The Far Blue Mountains

We’ve been studying Oregon geography this week.  Did you know that Oregon has the Coast Range, a line of mountains (you guessed it) along the coast, and also the Cascade Mountains, a line of mountains running south from the Columbia River?  We live in between the Coast Range and the West Hills of Portland, and that’s good news for visual me.  Because it means that a lot of the time when I’m driving around, I’m seeing these beautiful layers of mountains in the distance.

There are some places now, like the parking lot of the library, passing the Hillsboro airport, or coming out of Portland, where I know that if I look up I’ll see increasingly distant mountains in the distance, and I love it.

My other favorite place for seeing mountains is driving on the interstate in the Columbia River Gorge.  At one point (where I haven’t managed a picture yet) the road curves so that you look straight down the river, and the river appears to end in layer after layer of mountains.  Every time I’ve driven there I’ve regretted the lack of places to pull off the interstate and take pictures.  And the spots on my front windshield that show up in the pictures that I do manage to take, or get my kids to take.  But at least you can get an idea of how beautiful these mountain ranges are…

 

PS—in case you’re wondering (which you probably weren’t) about the title of this post, I’ll tell you.  There’s a Louis L’Amour book titled “The Far Blue Mountains.”  I can’t even remember what the book was about, but when I saw these mountain ranges in the distance for the first time the title came to my mind immediately.  And the thought: oh, this is what he meant by the far blue mountains…