At the beginning of August I went to Portland and took the Amtrak Cascades from Seattle! I had a wonderful time with my friend Hannah from forestry school and her girlfriend. It was also my last week in Washington and we went traveling to Glacier, WA near Mt Baker to measure some more trees before a timber sale.
Goodbyes to Washington
The last time I went to Seattle was on the Friday before I left. I went kayaking with Iara and her friend Alex, who she also happened to have met during the same WTA outing from June but just on the next day.
I had spent most of that day packing and getting ready for my trip back east, but met up with Iara in the evening for one last hurrah in the city. Needless to say it was a ton of fun and a great sendoff!
We rented kayaks from a local boat rental place, and I was surprised how affordable it was to actually rent – only $23/hour. We spent about an hour and a half on Lake Union in total and got some killer views I had never dreamed of before.
The first photo is actually the smoke visible from the Sourdough Mountain Fire in North Cascades National Park, which started literally the day I left the park. It’s crazy to see how much smoke that’s been putting off and especially from this far away.
The other views are of the I-5 bridge, and of course downtown Seattle!
When we got done kayaking, we stopped for dinner at a place we thought was a real restaurant but was actually a virtual restaurant, which doesn’t have a seating area and only caters to takeout orders. What appealed to us was that they made Indian pizza with curry and paneer, and it was pretty dang good!
After dinner, we walked around for the last time and I got some of my best views of the space needle during sunset.
Portland
This trip had a lot of ups and downs for me, but I would still say it was a success! I did end up breaking my phone screen and messing up my point and shoot during the trip, but the experience of it all was amazing and I’d love to come back to see more of the city.
Instead of driving, I ended up taking the train to Portland via the Amtrak Cascades, which runs from Eugene, OR to Vancouver, BC. I did this because I love train travel and because it was cheaper than having to buy gas in Washington at $5.39/gallon.
I devised a convoluted plan where I left my car at a park and ride garage where I would then take the bus to Seattle and the train to Portland to save on parking. I will say it was a bit stressful going both ways because I was on either the first bus or the last bus of the route and any major delay in the train or the bus would throw me off schedule. Luckily that didn’t happen but I was super worried about it during the trip.
My train left Seattle at 7:22 on the dot and I got some very scenic views during the ride down!
I was amazed at how fast the train was going compared to most Amtrak rides – we were averaging about 80mph the whole time and the cars were all super smooth. We made it to Portland at about 10:30 where I was greeted by some lovely neon signage in the station. I was supposed to meet up with my friend Hannah from UK forestry and her girlfriend Kayla at noon, which gave me some time to explore the city!
It turns out that Portland has a weekly art show that happens outdoors near the waterfront and I was there just in time to see it! There were local vendors from all over selling their work and it was super cool to stumble upon it while I was moseying around the city.
When Kayla and Hannah got in to town we were all hungry so we went to lunch at Afuri in the old town, which is an amazing ramen place and coincidentally right next to Voodoo Doughnuts, which I did not go to because the line was WAY too long.
After lunch we went to the Portland Puppet Musem, which I had read about on Atlas Obscura. I was really intrigued that it was both free and featured some really interesting historical puppets. The exhibit they had going on was puppets heroines from the ancient world, and for being such a small museum I was not disappointed! The guy who ran it was clearly very passionate about puppets and told us stories from the puppet shows he did. I was really engaged and we ended up listening to him talk for a really long time. Eventually though we had to leave so we could check in to our Airbnb!
What was interesting about where we were staying in Portland is that we actually got to meet the hosts, which was a first for me. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten to meet a host at an Airbnb I was staying at before. They were a cute lesbian couple who was renting out their vintage streamliner in their backyard! I have to say that this is one of the most perfect Airbnbs I’ve ever stayed in. They thought of everything – they have VHS tapes, records, magazines, post cards of the streamliner you’re staying in available for purchase through Venmo, yard lights that can be activated with Alexa, wine, champagne, and available for purchase, and so much more! I stayed in the sunroom on the couch and next to me they were making dandelion wine and had all sorts of cute decorations.
This was seriously a top-notch Airbnb.
When we got our stuff settled in, we went to Powell’s bookstore, which is the largest bookstore in the world. And they really mean it when they say that! We spent a decent amount of time there and I walked out with three books: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain. If only I had infinite time and infinite money because I would be spending both of those in that place reading and getting books.
