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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And so it happened with us and we found ourselves scanning with no small degree of interest and anticipation maps of the vast mountain-studded country stretching from San Francisco to the Columbia River. We had met infrequent motorists who had penetrated parts of this comparatively unfamiliar region and their tales were enough to arouse our curiosity and to intensify our desire to explore these virgin fastnesses of shining lakes, vast forests, and rugged hills, but the contemplation of such an undertaking caused us some uneasiness and misgiving, we are free to confess.

Here one will not find a system of smooth, well-engineered boulevards, but is confronted by a series of widely dissevered mountain trails which climb long, laborious grades or creep along precipitous slopes, deep with dust in late summer and stony and rough at all times. Indeed, many of the roads we planned to traverse are closed by snowdrifts during the greater part of the year and the preferable time for touring is from July to September inclusive. Later, one may encounter the first showers of the rainy season—as it happened with ourselves—and many of these mountain grades are described as “impassable” in wet weather. One of our informants told us of his harrowing experience in passing a night in his car on a slippery grade of the so-called Pacific Highway in Oregon until daylight and a cessation of the shower made it possible to proceed. He completed his drive to Portland but shipped his car back to San Francisco by steamer—no one but a fool, he said, would wish to drive both ways over such a road.