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We last visited Portland in June of 2014 as part of our road trip heading to Seattle to house sit.  If you are interested, you can see the details of that visit here, here and here.  This time we of course are in our motorhome, parked at the Columbia River RV Park.  We repeated some experiences from our last time here and tried to see something new.

One of our repeats was a drive through the Columbia River Gorge, heading east from Portland.  Sadly, in September 2017, a wildfire swept through 49,000 acres of the gorge.  As a result a major portion of the scenic road through the gorge is closed until later this year.  We were able to revisit some of the beautiful waterfalls, the Bonneville Dam and the town of Hood River.

On another day we drove out to Mount Hood, the highest point in Oregon at 11,249 feet.  We drove up to the historic Timberline Lodge and Ski Resort.  The lodge was constructed between 1936 and 1938 as part of a WPA project during the Great Depression.  The architect of record is Gilbert Stanley Underwood, known also for the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park (now known as the Majestic Yosemite Hotel).  Since Mount Hood is home to 12 named glaciers and snowfields, Timberline is the only ski area in North America to offer year round skiing.  The summer is quite busy due to a variety of ski and snowboard camps.

In Portland, we went up to Washington Park for some sightseeing and hiking.  This is a 410 acre park in the city of Portland with mostly steep wooded hillsides.  It includes a zoo, Japanese Gardens and an arboretum.  Naturally, we sampled some of the many food trucks, checked out the Portland Saturday Market and stopped in at the original Voodoo Doughnut (The Magic is in the Hole).

Next stop:  Silver Lake, WA