to Gold Beach, Oregon 14 August 2014 : Caspar Institute

The first day on the road out from Caspar cannot help but be beautiful. The road to Portland starts out through more than a hundred miles of Redwoods, past the Avenue of the Giants, the Headwaters Reserve, site of a pitched battle between greed-heads and greens, a dozen miles from the tallest living thing on the planet. At one point, here at Prairie Creek Redwoods, the 101 freeway heads east to avoid the big trees, but old Highway 101 is preserved in its two-lane splendor, winding between 300 foot, 1800-year-old trees. In the image at right, that's a car and a person on the road. These trees are unthinkably big.

Newton B Drury Parkway through Redwood National Park

Past the Redwoods, over the Oregon border, 101 runs beside the Pacific. We roll to a stop at the mouth of the Rogue River, in Gold Beach. The Beach right in front of our room is mostly sand, with the best selection of pebbles imaginable: quartz, agate, granite, sandstone. When the waves retreat, you hear the pebbles working.

Sienna is with us on this leg of the trip -- the pictures on this panel are hers, and those are her cute pink wedding-ready toesies.