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hey tiny.
the light changed this week. i can see the low orange glare on the west-facing buildings around 1800, and the gorge fog is pooling high enough to freeze my ankles. the season turned without asking permission.
so i left.
i stepped over the coast range and walked east until the trees quit. twenty-three issues staring down at one city while a ridiculous amount of geology sat four hours away waiting for the light to be right.
this is a road trip cut. i sorted it by how you get there. distance means nothing to my stride, but transit is your problem.
two lava tubes out in central oregon lock their gates on the fifteenth and do not open again until may. the bats are going to sleep and your boots keep tracking in fungus. one of those caves has three holes in the roof that drop morning light straight to the floor. you have five days to get out there. also on the radar: the ghost of a cult town that poisoned ten salad bars and now sells pure darkness by the night.
the first section never leaves the county line. i put it first on purpose. some of you are not going anywhere and i am not going to make you scroll past four hours of basalt to find that out.
but first, a correction, because a tiny named jane caught me and she was right. st. johns music fest is not last weekend. it is this one. september 11, 12 and 13. i ran it against montavilla jazz, announced a collision, and invented a conflict the city never actually committed.
it is also fifteen venues. i said twelve. i undercounted a festival in the middle of admiring how big it was.
pack a second flashlight. i cannot reach into the dirt and pull you out if you get stuck.
X X X
[ STAYING PUT ]
portland, or: the trip you can take on a bus transfer
Rocky Butte daylight, and then a little past it Joseph Wood Hill Park | Free [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] [ + all ages ] an extinct cinder cone with a stone crown the WPA put on it in the thirties, and a road that goes all the way up so you do not have to earn the view. three hundred and sixty degrees of it. five volcanoes on a clear evening and the airport on any of them. i rest an elbow here more often than i should admit.
Smith and Bybee Wetlands daylight, year round North Portland | Free [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] two thousand acres wedged between a landfill, a rail yard and the columbia, which makes it the largest thing of its kind inside any american city. beaver, river otter, western painted turtles, all of it four minutes off the interstate. the paved path is short and flat and ends at a platform where you stand still and let it come to you.
Lone Fir Cemetery daylight, tours by schedule SE 26th and Morrison | Free [ more ] [ + all ages ] twenty-five thousand people are buried here and roughly ten thousand have no marker. the chinese section was paved over by a county office building for decades before anyone corrected the record. the friends group runs themed walking tours and they are better researched than most things this city puts its name on. the trees are enormous. i keep my voice down.
Chapman Swift Watch nightly through Sep 30, arrive an hour before sunset Chapman Elementary | Free [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] [ + all ages ] for thirty-five years the vaux's swifts poured into that chimney every september in a spiral you could see from a mile out. lately they have been scattering to smaller roosts across the metro and nobody has a firm answer why. birds do not file a change of address. the counters still set up their table every night and count whatever shows up, which is either devotion or spite and is probably both.
The Witch's Castle daylight, always Lower Macleay Trail | Free [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] a park restroom built in the 1930s got flattened by a storm in the sixties and the city has since retroactively assigned it a murder, a witch, and a gothic reputation. the stonework held. the plumbing did not. three quarters of a mile in, flat the whole way, and the moss has taken a firm position on all of it.
Powell Butte daylight SE 162nd and Powell | Free [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] another dead volcano, this one with the city's drinking water sitting in two reservoirs underneath it. the summit is a meadow rather than a viewpoint, so the mountain arrives all at once when you come out of the trees instead of being handed to you at a railing. orchard remnants near the top from when this was somebody's farm.
Freakybuttrue Peculiarium check the hours before you walk over NW Portland | see info [ more ] eighteen hundred square feet of aliens, cryptids, and a bigfoot who has visibly been in a fight. the one promise they make is no jump scares and they keep it. the entire collection would fit in my coat pocket and i still cannot get through the door.
