Author: Occasionally Author

My Oregon trail began and ended in the Willamette valley just south of Portland. Our friends were kind enough to offer camper parking at the edge of the tree farm where they live. In normal years, this is the rich green farmland that pioneers braved the Oregon trail to reach.

It’s been a rainy summer, so this year’s crop of forest fungus is spectacular. Why should wildflowers get all the glamor shots when the fruiting bodies of fungi are just as beautiful?

Jeffery Pine trees (Pinus Jeffreyi) smell like butterscotch. Don’t get me wrong— I enjoy the scent of balsam firs (Abies balsamea) that I’m used to in the White Mountains (they smell like, well, pine)— but there’s also something wonderful about stepping out of the camper door into a forest that smells like baking cookies.

I didn’t have a big objective or a peak to bag this year. Instead we had a base camp and all the trail maps and guide books to explore the Eastern Sierra with no other agenda but to avoid crowds who all had the same ideas we did: take vacation on 4th of July week, and retreat to cooler, higher elevation during record-breaking heat in the West.

Glaciers and prehistoric super volcanoes are not the only things that have left behind stories etched in the landscape.

If you’d asked me in 2019, I’d have told you that no, I can’t spend two weeks in a camper in the national forest because I have a real job, thank you very much. Life and work have changed a lot since then, and this grove of Jeffery pines in the Inyo National Forest was my office for a week and then base camp for a week of vacation.