OREGON v ARIZONA PT 1: STATE FACE OFF SERIES

Despite news fakery to the contrary, the sun does shine in Oregon. It’s an elusive beam natives flock to like mosquitoes to a zapper.

Not the same in Arizona where people hide in shade half the year, and no mosquitoes.

The trade off is a raincoat or sunscreen, the smart gear every Snowbird packs in their hand-truck/carry-on.

A quick question about the Snowbirds: Do pasty English tourists and Russian tourists fly anywhere but southern Spain?

They ought to trade up to Arizona. No language barrier for half of them and the Spanish part is still there.

Admit it, you want to hear Spanish in a Cockney accent, a Moscow inflected conversation in Spanish. Who wouldn’t?

Between Oregon and Arizona, the line couldn’t be more clear: Leave PDX on a cold cloudy June day for clear bright PHX two hours later.

The return flight tells it all by dipping into gradient cloud banks shading from blinding white to threatening gray ten minutes before touch down.

Ninety degrees at ten a.m. to sixty in two hours.

The weather report always ends with Arizona – hot, Oregon – wet and cold.

So, what do they have in common?

Visitors to either state need plans to fight off boredom attacks, the sort of soul-crushing boredom that lurks like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus on a tour bus.

After you get on, get off, and climb back in the fifth time, tourist mrsa sets in. You find yourself with another ‘been there, done that, got the t-shirt’ infection.

Instead of milling around with the rest of the tour, you’re already seat locked.

Enough of the Arizona Grand Canyon?

Yes, it’s grand if two billion years of history layered in flood originated soil horizons helps your grip on science. If staring hard into the doomed past doesn’t frighten you. Why should it, you ask?

Face it, layers of dirt with dinosaurs probably means there’s a layer reserved for you.

To cut hysteria inducing terror, or encourage a lemming movement, the park map lists a trail named Bright Angel. There it is after kicking my butt. Now you know where to walk.

But you won’t and you don’t know why. Instead you look past your reflection in the bus window to a parking lot full your peers like a memory care ad.

One half poses and takes pictures, the other focus on their phones.

Oregon’s Happy Columbia Gorge

Every stop on the old highway features a kick-ass waterfall. Instead of a blue dribble of water a mile into the earth like the Grand Canyon, you get a negative ion rush.

Give rivers their due, but a distant river is no better than a jet stream. Adventurous souls need more.

Here, you’re drawn out of the bus, across the road, and up a set of short steps. You hear it before you see it, before you stand in front of the mountain-carving dynamic of water.

You could stay right here for hours, and should, but more waterfalls are just up the road with trails that go on forever. Do not slip.

Like this series of state comparisons, the two sites together show opposite sides of the same coin. The Colorado River carved Grand Canyon into flat land, the Columbia Gorge grew out of broken dams melting after past ice ages.

On the Oregon side you see the results of cannon ball-speed water loaded with mountainous icebergs frozen around huge boulders aimed at the Cascade Range. You won’t see lines of soil horizons here, just vertical walls of volcanic basalt with an El Capitan look extending mile after mile.

And you’re buzzing with negative ions from top to bottom.

Where else can you find this besides Oregon? What else feeds the same wonder and love as Arizona?

Comment if you can. Love to hear about more water carved places.