Pacific NW: day 5
This post is part 5 of the "pacific_nw_2008" series:
The last day before going home was a bit of an adventure. We got out of Portland before 7AM, and started heading south east towards Crater Lake National Park. The day before we had left for the trip (June 27) we learned that the campground where we had made reservations in Crater Lake was still closed due to snow. So we ended up juggling our plans & itinerary a bit. There were no other open campgrounds within the park, and the nearest campground outside the park was almost an hour's drive north. So we decided to eliminate nearly all the activities that we had planned, and cut it back to a scenic drive through the park, and then continue south the same day to Oregon Caves National Monument.
The drive down to Crater Lake was uneventful, and actually quite scenic. We got to the park just after 10AM, and got our first look at the lake. It was quite beautiful, although there was a ton of haze in the air, which reduced overall visibility rather significantly. Regardless, the water was still a very deep blue, and the remaining snow around the perimeter of the crater made it especially scenic.
Just after lunch, we left Crater Lake for the 85 mile drive southwest to Oregon Caves. The route that Google gave us looked relatively simple on paper, but turned out to be a complete nightmarish disaster. Take a good look at that route, especially everything after step 18. The route up through I-5/Grants Pass was slow going, but relatively uneventful, however everything after Grants Pass was horrific. Apparently Google Maps is incapable of distinguishing between real, maintained, paved roads, and mountainous, dirt/gravel, 4x4 forest service trails. We were semi-low on gas when we got off of I-5 in Grants Pass (the car's computer claimed that I had about 120 miles of driving left before hitting empty), but I figured that I'd just fill-up at the first gas station that we reached on my side of the road. Oddly, there were none until around step 15. At that point, I was hovering around 110 miles of gas left. So I pulled into this gas station, drove up to a pump and sat there and waited. Oregon has this retarded law that only a paid gas-station attendant is allowed to pump gas, so there's no such thing as self-service. The gas-station was moderately busy, with only 1 attendant, who was this burly, mountain-man looking dude who was far more interested in goofing off with his friends, than actually doing his job. We weren't the only people waiting for service, there were at least 2 other cars sitting and waiting too. After sitting there for 5 minutes, and getting no attention, we gave up, and pulled back onto the road. I foolishly assumed that there would be more gas-stations along the route, and since I still had theoretically 110 miles of gas left, with less than 50 miles before reaching our destination (at least according to the map), it never occurred to me that there would be any problems.
Oh, what a fool I was. Starting with step 19, we turned onto a BLM (Bureau of Land Management, the govt entity that manages the rural, undeveloped parcels of land in this country) Road. This road was still paved, but was very narrow (only 1 car wide in portions), and started to climb, with numerous switchbacks, up the side of a mountain. Of course, driving up a mountain is going to require alot more gas than driving down a mountain, or driving on level road, so the gas consumption rate started to accelerate. I was now at 100 miles of gas left. At this point, I'm starting to get mildly nervous, as its obvious that there's no civilization on this road, and I have no clue how much longer we're going to be climbing up the mountain. We're watching the odometer very closely, since there are basically no road signs either. Some of the side roads (most of which are clearly dead-ends) had 3ft tall posts beside them with a cryptic forest service road number (such as BLM-39-6-36) on them, so all we had to go on for the most part was the mileage that Google told us we needed for each turn.
Step 20 instructed us to turn onto NF-059 at 3.8 miles since the last turn. On queue, there was a side road at exactly 3.8 miles, however it was UNpaved gravel, and the signpost wasn't labeled NF-059, but some other cryptic BLM code. We could see several hundred feet down the road, and there were no other turnoffs, so this almost certainly had to be NF-059, but the fact that it was a dirt/gravel mountain road with no signs confirming that it was NF-059 worried us considerably. We were supposed to be on this road for about 1.5 miles. We agreed that if we drove 2 miles and hadn't yet found the next turn off road, we would turn back. If we were flying down the freeway, that would be less than 2 minutes, but on a rinky dink road like this, it could easily take 30-40 minutes. Also at this point, I'm at 95 miles of gas left. Anyway, we turned onto the road, which started off reasonably ok, but then quickly degraded into rocks the size of baseballs, huge potholes, and a steep hill. I slowed our pace further, but actually bottomed-out the car going over one of the dirt hills, which made a frightening grinding noise. Around the next bend, the road turned into a sheer cliff on one side (and this road was only 1 vehicle wide), with the densely forested valley below, with no signs of civilization anywhere. This looked even uglier.
85 miles of gas left, and we'd driven perhaps only a quarter of a mile in 15 minutes. We agreed that this was going to be suicide, and we had to turn back. Denise got out, and talked me through making a 3 (well, 6 in this case) point u-turn. At point 3, my front tires got stuck in some very loose dirt which was hidden below a pile of dead leaves. Gravity (plus the cliff directly in front of me), allowed me to pull forward a few inches and break free, and finally I completed the u-turn, and drove back up to the paved road. 80 miles of gas left. Thankfully at this point, we were coasting down the mountain, and using very little gas, so the computer got tricked into thinking that we were going to be able to drive forever, and inched up the prediction to 100 miles of gas by the time we got to the first signed intersection. We were back at step 18 on the map.
We had a choice. We could either drive all the way back to Grants Pass, and take US-199 all the way around to the park, or we could attempt to take a different route across the mountains. There was an unnamed road on the Orgeon State Highway Map which appeared to run directly across the mountains to Selma OR, right on US-199, just a few miles north of the turn off to the caves. Denise felt confident that this unnamed road was the Cedar Flats Road which was right in front of us at the time. From where we were sitting, the road looked to be in good condition (paved, marked, signed, two lanes, etc), and we were confident at the time that we had enough gas to get to Selma and US-199. So, down Cedar Flats Road we went. The first couple miles were relatively flat, and easy, and then suddenly the road narrowed, and a forest service sign 'renamed' the road the "Cedar Flats Pass Road". Uhh, 'Pass'? At that point, the road took off up the side of a mountain, and of course, our gas consumption accelerated again. Within a minute, we were back down to 85 miles of gas left, and the road just kept going up, and up and up, with numerous switchbacks.