[TAKING THE BUS ]
the columbia gorge express runs gateway transit center to cascade locks and hood river seven days a week, up to eight round trips, two or three bikes on the front. the northwest point leaves union station twice a day for the coast. cc rider line 1 gets you to st. helens on a weekday in under an hour. northwestern stage lines runs to pendleton twice daily, five and a half hours, about seventy-eight dollars. none of these require you to own anything.
Bonneville Lock and Dam Fish Ladder daily, peak Sep and Oct Bonneville | Free [ more ] [ + all ages ] you go down under the river and watch fall chinook shove past a window at eye level, one at a time, on the worst commute in this state. upstairs at the hatchery is a white sturgeon named herman, over ten feet long and older than nearly everyone looking at him. the bus puts you in cascade locks and the dam is a couple of miles west, which is the part a bike solves.
Battery Russell daily 08:00 to 16:00 Fort Stevens | Free with parking [ more ] a concrete coastal gun battery left completely open. no docent, no rope, no lighting, no supervision at all. you walk into the ammunition magazines with a flashlight and the building has no opinion about what you do in there. a japanese submarine shelled this beach in 1942 and the battery was ordered not to return fire, which is a fact those empty rooms carry better than any plaque.
Tillamook Rock Lighthouse visible from Ecola State Park Cannon Beach | $5 day use [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] a lighthouse on a bare basalt stack a mile offshore, working from 1881 to 1957 in the worst water on this coast. you cannot land on it and neither can anyone else. it is privately held now as a columbarium, which means people paid real money to have their remains stored on the least reachable rock in oregon. terrible tilly is doing fine. everyone else out there is not.
Spirit of Halloweentown Sep 26 through Nov 1 St. Helens | Plaza free, attractions from $15 [ more ] [ + all ages ] a working town on the columbia leases itself back to a 1998 disney channel movie for five weeks every autumn. the plaza is free to walk. the enormous pumpkin goes up on the courthouse and every business in town agrees to the bit without visible embarrassment. line 1 runs weekdays only, so the bus version is a tuesday and the weekend version is a car.
Pendleton Underground Tours year round, 90 minutes Pendleton | see info [ more ] portland sells you a kidnapping legend the historical society has spent decades quietly dismantling. pendleton sells the documented version. card rooms, bootleg liquor, and businesses run by chinese immigrants who were not permitted to run them at street level. same shape of story. one of them has receipts.
Pendleton Round-Up Sep 12 through 19, 13:15 daily Pendleton | varies [ more ] the arena floor is grass, not packed dirt, which is close to unique and changes how everything in the ring moves. horses run differently on it. going since 1910, and the whole town simply hands over its week. lodging books a year out, so either you planned this in september 2025 or you are riding the bus back the same night like a person of character.
[ TAKING THE TRAIN ]
the empire builder runs east once a day out of union station and stops at bingen-white salmon and wishram. the amtrak cascades goes south to oregon city and salem. the last few miles are always somebody's car. i do not have this problem.
Maryhill Stonehenge daily 07:00 to dusk Goldendale | Free [ more ] a full-scale concrete stonehenge on a bluff over the river, put up in 1918 by a man who believed the original was an altar for human sacrifice and decided the first world war qualified. he was wrong about the altar. he was not wrong about the war.
Ice Cave open, and slick Trout Lake | Free [ more ] a lava tube shaped like a bowl, so it catches dense winter air and never gives it back, then freezes whatever drips through the rock all summer. there is ice down there in september while the parking lot bakes. people were storing huckleberries in it long before anyone thought to sell a cooler. wear boots you do not mind going down in.
Swan Island Dahlias Wed through Sun, 09:00 to 17:30, through Sep 30 Canby | Free [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] fifty acres, three hundred seventy-five varieties, no admission and no parking fee, which should tell you what the plan is. the plan is that you walk into a field of flowers, lose your composure completely, and place a tuber order for spring on the way out. it works on everyone. it will work on you.
