After visiting the Yellowstone National Park we drove further and further westwards. For a long time our route was the same as the historic Oregon Trail. Between the years 1843 and 18700
about 300,000 settlers made their way into the west on his trail. How they managed this huge distance with their treks composed out of up to 300 wagons is hardly to imagine: no roads, heat,
deserts, ....
We enjoyed the ride. Here you do not find the big, famous national parks but small, well managed state parks, which give a lot of information and a broad range of very different impressions.
One of these parks is the John Day Fossil Bed in East Oregon. It contains a number of distinctive rock formations with fossils showing not only single living beings but whole habitats which existed thousands of years ago. Here we trekked through the Blue Basin a rock formation of shining blue in a brown-yellow surrounding.
Also in this park there are the Painted Rocks: a range of smooth hills striped in colours of yellow, red, brown and black. They looked like somebody had covered them with a heavy piece of silk creating folds with an extraordenary intensive shine in the setting sun.
Completely different from this was the Smith Rock State Park. North American landscape like in picture book. Blue sky, a winding river in front of bare rocks. Of course also here we had the chance to hike. But especially famous is this area for rock climbing. People from all over the world come to climb the needles of Smith Rock State Park, some of them even balance on ropes between the needles.
That California suffers from drought since many years became clear to us at the many lakes. The water level was sometimes so low
that jetties had not connection to the water and beaches were in the forest but not at the water line. Once we camped at a boat ramp which ended on pasture with a lot of cows. A very strange
picture.
And also the devasting forest fires in California became part of our journey. Long time before we reached the affected areas we
could see the the smoke and smell the fire. Later we had to drive though huge burned areas and villages. Cruel pictures.
More than once we had to change our route as streets, whole areas and campgrounds were closed.
But this is nothing compared to what people have to bare here.
Finally we reached the west coast so full of impressions and experiences that we definitely needed a break.