Wind Mountain

Portland has been sunny and awesome since I got back a few days ago and it is hard to be inside. Yesterday, I worked from a local restaurant fast-food chain that serves items made with locally grown ingredients (yes, you read that right) and has wi-fi and today I spent the day working from a coffee-house with awesome views in a pretty neighborhood called Ladd's Addition (I really like that name, perhaps a band name? there must already be one I would guess....) Everything was going great until I ate an artichoke and white bean "savory tartlet" for lunch at about 2:30. By about 5 o'clock, I was at home throwing up in the bathroom--and of course that means someone else's bathroom because I don't have one. Sometimes the joys of minimalism mean one has to do disgusting things one would normally only do in the privacy of one's own home in other people's homes. Not really a drawback, now that I think about it....
Anyway, before suffering at the hand of a savory tartlet, which I am sure has happened to everyone at some point or another (either literally, metaphorically, or in my case, culinarily), I was busy basking in the glow of life in Portland. Happiness does not make for interesting blogging, I realize that, but it is just so fantastic to be living in a place where hiking up a mountain can be done with almost no real effort. At 4 pm yesterday afternoon I drove 20 miles up the Columbia River Gorge (which is a National Scenic Area and deserves to be), crossed over the river on the Bridge of the Gods (which is an apt name for a gorgeous crossing), puttered up through some backroads of rural Washington state, parked my car, and started hoofing it up a beautiful unmarked, unpopulated trail, and wallah-- my first NW summit was in the bag. It was a beautiful little walk and the first of many. Here I am at the top with a self-satisfied grin that can only be gotten from climbing uphill, and here is the vista facing east looking up into the gorge. The gorge was formed, in part, by the Missoula floods, a periodic series of gigantic floods caused by the breakage of a massive 2000 ft tall ice dam towards the end of the last ice age. The floods are of significant interest to historians and geologists because of the rapidity with which the gushing water flowed through the valleys and the major geological formations that resulted rather quickly, at least compared to the rate that most geological change occurs. I will post more as I learn about the area, but for now it is just a geological wink--a small summit, on a beautiful afternoon, with a great view.