I’ll get to the title of this page in just a minute, but to understand the context, you have to have some sense of the landscape with which we were dealing.

One of the many joys of this job is that we get to go to beautiful vacation spots that you might not chose as an actual vacation destination, because of  distance etc.  Well, the Columbia River Gorge, through which we drove to get to Lewiston from Florence, is one of these places.  Unlike the mountains around Portland, which are typical of the west coast (huge, craggy, rocky, and covered with evergreens), those abutting the gorge are like none we’ve ever seen.  They are just as gigantic, but are covered with grass, almost like mountainous prairie, except for the towering cliff faces that line the river.  The gorge itself is miles wide... I really can’t give an accurate account of the scale, but the river seemed to me at least a kilometer across.  After about a hundred miles or so, we came out of the gorge into pure mountain territory; same grassland, and scale, but with no cliffs, and hardly a tree in sight.

This terrain was continuous all the way to Lewiston, and it is important to keep this in mind when I relate what happened after we left there the day after the concert.  Because of the grassland that covers the mountains, it is easy to underestimate the scale; the mountains, in fact, are genuine mountains, not just large hills.  In other words, they are huge, a fact we forgot to take into account.

According to the road map, there is a cutoff that looked to save us about 45 minutes driving, since the main road makes a big loop to the north, west, and then south finally into Oregon.  We knew it went through the mountains, but the map portrayed it as a good road, so no problem.... right!

About half an hour out of Lewiston, Jim suddenly called out “Here it comes; let’s take it!”  I wasn’t quite convinced it was a good idea, but I’m a bit of a stick-in-the-mud about sudden changes like this; not to appear overly conservative, I said “Uh... sure... why not?”  So, we turned left (east) and started up the road... and I mean up.

Actually, it wasn’t so bad at this point.  We drove along, gently going up the whole time, for about half an hour, and given that there were mountains on both sides of the road, and that that road was in good condition, it looked like we’d made the right decision.

Well, what goes up must come down.  Suddenly, we rounded a corner, the mountains on the passenger (my!) side disappeared, and literally out of the blue, a huge panorama stretched out in front of us that took our breaths away.  We must have been able to see for hundreds of miles.  It was at this point that the pavement ended.

We found ourselves on a slippery gravel road with no guard rail on the passenger side.  When I looked out the passenger window, I was staring straight down into a canyon, at the bottom of which was what I thought to be a tiny winding river.  Very quickly, I realized that the “tiny river” was the very road we were driving on, and that I was staring into a shear drop of about a quarter of a mile.  Because of the narrowness of the road and the lack of a guard rail, we couldn’t turn the car around, so we had no choice but to go on.  We both thanked the gods that we’d rented a 4X4, because it had rained the night before, the surface was slippery, and to top it all off, the road coiled like a serpent with a descending grade of about 30 degrees!  Jim drove the whole way down at about 10 miles and hour with his foot never leaving the brake.  The view really was spectacular, but I got vertigo every time I looked down out the passenger window.

After one of the longest 30 minutes of our lives, we got down to the bottom of the canyon only to realize that we had, in fact, taken the wrong road (the one we wanted was about two miles past the one we took) and that we’d headed south instead of east!  As a result of this “shortcut”, we added almost an hour to our drive back to Portland and we had little time to spare when we finally arrived at the airport.  Actually, even though it cost us time, we’re glad it worked out the way it did.  It scared the you-know-what out of us, but it was something not to be missed... or repeated, needless to say!

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