Mt. Angel Oktoberfest Sep 17 through 20 Mount Angel | Grounds free, garden wristbands extra [ more ] [ + all ages ] three hundred fifty thousand people come to a town of seventeen hundred and stay four days. glockenspiel, maypole, forty-odd food booths, wiener dog races, and an event officially called the oktoberfest olympics. they have run it since 1966 without flinching. the crowd outnumbers the town two hundred to one and the town holds.
[ DRIVING ]
the part where i stop pretending you can get there on a transfer. two lava tubes lock on the fifteenth. that is the only real deadline in this letter.
Lava River Cave closes Sep 15 Newberry National Volcanic Monument | $2 reservation plus parking [ more ] a mile of lava tube. fifty-five stairs down. forty-two degrees at the bottom, every day, forever. it shuts on the fifteenth and stays shut until may so the bats can hibernate without an audience. tickets release seven days out at 07:00 and go. if you have been in any other cave this year, leave those boots home. white-nose syndrome does not walk between caves on its own. it rides.
Skylight Cave beams 09:00 to 11:00, closes Sep 15 near Sisters | Free [ more ] three collapsed holes in the roof of a lava tube drop three separate columns of morning light onto the floor. clear sky or nothing. cloud cover and you have driven six miles of gravel to stand in a dark room being quiet about it. the entrance is a ladder down a hole and the ladder does not stay up all year. same closure date, same bats, same fungus, same last week.
Ape Cave timed entry, 09:00 to 17:00, through Oct 31 Cougar | $2 plus a parking pass [ more ] two and a half miles of lava tube, the longest continuous one in the lower forty-eight, formed by a quiet basalt eruption rather than the explosive kind this mountain is famous for. you are asked not to touch the walls because the slime on them is load-bearing for an entire food chain, which is the best sentence the forest service has ever produced. lower cave is a walk. upper cave ends at an eight-foot wall you climb or turn around at.
Jewell Meadows Wildlife Area September, first and last light Jewell | Free with parking permit [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] roosevelt elk live in heavy timber and are close to impossible to see most of the year. september is the rut and the bulls stop being discreet about it. the bugle is a high shriek that does not match the animal producing it by any measure. odfw will tell you the big herds arrive in november. go now for the sound, not the headcount.
Octopus Tree daylight Cape Meares | Free [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] a sitka spruce roughly three centuries old with no central trunk at all. six limbs run sideways for thirty feet and then turn straight up. nobody has settled whether the wind shaped it or whether people shaped it deliberately to cradle canoes. it lost a limb in a nineties windstorm and gave no sign of registering the loss.
Thor's Well check the tide table before you go, not after Cape Perpetua | $5 day use [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] a sea cave roof collapsed and left a twenty-foot hole in the shoreline that fills, spits and drains on the swell. the photograph everyone drives out for requires standing on wet basalt at high tide, which is also precisely how the ocean collects people here. stand considerably farther back than the shot wants you to.
Fall Kite Festival Sep 26 and 27, 10:00 to 16:00, night fly Sep 25 from 18:30 Lincoln City | Free [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] [ + all ages ] professional fliers only, so your job is to stand on a beach and watch other people work. friday night they hang lights on the kites and put them up in the dark, which is the part worth the drive. it moved to the casino beach this year while they build the new welcome center.
Antelope any clear night Antelope | Free [ ~ outdoors ~ ] in 1981 a commune bought a sixty-four thousand acre ranch out here, took the town government, renamed the place after their guru, built an airport, and poisoned ten salad bars to suppress turnout in a county election. the ranch is a christian youth camp now. the town is a certified dark sky community. the practical inheritance of all that ambition is that you can see the milky way from the shoulder of the road.
Painted Hills dawn and dusk, or do not bother Mitchell | Free [ more ] [ ~ outdoors ~ ] fossil soil stacked in bands. the red is what this ground did when it was a humid tropical floodplain. the yellow is what it did once things cooled and dried. no shade, no trees, no water, no mercy at midday. the color only saturates at the ends of the day, so go then or stay home.
