For the ultimate in creepy beautiful...
Drive to the forest.
Make sure it's good and green...
... the kind of place where an elf or ogre might appear if your back is turned too long.
Wait for dusk to fall heavily upon the land, wiping out the sky.
Orient yourself. Look around for a bridge perhaps straight out of Middle Earth, or an entire galaxy of water plummeting onto rocks of ice.
Then...
Climb.
It will get dark. Keep going.
The mist will swallow up the world. Keep going.
Eventually- if nothing out there steals you away- you will reach the top.
Human technology, however, will not be able to compete against the powerful forces of the natural world.
This will be your final record of that journey.
Wait...
I'm just playing with you. It is just Oregon, after all.
There won't be orcs and gremlins. There will be families.
There will be cottages blown up to the sizes of mansions.
There will be brightly-dressed tourists not wanting to disappear into the gloom.
There will be tourists taking pictures, maybe even for their own blog : )
And more tourists.
There will be a moment when you think you've escaped the crowd-
-but only a moment.
At least in the crowds there will be people of all nations (this girl was speaking Russian!).
Because this is a state of rain, there will be rain, in some way, shape, or form.
There will be a young park ranger in his green jacket, shoveling slabs of ice, for which you and everyone else will be immensely grateful.
There will be eleven long and torturous switchbacks...
...during which you constantly lag behind what you once thought of as your significant other but now understand is some kind of eastern-European, hill-climbing cyborg.
There will come a time when you realize it's time to give up and go find some cheesecake.
To which the cyborg cheerfully replies- but we're almost there!
Almost.
Well, forty and a half hours later you finally get there.
And even though the world is shrouded in white and there's nothing to see, it's all been worth it.
PS: For more of this waterfall, go here.
Drive to the forest.
Make sure it's good and green...
Wait for dusk to fall heavily upon the land, wiping out the sky.
Orient yourself. Look around for a bridge perhaps straight out of Middle Earth, or an entire galaxy of water plummeting onto rocks of ice.
Then...
...enter the forest.
Climb.
It will get dark. Keep going.
The mist will swallow up the world. Keep going.
Eventually- if nothing out there steals you away- you will reach the top.
Human technology, however, will not be able to compete against the powerful forces of the natural world.
This will be your final record of that journey.
Wait...
I'm just playing with you. It is just Oregon, after all.
There won't be orcs and gremlins. There will be families.
There will be cottages blown up to the sizes of mansions.
There will be brightly-dressed tourists not wanting to disappear into the gloom.
There will be tourists taking pictures, maybe even for their own blog : )
And more tourists.
There will be a moment when you think you've escaped the crowd-
-but only a moment.
At least in the crowds there will be people of all nations (this girl was speaking Russian!).
Because this is a state of rain, there will be rain, in some way, shape, or form.
There will be a young park ranger in his green jacket, shoveling slabs of ice, for which you and everyone else will be immensely grateful.
There will be eleven long and torturous switchbacks...
...during which you constantly lag behind what you once thought of as your significant other but now understand is some kind of eastern-European, hill-climbing cyborg.
There will come a time when you realize it's time to give up and go find some cheesecake.
To which the cyborg cheerfully replies- but we're almost there!
Almost.
Well, forty and a half hours later you finally get there.
And even though the world is shrouded in white and there's nothing to see, it's all been worth it.
PS: For more of this waterfall, go here.
Really beautiful. We miss Oregon!
ReplyDeleteIt is definitely a beautiful state!
DeleteWhen I was writing this post, I was looking at online pictures of waterfalls in Ukraine, because it struck me that we never saw any waterfalls there. It looks like a lot of them are in the Carpathian region. Have you guys ever made it there to check any of them out?
Whoa! How beautiful! Too bad there are such big crowds though. Ah well, that's the price of awesome, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteHi Polly! Looking at pictures of the place in summer (think Moscow metro), this was actually a tiny, bad-weather, too-late-in-the-day crowd. We lucked out : )
Delete