We walked and got dinner at a pizza-by-the-slice place and pretended like we were in New York walking down the street with our pizza! Then we went and got dessert at a Japanese dessert shop, which just to happened to be next to a giant inflatable of Totoro from My Neighbor Totoro.
After that, we called it a night and went to the Airbnb to get ready for bed.
That’s when disaster struck because overnight I accidentally slept on my phone and cracked the screen. When I woke up in the morning a good chunk of the pixels had turned black and it was slowly spreading throughout the phone. Frantically I checked to see if there were any repair places in Portland that were open, but none were open on Sundays so I spent most of that day saving my contacts and preparing for a train and bus ride home with no phone.
Luckily I got a work phone from the forest service and I knew I could use that, so in the meantime I was at least not phoneless. Just for the brief period of time between when I was getting back from Portland.
We started off Sunday by going to a Vietnamese bakery and getting some absolutely wonderful pastries! I got a Thai chai as well, which was really good.
Then we went to the Portland Art Museum at the recommendation of that guy from the puppet museum, and because Hannah wanted to see what they had to offer. If you’re planning to go to Portland at any time in the near future, I would actually recommend staying away until they’re finished with renovations in 2024. There were only two exhibits open, both of which were excellent, but we spent less than an hour there for an $18 student ticket, which was disappointing.
That being said, the exhibits were phenomenal – especially the rotating exhibit they have about the new Pinocchio movie, which employed a lot of Portland artists since apparently Portland is the #3 city in the country for puppeteers! Once the construction is done I would definitely love to come back and spend the day here again to see all of their art.
We still wanted to see some museums so we went to the Japanese American Museum of Oregon. I didn’t get a lot of photos because the exhibition subject matter was pretty serious, but I learned a lot and thought they were very powerful. My favorite part of the museum was the hapa.me exhibit, which featured photographs of Japanese Americans accompanied by a small written statement saying who they are and what being Asian American means to them. The photographs were interesting because they had just done another round where new photos were taken 15 years apart after the first round to see how attitudes changed. Below were some of my favorites!
Following the Japanese American Museum, we went to an Indian street festival we just happened to pass by on the way to the museum. We stopped, got lunch there and watched some performances people were doing on stage. It was really cool to have stumbled upon it!
The last thing we did was go to the Portland Japanese Garden, which was really beautiful! When we went it was getting to be later in the evening but it was still pretty busy. They had everything that you would expect from a Japanese garden – a koi pond, a zen gravel garden, bonsai, and even traditional structures fitted together with joints and glue – no nails.
We said our goodbyes at the train station and my phone screen finally output its last pixel. I was a little bit worried about missing my bus back home, but luckily everything worked out and I was able to make it back to North Bend in one piece!
Glacier, WA
My final week of work was spent traveling to nearly the Canadian Border doing Stand Exams (click that link for a 96-page PDF all about stand exams). Essentially, it’s similar to cruising for sales, which I talked about in an earlier blog. We went around various plots and collected data about tree species composition, diameter, height, and seedling/sapling composition of an area. This is important to the zone silviculturist because she needs that data to write thinning prescriptions for future timber sales!
We had about 20 plots to do for the week and we cranked them out pretty quickly. The bunkhouse we stayed in felt like a mental hospital with the setup, but it was what we had to come back to after each day of working.
What was cool about this area is how many mushrooms there were! In North Bend we hardly had any mushrooms the whole season because of how dry it was, but in Glacier they were all over the place. There were also a TON of slugs and cool flowers and plants. What I thought was cool is that we stumbled on a lot of ghost pipe, which is a non-photosynthetic plant that grows at the bases of trees.
The highlight of the week was discovering a bush craft shelter in the middle of one of our plots. It was super creepy to stumble across but once we realized that it was abandoned we felt a little better about exploring around it.
So that was my last week in Washington! It’s been a wild ride, but I will definitely be back next year to learn more about the Pacific North West. I made a lot of good friends while out there and I can’t wait to be back! It’s sad to see it go by so quickly.
When I got back to North Bend to pack, there was a gorgeous sunset to greet me and it felt like the end credits scene of a movie- definitely a good sendoff for a wonderful summer!
Stay tuned for my week-long road trip back east. It was really scenic and I got a lot of pictures!
Mushrooms and Arches 
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