Oregon
September 21st, 2008
After Hood River I checked out Mount Hood and did some mountain biking at the Mount Hood Ski Bowl resort across from the mountain itself. Despite the fact that there was a fire burning on Hood, the side I was looking at was still very visible and awesome. It looks like a fun one to climb, but as with Rainier this high point is 
going to have to wait until I have some climbing partners. The ride was short since I was tired from Adams, and afterward I went in search for Bagby Hot Springs form a little R&R. I got lost lost lost in the maze of forest service roads looking for the springs. Worse, the van I’m driving started to act up, losing power from time to time. This is a little unnerving when you’re almost two hours from anywhere in the middle of Oregon. The van made it though and I DID find Bagby by the end.
Bagby is a strange hot spring to me. It’s free like most undeveloped hot springs… but it’s actually pretty developed. There’s a complex system of wooden tubs and pools and it completely lacks the archetypal rock pools. There 
are actually private rooms with big tubs carved out of logs. I read that normally there is a line for these private tubs but the springs was pretty deserted so I claimed one easily. The hot water pours right out of a trough into the tub, but you have to go get cold water with a bucket to regulate temperature. All in all the springs was cool (and unique) but I think I prefer the rock pools.
Finally I rolled into Portland for the night. I met up with some friends from college and, since it was Friday night in what may be the Microbrew Capital of the World, we headed out. They took me to a really cool place called the Kennedy School. It’s an old school (middle or high?) that has been renovated and converted into a hotel/restaurant/bar/theater complex. 
The company, McMenamins, does this sort thing a lot I guess. The place was amazing! There were maybe six bars (Detention, Honors, The Boiler Room… all school themed), you could eat in the theater (which shows cheap movies), and it was fun to walk around the halls of the school. After a couple of microbrews there we bounced to one other bar, the Laurelwood Public House, for a couple of final drinks. While not the big guys like Rogue and Bridgeport, it was great to try some beers I wouldn’t have otherwise.
The next day I rode my bike around the trails north of Portland a little, picked up a “Growwwwler” at the Rogue brewpub (and sampled their vast and savory selection of beers), and headed to the Blackrock freeride area to test my mountain biking mettle. (It turns out my mettle is weak.) The place was awesome. It was full of that North Shore stuff 
you see in the movies. Huge drops, big jumps, tall ladders… everything. It was horrifying. Whereas I usually ride black diamonds at ski resort bike parks… at this place the green circle runs were all I could handle. The easy runs had 8ft high ladders and 2ft drops! It was great to work on my skills. The runs were fun but my favorite part was the “training area” at the bottom with jumps of all sized you could lap. I even caught a free ride up on the shuttle truck! I wish there was a place like this close to Bozeman. Anyway after Blackrock I realized I was running out of time for all the things I wanted to do in California and saddled up for the long drive out of Oregon.
[...] afterall, Bridger Bowl has been hurting for snow, and it looked like a lot of fun to ski when I visited last summer, so it was the only thing to do. There are three main resorts on Hood: Mount Hood Meadows, [...]