didn't anticipate was that I couldn't read a map properly, and that Eagle Island State Park a.) didn't have camping, and b.) was basically impossible for us to find. In fact, there weren't any State Parks around Boise that DID have camping at all, so after some searching, we settled in at Motel 6 for the night (where I was infuriated by their internet not working).
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