August 19, 2015

If it seems our posts have been spaced further apart that would be because they have been. Lyla and I have driven more than 5,000 miles at this date and are both getting a bit road weary. Some days, like the day we visited Mount St. Helens, we drove up and up mountain sides for at least three hours, which meant we also had to come back down mountain sides for almost that same amount of time. I was told that the last 20 miles to the site we visited -- where you can peer straight down at the sad remains of Spirit Lake and see the naked, steaming mountain to the left -- was a gravel road just a few years ago. Today the road is broken asphalt, teetering toward the downhill side of the road, which, if one was brave enough to look at, would probably be a sheer drop of thousands of feet. Have I mentioned I am not a fan of great heights when it involves me standing on them?

Lyla has been a spectacular travel companion, in that she endures the winding, bumpy roads without complaint and has yet to utter, "when will we be there?"

Now we are holed up with relatives in Bakersfield for a couple of days and I can get off a quick post before the next segment of our trip--into the searing Mohave desert. The temperature Monday in Bakersfield was 109 degrees and we are told it may be a tad cooler today, say 104 or so. Now that sounds really bad and it can be, especially, I would think, for the homeless people we have seen on the streets. But the natives who live here know to get outdoor work done early and stay indoors from 10 a.m. to dark. Across from us this morning yard workers were buzzing away loudly with maintenance equipment at 6:30 a.m. and I did not notice anyone complaining. These desert folks remind us, "it is a dry heat." And truly, it isn't that bad out at night. I wonder why more people don't just flip their days around and sleep all day and work and play at night?

Here are a few photos of our days from August 11 to August 15.

Steam continues to vent (lower right in photo) from Mount St. Helens, which erupted explosively May 18, 1980 and blew out the north side of the mountain. The volcanic eruption was the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic event in the history of the United States. Fifty-seven people were killed; 250 homes, 47 bridges and 185 miles of highway were destroyed. The day we visited we could smell a faint odor of smoke, or was it brimstone?

Remarkably, after 35 years, skeletons of dead trees still stand or lay on the forest floor, amid the rebirth of pine trees and flowers. Mount St. Helens is ghostly-looking in the far background.

A crushed and now rusted miner's car is left as part of the memorial to nature's robust ways. Plants and flowers are nourished even by the decaying metals of human endeavors.

We all know our homes are usually built from wood and our "dead tree" books too come from, well, dead trees. But you have to drive through Oregon to appreciate how many trees bleed their sap for our use. In the photo below a hillside begins to recover from timbering.

Logging trucks barrel down two-lane as well as four-lane roads. Beware your back bumper! A motel owner told me the story of his years in the timber business. He said he once cut (and showed me a photo of it) a 600- to 700-hundred-year-old tree whose butt end (when laying sideways on the ground) was eight-feet tall and the length of the tree was 250 feet. "When they (I suppose the government) told me we couldn't cut any more of those big ones, I quit timbering," he said. He also reminded me that timber is a renewable resource. And so it is--right now I can't count how many generations down the road would use that renewable tree that would take 600 years to grow.

Spectacular cloud formations added to our drive on this day.

Along the Oregon coast a vulture swoops over Pacific waves.

Shasta Lake, near Redding California, is the state's third largest body of water after Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea. The red banks exposed in the background reflect the long and severe drought conditions in the state -- the water level should cover these exposed banks. One source said the reservoir contains only about 30 percent of the water it did 10 years ago. When I asked a local employee at the lake how much water it would take to refill the lake, he merely said, "a whole lot!" Then as an afterthought, and in keeping with comments I've heard from other westerners, he added, "but that's just nature at work."

One of the scariest nights we spent was in Douglas, California, while we were trying to reach the redwood forests. A forest fire was burning several miles away and the next town down the road had been evacuated two nights before. We retreated indoors to escape inhaling the thick smoke and the next day had to retrace our route back over mountains the way we had come because of road closures.

Lyla's bane: small dogs and

very large dogs.

Watching from her bed in the van, Lyla scrutinizes the landscape for the presence of dogs. Her animal behaviorist from OSU has helped us through several phone conversations to deal with her fears, which instead of decreasing with daily exposure, have increased. We are trying a new medication to lower her anxiety levels and also continue to work daily on "fun" things, like long walks in quiet places and practicing our obedience commands.