Day 3 and Day 4

[olivermoss]

Day 3:

I did some hiking! I did the one trail that was sort of navigable. It was still pretty icy in parts and hadn't had maintenance in a while, but at least I could handle it. It was the trail along the North side of the lake.



You can see the ice on the trail. A challenge at times, but I could do it.



My camera bag hung on branch as I navigated some downed trees.

Day 4:

I tried to drive to Davis Lake. The road was closed. I went out to yet another ranger station and she had no info on any open trails.

If you look at a map of Oregon, you can see the long swatch of green along the Pacific Crest. It looks like one forest. It's owned by a variety of agencies and legally it's many forests. It's handled in all these tiny little sections and ranger stations often don't have info on trails or areas literally five minutes from them. They might not recognize the name of a campground that, again, is literally 5 minutes away by car. It's like a joke from a cartoon or something, but real.

The ranger had one suggestion: Shelter Cove was open. It's also on Lake Odell and is a National Forest Service run property like where I was staying. Some trails start from that lodge. Even if the trails were closed, I'd get a different view of the lake I was staying on. That sounded like I plan, so I headed out.

They didn't maintain their road at all. Not a drop of sand or anything. I turned off and it looked like this:


Since it was narrow and big trucks were zooming in the other direction, I was sort of stuck going down the road until I could get a good turn around. Even without trucks, a K turn is a recipe for getting stranded on a road like this. I wound up driving the two miles down. Shelter Cove was cute and had a coffee shop! I saw that it had lovely views, then took a second to collect myself and drive right back out. It was raining and the temp was dropping. That's pretty much a recipe for bad things. To the lake was all down hill, back was all up on a sheet of ice being raining on as the air fell to about freezing.

Somehow, I didn't have a single moment of tire slippage. I don't know how much was the car, the fancy new winter tires and how much was my own driving skill, but I'll take it. After that I just retired back to my lodge for the rest of the day.

Comments

[velithya]

I consider myself a pretty good driver but one thing that Australia has not prepared me for is snow/ice on the roads. I just, have no idea of how best to tackle those kinds of driving conditions because I've literally never encountered them before. The above picture of the road just looks terrifying to me because I can't tell whether that's slush or ice or what (whereas you can clearly identify it at a glance) and it all just looks like a lot of sliding death to me. I am very glad that you got back to your lodge safely!!

[olivermoss]

That is literally ice at least an inch thick being rained on. It was solid. The top was bumpy in places and I felt the bumps. You have to control momentum super carefully and if you stop, you might not re-start. That is why I had to drive all 4 miles. A K turn was pretty much asking for doom.

[sperrywink]

Wow, that road is ice!! I'm glad you made it to and fro safely!

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it was a whole thing. I'd kinda like to explore Shelter Cover at some point, except for the fact that I never want to drive along 58 again.