Back roads and weathered wood

I guess we were feeling restless and in need of a real road trip. Winter snows have yet to arrive so we headed north on Highway 97.

The idea was to follow this major arterial to the Columbia River Gorge and then wander backroads south along the east side of the Cascades – the more desolate the better.

The photographic target for this journey … abandoned buildings and weathered wood.

With no set destination our wandering led us to the discovery of the day … an old Catholic Cemetery with headstones dating back to the mid – 1800s.

The settling and re-settling of rural Oregon is most evident along the small state routes. Roads connect names on a map where the main structure of commerce is a grain elevator.

Once you climb out of the gorge there’s an expanse of furrowed fields with sprouts of winter wheat in perfect rows. These rolling hills of grain fields get broken by gashes cut in by seasonal creek beds. The road follows nature’s contours with minimal engineering.

There are trip planners on the Internet leading to ghost towns. In Oregon, agriculture and mining are featured as the driving forces in the creation of these markers to progress and shifts in the state’s economy. A large number of these spots are in Central Oregon.

Dufer, 20 minutes south of The Dalles, was once at the heart of an apple growing mecca.

Our research suggested this as a good area for photographic explorations. Aging wooden structures holding granaries and mills, as well as rural schools dot the area.

We toured roads named for mills, markets and local farms, as well as the slightly racist “Japanese Hollow” where we found an abandoned schoolhouse in a cow pasture.

Turning up fifteen mile road, which is more like sixteen miles up OR 197 from it’s junction with I-84, we were treated to postcard views of Mt Hood. The focus of this leg was to locate the old general store in the town of Friend. Unfortunately, it was closed to outsiders. I guess there was no friendliness to be found in Friend.

We climbed up the lower eastern foothills of the Cascades and onto the Warm Springs Reservation. Here we caught more great snow capped images and a well weathered stock corral before dropping back down into the Deschutes River gorge and reconnecting with Highway 97 and the trip home.