We decided to stay one more week in Long Beach. We like this RV park, with its easy access to the beach. The sites are rather narrow, but it's quiet and pretty and suits us well.
We discovered that Clark's bronze tree sculpture is just down the road from the RV park and went in search of it. From a distance the tree certainly looked quite real. There is a path to the tree that sits atop a dune at the north end of the 8.3-mile Discovery Trail along the ocean. Here is the link to a wikipedia information on Clark's Tree:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark%27s_Tree
Long Beach is the western-most point reached by the expedition. Captain Clark's diary entry on November 19, 1805 states that he "proceeded on a small sandy coast 4 miles and marked my name on a small pine, the day of the month and year..."
This part of the world is also cranberry country. We visited the Cranberry Museum and working cranberry farm. Cranberries have been growing in Washington since 1883. There are 8,000 acres of cranberries on the west coast grown in Bandon and Seaside, Oregon; Long Beach and Grayland, Washington; and southern British Columbia. Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Quebec account for an additional 42,000 acres of commercial cranberries.
I didn't realize there are over 200 varieties of these little acrid berries. However only 10 varieties are produced commercially. Pilgrim and Stevens are the most popular West Coast varieties. A good yield is 20,000 pounds per acre. That's a lot of tiny red berries.
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| cranberry fields with drainage ditches |
We took a stroll through the middle of the farm and saw the growing berries.
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| ripening berries |
Most of us are familiar with the advertisement for Ocean Spray, father and son up to their thighs in water with cranberries bobbing around them. Cranberries do not, however, grow in water though they do require adequate water for irrigation, frost protection and harvesting. This perennial wetland vine thrives in sandy or peat soils and can produce for 100 years or more.
The quaint museum with a gift shop was worth the stop. The informative displays in the museum section gave a good overview of the harvesting and sorting process. I was struck that despite the innovations made over the decades, the process remains just as labor intensive today. It certainly gave me a new appreciation for cranberries and what goes into growing and producing them.
The museum had several displays of old equipment used for harvesting and sorting. Once this was state-of-the-art machinery though even today the method has not changed very much.
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| suction pickers |
The suction picker introduced in the mid 1940's operates like a vacuum cleaner, sucking the berries off the vines into bags or boxes. Though replaced by more efficient Furford pickers and water beaters, some are still used in Grayland to pick along bog railways.
The Furford dry harvest picker was first introduced by Julius Furford of Grayland in 1956. Berries are lifted into conveyor trays and dropped into a burlap bag between the handles. These cranberry "mowers" are still manufactured in Grayland, Washington at Furford Manufacturing, and sell new for $8,500.
West Coast growers produce an estimated 1 million, 100-lb barrels of commercial cranberries annually, accounting for 25 percent of the nation's total crop. Washington contributes 200,000 barrels, Oregon 300,000 barrels, and British Columbia 500,000 barrels.
Ocean Spray, a grower-owned cooperative, is the country's largest purchaser of cranberries. At Ocean Spray most of each year's crop is stored in 12,000 pound tote bins and frozen in large freezers. Much of the rest is cooked and processed as a sauce for the traditional demand around Thanksgiving and Christmas, while a small amount is packaged and sold as fresh fruit. During the rest of the year, juice and sauce are made from frozen berries.
We enjoyed a cranberry ice-cream treat from the little store that is well stocked with everything cranberry, from edible treats and relishes, to candles and kitchen towels with cranberry motifs. The ice cream was of course sweetened and combined with other juice flavors.
Another day, we drove the 19 miles to Astoria, across the mouth of the Columbia River and over the 4.1-mile bridge again.
The Astoria-Megler bridge is quite an icon, and a planning and an engineering feat that took many decades to materialize. Construction only began in 1962 and the bridge opened in 1966, thus completing highway 101 as an unbroken link between the Canadian and Mexican borders. Designed by William A. Burgee, it is the longest three-span, continuous cantilever, through-truss bridge in the world, and one of 20 historic bridges along Oregon's Coastal Highway 101.
Prior to bridge construction, travel across the Columbia between Oregon and Washington was by ferry. Back in 1840, Astoria's first school teacher, Solomon Smith, lashed two canoes together and began ferrying passengers and cargo across the river. Years later, as the number of motorized vehicles traveling through Astoria increased, so did the demand for a reliable ferry service. In 1921 Captain Fritz Elfving established the first commercial ferry service and in 1946 operational control was taken over by the department of transportation after the state of Oregon purchased his company.
Ferry service was not ideal because it was slow, expensive, and ferries did not run in bad weather. The four-and-a-half-mile round trip took at least an hour in good weather. Passengers often had a long wait since the boats could only take a limited number of vehicles on board.
There were several attempts between 1932 and and 1953 to discuss plans to build a bridge across the mouth of the Columbia River. Preliminary engineering reports were that it would be too difficult. During WWII there were further fears that the bridge project would block the river entrance at a time when the Columbia played a vital role in the war effort. Finally in 1957 the Oregon and Washington legislatures appropriated funds to prepare plans, and in 1961 both legislatures agreed to joint funding of the project.
