Thursday Hike

Davan and I try to make it a habit to go hiking on Thursday mornings. We do a very light chore morning, pack a lunch and get out the door. Having it be a light chore morning helps Davan be motivated to do it, plus gets us out the door earlier. However, we haven't been so good about going lately. We only made it once in December. Ah, the holidays. We almost skipped again today because the wind is a blowing here. I mean really blowing. Gusts up to 33+MPH.

Knowing that was the forecast for today, I did a little looking around last night. I wondered if we headed south, away from the Columbia George, if we'd get away from the wind. Sure enough, 30 miles south, the wind predictions were for about 7 MPH winds. Much better.

This morning, we headed off to Molalla River State Park, a day use park I've never been to before, even though it's only about 30 miles away. It's a nice little park along the river with some walking paths, but the state park sight indicating hiking is overstating things a bit. Still, we managed to walk for about two hours, exploring the park...


and walking over to the nearby Canby Ferry, which, as a pedestrian, you can ride for free:



We rode the ferry to the other side, walked up the steep hill, looked around, then walked back down and rode the ferry back over. When we rode back, we thought we might have to wait because there weren't any cars, but the operator just chugged us back over, which was very nice, although it may have had something to do with the fact his outhouse was on our original side and he followed us right off to go tend to business. :)

Back at the park, Davan picked out this park bench, eschewing the nearby picnic benches, for lunch:


However, we ended up only starting lunch there because we got cold quickly just sitting. We finished eating in the car on the way home. It was a lovely day out. I'm so glad I didn't just give up because of the wind.