Snoqualmie Tunnel open through Oct 31 Hyak | Discover Pass [ more ] two and a third miles bored straight under the pass in 1914 for a railroad that later went bankrupt, now open to anyone with a bike and a headlamp. no lighting the whole way. water comes off the ceiling continuously and pools in the gravel. twenty degrees colder inside than out. it closes november first so the ice does not shut anyone in, which tells you what it is like in there on the last good day.
Glowing fungus after rain, in full dark Cascade forests | Free [ ~ outdoors ~ ] a small kidney-shaped mushroom grows in shingled clusters on dead hardwood and its gills glow green. not a flash. a lamp, steady, all night, apparently to bring insects in to carry the spores out. you have to sit in complete darkness for twenty minutes before your eyes will concede it is happening. bring nothing that lights up. tell nobody where you parked.
how far up do you come on me?
[ STARGAZING ]
aunt svetty has read the sky for the month. i got four hundred miles closer to it than usual this week and understood exactly as much as before, which is nothing. being tall is not the same as being near. svetty, take it.
Hold your head high as we enter September. Leo Season was wild with multiple eclipses and strong fiery energy. What did it burn down for you ? You’ll have some time to adjust before everything, everywhere feels like it’s happening at once on Sept 10th.
September 10th Venus enters Scorpio, Mercury enters Libra, Uranus goes retrograde and there’s a new moon in Virgo. All on September 10th! The mood is intense. It’s time for uncompromising honesty. Uranus is retrograde from September 10th until February 8, 2027. We are reevaluating as a society how we process information. Social media is out. There is a readiness for change and privacy. Let’s remove the police state together.
Venus in Scorpio calls on us to seek hidden truths. The new moon in Virgo asks us to set intentions. Mercury has simultaneously entered Libra. Choose your words carefully. It’s a good time for fair negotiations. Venus will remain in Scorpio until October 25th. It’s time for total honesty or nothing. Put both your body and soul into what you’re doing or don’t bother with it at all.
On Sept 15th, Neptune is sextile Pluto, part of a seven decade pattern. Neptune bridges the unseen and mystical realms. Trust your intuition. It has been sharpened. There is a collective awakening. The intuition of others has also sharpened : again with the uncompromising honesty. People can smell each other’s bullshit so stick to the truth. It’s best in most cases, nearly all the time.
Jupiter is quintile Uranus on the 20th and sesquadrate Neptune on the 22nd. Jupiter is about expansion, wealth, and law. Uranus is about revolution,technology, and sudden change. Quintile is a 72 degree angle which has a history for being diplomatic, and quietly successful. This placement has been a precise catalyst for brilliance in the past. On the world stage expect a spark that brings a dramatic turn of events, likely technology related, mostly positive in nature.
A sesquadrate is a 135 degree angle. Jupiter is sesquadrate Neptune on the 22nd. This is a highly frustrating alignment as Jupiter is now expanding the collective disillusionment brought by Neptune. Whatever that brilliant spark was 2 days ago is likely misunderstood by the masses forty-eight hours later. Misinformation and mass delusion will spread like wildfire. Watch out for the rise of a charismatic leader on this date. He or she is not the real deal. Can you still smell bullshit ? Can others ? Let’s hope so.
The Sun enters Libra on the 22nd making the focus about balance and fairness. The Full Moon in Aries asks that you speak up if you have something to say. People-pleasing falls away to harsh, direct honesty again this month. Not all have been fooled by the false savior. There is a strong push for action- especially by those with Leo and Aries influence. It’s a good time to start new projects. Your Aunt Svetty is starting at a new salon this month after burning down her old job (figuratively) between eclipses in August. Come see me at the bobbypinsalon.com. The stars say you should get your hair done ! They don’t really, but your Aunt Svetty has rent to pay! Happy September! Go inward. Be truthful. Trust your instincts. Don’t lie. Auntie Svetty loves you !!! Get a haircut !
you're standing outside the wall.
the extended cut, the full calendar, event tickets, and whatever's next. all on the other side. come in.
let me inwhat's back here:
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- tickets to tunnel vision pdx events
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