Engineers faced several unique design challenges. The bridge would have to withstand storms with winds raging up to 150 mph. Additionally the concrete piers would have to withstand a river flood speed of 9 mph, powerful enough to sweep whole clumps of trees down the river during floods.
Concrete foundation piers were floated and sunk carefully to the river bottom and filled with concrete. Construction crews built whole sections of the steel superstructure on barges 90 miles upstream in Vancouver, Washington. Tugboats brought the barges to the site and an assembly crew carefully lifted the pieces into place with giant hydraulic jacks. Finally, 1,356 days after construction began, the bridge was ready.
Initially cars paid a toll to cover the building costs. The first year, 206,216 vehicles crossed the bridge. By 1993, 1.6 million vehicles a year were making the crossing, and the toll was removed with the final payoff of the bonds.
Today, about 7,500 cars a day cross the 4.1-mile Astoria-Megler bridge, once dubbed "the bridge to nowhere" by critics.
This is a great photo courtesy of wikimedia, showing the ascent from Astoria towards Washington:
We toured the popular Astoria Column located on Coxcomb Hill and climbed the 164 steps to breath-taking views. In a 360-degree radius, we could view the city, the surrounding rivers, the bay, forests and today even Mt St Helen's flattened top to the east.
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| 125 ft high, and 164 steps winding to the top |
I learned that the Astoria Column is the final monument in a series of 12 historical markers erected in the early 1900's between St Paul, Minnesota and Astoria, Oregon. A pet project of Ralph Budd, the president of the Midwest-based Great Northern Railroad, the column honors Astoria's explorers and early settlers for their role in the United States' westwards discovery and migration.
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| spiraling historical motifs |
Vincent Astor, great grandson of businessman John Astor whose fur traders settled Astoria and for whom Astoria is named, provided support and funding for the project.
Italian immigrant artist, Attilo Pusterla, expert in bas-relief technique called sgraffito, decorated the exterior with 22 significant historical events from the region. Starting at the base with the American Indians, each event is depicted in a mural in an ascending spiral ending at the top with the arrival of the pioneers and railroad in the 1880's. The length of the the artwork unwound would measure more than 500 feet.
In July 1926 the dedication of the column was celebrated with a 3-day celebration. Today, over 400,000 annual visitors come to view the column, climb the 164 steps to the viewing platform at the top, some of whom enjoy releasing balsa wood planes purchased at the gift shop. Excited onlookers enjoy watching how long the planes remain airborne during their descent.
The panoramic sweep from the top was spectacular. It gave a great overview of the enormous size of the mouth of the Columbia River, and the extent of the expanse of the bridge span across it.
To the west we had a great view of the Youngs and Lewis and Clark Rivers.
This panorama shows the mouth of the Columbia, and the full expanse of the Warrenton and Astoria-Meglar bridges.
There is another monument on this site, a tribute to Comcomly, a chief of the Chinook tribe, well respected and known to Lewis and Clark, the founding fathers of Astoria, and the Hudson's Bay fur traders.
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| a burial canoe, and monument in memory of Chief Comcomly, 1765- 1839 |
Here are several more interesting facts we read about the column:
Beach walks are always enjoyable and interesting. It appears that this spot is a Dungeness crab carapace deposit. The gulls have a grand time. I saw a washed up seal one morning. Michael saw a stingray another morning.
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| Dungeness crab shell |
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| seaweed |
This is kite flying territory and there are numerous kite flying competitions held along the coast. On this walk we watched a couple having fun with their differently shaped kites.
This 28-mile long beach is wide and flat and easy to walk. Cars are allowed on the beach which is considered to be a highway (and which I find quite strange and also amusing).
Dunes have shifted and the shoreline has grown over the decades. The jetties at the mouth of the Columbia River were built to narrow the channel to increase the flow rate of the river out to the ocean. This faster flow kept the silt in suspension and helped to keep the shipping channel free by carrying the silt out to sea. Ocean waves then deposited the silt on beaches north of the river mouth, all along the Long Beach Peninsula. In addition, non-native grasses brought in to control dunes along the Oregon coast have migrated north to Washington beaches, holding the new silt deposits in place as new beachfront. The Breakers, a resort that was situated a few steps from the breaking waves a century ago, is now a quarter mile from the ocean.
Sunsets are always spectacular over the ocean.
We passed the week pleasantly. Home chores got accomplished with time on our hands. Michael was able to finally get to some maintenance items he has not had time for these past months. He also installed a new LED light in the dining area. It not only offers more light but we are also less likely to hit our heads as with the previous fixture, and we happen to like the more modern stream-lined look. The new light also now has an accompanying new dimmer switch.
I set up the embroidery machine and completed a few projects. It's been a long while since I had the digitizing software up and running. It takes me a while to get my "digitizing feet" back again and for my brain to remember the steps. I must say that I am glad I have the embroidery unit on board with me. It adds a fun dimension to my sewing.
Tomorrow we head on to Grayland, Washington, further north along the coast. Our Escapees chapter is conveniently having a rally nearby and we are joining them. That is the real bonus of being flexible and being able to move your home to different locations. So far full-timing is working out quite well for us.
