Road trip

This morning neighbors Carol & Merle called asking if we'd like to take a drive over the mountains to Agness.  We've never done that 'hairy' drive so knew it would be fun, and Merle is such a good driver there were no worries on my part riding along those narrow, no guard rail, mountain roads.

This is not terribly far up from where we live. The brown is part of the remnants of last year's big forest fire that was close to us.

 

Here's a better photo of that section of the fire area - it was ravaged by the fire - such steep dangerous terrain for the fire fighters to work.

This is the infamous Bear Camp Coastal Route sign near where the Kim family got stuck in the snow and the husband perished trying to walk out to save his family. Personally I've never understood why they tried to drive this way to the coast even if their GPS told them it was a route. After starting up in elevation and quickly running into snow I would have turned around rather than to go even higher into the mountains into deeper snow. There are signs on the road leading to our place warning against taking Bear Camp Rd. but the Kim's must not have seen them, or had turned off the road before seeing them.......I've always seen them starting fall through spring. Very sad incident.

We live just off the right lower corner of the map to the right of Galice - today we drove all along the coastal route to Agness on the far left of the map.

Here's another view of part of the fire area from the pullout spot where the map is - it's immense.

This was just a nice overlook we stopped at - I loved the stone wall. We were at around 4700 ft in elevation here - warm but much cooler than the 101 in the valley.

Loved this flag painted on that stone wall.

 

And really loved the smiley sheep dog/poodle mix dog we met there.....

 

....and his smiley sister.

 

Here we've finally gone past the fire area and are into the coast side of the mountain range - much greener than our side of the range.

Finally to Agness where we had lunch at a seasonal restaurant that caters to rafters who come out from their 3 day trip down the Rogue River. There's a tiny little post office in Agness that gets it's mail from the mailboat that comes up daily from Gold Beach on the coast. We've ridden along the mailboat twice - very fun riding the jet boat up river through the more wild areas than the river here on our side of the mountains.

Heading back home after a lovely day - I couldn't get a good picture (without falling off the cliff) but the Illinois River comes into the Rogue River at this spot.

It was nice to escape the brutal heat for around 7 hours today, no escaping it this week, temps of up to 107 expected. Since I will be spending time in the air conditioning I'm hoping to get some fun projects worked on.