Thoughts for today:

In the campground that I stayed in last night, there was senior citizen driving a 90's era VW bus.
This was a bumpersticker on it. I had been hiking in the rain for a bit...so when I saw it, I broke down and cried... and I won't ever give up.

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world -- that is the myth of the "atomic age" -- as in being able to remake ourselves." Mahatma Gandhi

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds". Albert Einstein
and
The Sun has finally come out in Oregon!!!!Yippee

Bus Ridin' Tourism

On Wednesday I managed to extract myself from answering all these facebook replies (not sure I will keep doing it ) and decided to get the bargain of the century Eugene public transportation $3.00 day pass and tour Eugene while my friend was in school.

I went downtown to start checking out the various routes and see how far I could get.

Well it's still raining buckets and I can't think of a better way to see a town and what's where and such.

When I first got downtown I saw one of the many folks who try to get petition signatures (as a job) and check it out---this guy had on a full wet suit and booties. Talk about making the best out of a difficult situation...I laughed hard and told him he was brilliant. That's a challenging job anyway but this guy fully embraced the rain.

I also took a bus out to the expansive Dexter Reservoir (which I am assuming is the Eugene water supply) in the town of Lowell, down to the local community college and to the base of a large hill called Spencer's Butte. They seem to call everything "buttes" around here. What looks to me like a tree covered hill is a butte.

I had yet another great conversation with a few of the elderly ladies on the bus and one of them showed me the trailhead to actually hike to the top of Spencer's. In the early part of the day the busses were largely empty but by the end of the day I was worn out and had enough of wet smelly people crammed together like sardines.

All and all though I am glad that I did it. It always helps me to be more self sufficient when I am visiting friends anywhere, to learn the bus routes. Santa Cruz Metro is still the best I've seen (as it hooks up to all of the other local transit systems up and down the coast) but Eugene is a close second.

I am so very grateful that I had two Grandmas that rode the busses everywhere in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. They took me for rides when I was little and to this day I can't stand driving in any city where there are busses. Makes sense eh?

This is a really cool Cob bench that someone built on my friend's road here in Eugene. It's up by the road to allow any passerby or person waiting for a bus to sit on down and relax. Now that's community action. Cob is a mixture of straw/clay and sand. The soil here is so perfect for cob building that you could build a house right up from the ground, with no additives except straw and water.

The McKenzie Bridge Ranger Station was built to resemble some of the great old lodges of the Pacific Northwest. It is an architectural wonder to behold. The Natural History Interpretive displays on the inside are some of the best that I have ever seen.

Vanilla Leaf (Achlys triphylla)

A Beautifully crafted bench on the porch of the McKenzie Bridge Ranger Station


Old friend/ Covered bridge

Serendipity

Rhododendron bud off the McKenzie River Trail

Columbine
Covered Bridge over the Mohawk River, Oregon

A bend in the McKenzie River above Paradise campground in the Willamette National Forest

Byron Dudley

Looking through a hole in one of the covered bridges....

I have been exploring the hills east of Eugene with both my friend Jodi and on my own these past few days. The public transit system in Eugene is a friggen miracle I say.
For a mere one dollar and 5o cents I can take a bus nearly 60 miles towards the Oregon Cascades to Willamette National Forest's McKenzie Bridge Ranger Station on the beautiful McKenzie River and be hiking in old growth temperate rainforest in just a few minutes after getting off the bus.
I had originally planned to spend a few days alone up there and try to see and spend time at Cougar/Terwilliger hotsprings. I started my morning with a 2 mile hike to the Paradise Campground along the shores of this rapid strewn river canyon. In many places there are rocks above the water covered in emerald green moss. The place was a ghost-town post memorial day , so I just sat on the high cliffs for a while looking down on the river rapids.

Noting that the campground fee was a steep $18.00 I decided to turn around and go back to the ranger station to try and get a ride to the Cougar trail head.
Earlier in the day I had seen several folks with packs get off heading that way (and after ) talking with a local found out that hitching a ride there is easy as many folks from Eugene visit the springs. Rumor has it that the rangers at times will even pick you up. (For $ 5.00 I can be sitting in a series of well-maintained geothermal pools, soaking out all of the aches and pains gained from a long period of no serious hiking in over a year. I look forward to a break in this lingering Oregon rainy season/winter).

I got back to the ranger station though and saw a posting that a major storm was headed that way. So I went back down to the river to sit and wait for the bus headed back to Eugene and will try again on Thursday.
I have always been guided to be in the right place at crucial moments ( it seems) and everything about today worked out perfectly. When I was waiting for the bus to go out to the river originally, I just happened to ask a guy with a pack where he was headed.

Boy did I ask the right person! I was fortunate to have met one, Byron Dudley, who had been up there several times and knew many of the nuances about NFS legal "dispersed camping", getting out to Cougar and many other things about living lightly in the woods around Eugene.
Byron is truly an incredible spirit and we talked all the way out on the bus about so many things ...joyous, stimulating conversation.
It is no great surprise to me that I have met yet another amazing kindred spirit. My mind does get blown every once in a while at the number of times that this has happened in my life.
Byron Dudley showed me some of his photos and art on his really cool Otter phone/camera .
You can see what I saw on http://www.byrondudley.com/ or http://www.byrondudley.blogspot.com/

Click on the icon on the left to read about the book of his photos and musings taken and written while driving a truck over a million miles in America. I personally am floored with the beauty.

Above is Byron as we were descending down to the river so he could show me how to access the (amazing) McKenzie River Trail and above that are some more pictures that I took.

I am having trouble putting my pictures where I want them...

Mohawk River, Oregon

" I go to nature to be soothed and healed,

and to have my senses put in order".

John Burroughs

" The more you sense the rareness and value of your own life, the more you realize that how you use it, how you manifest it is all your responsibilty. We face such a big task, so naturally we sit down for a while."
Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi

Above is a pastel that I did a few days ago as part of the start of my art therapy over the loss of my brother, Patrick.

In many Native American tribes it was believed that when you die, you walk the red road towards the west, the place of the ancestors. In the center of the road there is a far off person (Patrick) walking away. The moon is going down on the mighty Pacific. I do hope that he was able to see the Grand Canyon and the Pacific Ocean on his way out.

Ginormous Raised Bed....

My friend Jodi came up with a great idea /design for a raised bed. Her landlord had heaped up a mound in the center of the backyard from a previous excavation on the property. She took straw bales and made one gigantic ( approx. 14x29 feet) raised bed for growing an abundance of vegetables and herbs. The straw has been in place since last spring and is still holding up. She has made pockets in some of the tops of the bales and inserted potatoes . They seem to be thriving. At some point she will add another outer wall of new strawbales , allowing the inner layer to continue turning into new soil and more gardening space! Alot of folks grow kitchen gardens here and (for me) it makes for an urban paradise.

Eugene is a model city for sustainability in so many ways and has been long before being green was fashionable. I found out that it is possible to take a city bus towards the Cascades (nearly 60 miles) to a town called McKenzie Bridge on the McKenzie River. Many municipalities desiring sustainablity should really take a closer look at what's going on here!