High Rock

"Resurrectin' memories of a love that's dead and gone..." -- Randy Travis, "Diggin' Up Bones"

At the top of Oregon’s Cascades Range, about fifteen air miles south of Mount Hood, is an old lava plug known as High Rock. There used to be a fire lookout on top of it.

To make a long, long story very short, I had married the woman of my dreams up there, nearly thirty years earlier. I hadn’t seen the place since.

Here is the view from there:

South face of Oregon’s Mt. Hood, as seen from High Rock

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It’s a view that takes your breath away. I parked the RV at the spot where this is the view from the door.

I only spent two nights there, revisiting only a few favorite haunts nearby. One of them was Hideaway Lake:

Campground at Hideaway Lake

It was late September - well past tourist season - and the campground there was almost fully occupied. Not a surprise, because this is only a couple of hours or so from Portland. Here’s another view of the lake:

Hideaway Lake, near High Rock

On that ridge above the lake is another lake in the Roaring River Wilderness. You have to hike in to it, which makes it a bit less busy:

Shellrock Lake, in the Roaring River Wilderness

Hideaway Lake drains into a swamp that gets very picturesque in the fall:

The swamp below Hideaway Lake, in the fall

A stone’s throw away is a historic road known as the Abbot Road, named for an Army engineer that had located a railroad route through these parts (the railroad was never built). I had many adventures on that road too, which ended when part of the road slid out. Now, there is only this cryptic marker:

The notorious Abbott Road.

There were too many memories to revisit in only two nights, but I had a funeral to attend. This, and the visit to the Olallie country (previous Substack post) was definitely the therapy I needed after a summer of cleaning toilets in Paradise.

And, the next day I had finally completed my trek north from Medford, Oregon through the Cascades Range, all the way to the Columbia River, in the motorhome.