Читать книгу Oregon, the Picturesque. A Book of Rambles in the Oregon Country and in the Wilds of Northern California онлайн

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If the hotels along our route averaged quite moderate in charges, the garages did their best to even things up; gasoline is, indeed, a precious fluid in this country, prices ranging from thirty to fifty cents per gallon. We paid the latter figure only once, but thirty-five and forty cents was quite common and lubricating oil was at least fifty per cent above the San Francisco price. When one recalls that in many of these towns supplies have to come by motor truck for long distances, perhaps these high prices are justified. Garage charges for our car ran from fifty to seventy-five cents per night. Fortunately, we are not able to speak from experience as to the cost of repair work, but the average garage seemed very well equipped to take care of anything in this line.

As we have already intimated, only an inconsiderable mileage of the roads covered by our tour has as yet been improved. Most of the counties that we traversed in Northern California and Oregon are vast in extent and but thinly populated. For instance, Lassen and Modoc Counties in California have respectively 4531 and 3823 square miles, with a population of 4802 for the former and 6191 for the latter named. Some of the Oregon counties would not show so great a population in proportion to their area. It would be folly to expect such sparsely inhabited communities, entirely without large cities, to be able to match the great bond issues of the counties of Central and Southern California. They have done much, everything considered, but so vast are the distances and so great the engineering difficulties that the main effort has been to keep the present roads in passable condition rather than to build new ones. A veteran motorist told me that he had covered a good part of these northern roads several years ago and that in going over them a second time recently he could not note any great improvement. Better bridges have been built and the surfacing improved in places, but little has been done to widen the roads or to eliminate the heavy grades. If fine highways with moderate gradients and curves ever penetrate these natural fastnesses, the state will have to do the work.