A few minutes later, still climbing this mountain to the sky, we're down to 75 miles of gas left with no end in sight. If there was any redeeming quality to the road, it was that it was paved, but other than that, we had diminished confidence where it went, and we were running low on fuel. The actual gas tank meter was now at about 1/8 of a tank left, and 1/16 was the red zone. After a few more minutes (and down to 65 miles of gas left), the road started to level out a bit, with fewer switchbacks, and there was a small glimmer of hope that we were going to either reach the top and/or civilization shortly. We reached the summit, only to find an unsigned fork in the road, and the view to the horizon in all directions was nothing but dense forest. We made a wild guess, and took the right fork, and started to climb yet again. 55 miles of gas left.
Thankfully, this ascent was short lived, and we finally started to descend the side of the unknown mountain, on the unknown road, into the unknown forest. Now it was nearly all downhill driving, but apparently we had crossed the point of no-return on the gas, and it wasn't climbing back up, but instead just hovering at 55. At this point, I was starting to seriously fear that we would either end up at a random forest dead end road (and have to back track all the way that we came), or end up at some other fork in the road, and be forced yet again to guess which way to turn, with no clear idea where it lead. I started to make mental plans in my head of running out of gas, having us camp on the road that night (thankfully,we did have all our camping gear + food), and walk out early the next morning to find gas. I seriously doubted that we had sufficient gas to drive back the entire way we came, and after passing numerous side roads, and semi-forks in the road, I honestly wasn't sure that I even knew the way back. However, the road continued to go down hill, so we stuck with it, since at least it used far less gas then going back up. After a few more miles (and down to 50 miles of gas left), a car passed us in the opposite direction. This gave us a glimmer of hope that the road wasn't a dead end (or these people lived on that dead end), and would eventually go somewhere.
We finally reached the bottom of the valley, and passed the first road sign in a very long time that apparently labeled this road as the Deer Creek Road. Of course we still had no clue where we were, as there was no Deer Creek Road on any of our maps, but we continued onward. The road was now mostly flat, and we started to occasionally pass a few signed side roads. Then a car pulled out from one of the side roads a few hundred feet ahead of us, and we decided that we needed to follow this car, even if it took us onto another dead end. It was the first chance of contact with civilization that we had in over an hour of driving. Wherever this person was going, they were driving with purpose, as they were going fast. Our gas was down to 45 miles, but I clung to hope that following them would lead us to something other than camping in the forest that night. After a few more miles, farms and small homes started to crop up along the road, and we grew more confident that we had to be getting closer to some town somewhere. Then there were actual mile markers on the side of the road, and they were counting down! This meant that the Deer Creak Road had to end soon, and hopefully lead to some other signed/named road that took us to a town (hopefully with gas). The markers started off at 10(miles), and mile after mile passed, and finally we got to the end of the road and US-101 in Selma! Denise's hunch was right, and we made it to a real town. Even better, there was an open gas station, and we filled up. \$62 later, we had a full tank, and we were about 30 miles from the caves.
It had occurred to me afterwards, that the Kim family wasn't as fortunate as us, and they actually got lost within about 50 miles of where we were lost. After getting back home, I hunted down the actual route we took from Grants Pass to Selma, and that < maps.google.com maps?f="d&hl=en&geocode=1250509943390780500,42.198759,-123.365311%3B13596482233209571351,42.260684,-123.444428%3B5730029795341405123,42.097452,-123.409964&saddr=Crater+Lake,+OR&daddr=Cedar+Flat+Rd+%4042.198759,+-123.365311+to:Deer+Creek+Rd+%4042.260684,+-123.444428+to:42.278071,-123.613701+to:20000+Caves+Hwy,+Cave+Junction,+OR+97523+(Oregon+Caves+National+Monument)&mra=dpe&mrcr=0&mrsp=3&sz=13&via=1,2,3&sll=42.252028,-123.550701&sspn=0.077762,0.147629&ie=UTF8&ll=42.216059,-123.427277&spn=0.155613,0.295258&z=12"">route</a> was so scary. There were dozens of places on that map where we could have guessed and taken the wrong fork or turn, and ended up on a dead end (after miles of driving), or worse, circled back on ourselves. This was the most lost I've ever been, and it was truly frightening. If we had enough gas, I likely wouldn't have been as concerned, but faced with the possibility of being both lost and stranded in the wilderness was not an enjoyable experience. If there are any lessons to be learned, they are:
* When driving in a non-urban area, be very wary of GoogleMaps (or Mapquest, etc) directions if they lead you on anything other than state or federally numbered roads
* Always fill up on gas before driving on roads that aren't on your map in an unfamiliar area
We reached the caves at about 4:30PM, nearly 3 hours after getting off I-5 in Grants Pass. That means we averaged less than 20 miles/hour. Anyway, we took the 5PM cave tour. The tours are 90 minutes long, and it was a pretty decent sized cave. Much of the cave looked pretty similar to most other caves that I've been in. There was one part where it looked like there were jellyfish swimming above us.
We spent that night camping about 10 miles from the cave along OR-46, at the Country Hills Campground. Overall, it was an ok campground, although the most expensive of the entire trip (\$16/night), and for that price, I kinda expected it to be alot nicer than it was.
This post is part 5 of the "pacific_nw_2008" series: