Two days after the 2015 summer solstice (and
Father’s Day) I went on an unusual and special trip. Somehow I had gotten the idea to take public transportation from the southern end of Portland’s
TriMet service area at
Wilsonville Station all the way to
Timberline Lodge, halfway up the 11,249-foot
Mount Hood, the highest peak in Oregon.
The exact distance between these two points depends on how you measure it. As the crow flies, it is about 53 miles from Wilsonville Station to Timberline Lodge. Even though I am a Byrd, I am not a crow, so my route was going to be longer.
The driving distance along
I-5, I-205, Oregon Route 212 and
U.S. Route 26 is about 69 miles, which should take around 90 minutes, depending, as always, on the traffic.
For this day’s outing, I wanted to try
something completely different by eschewing American overdependence on the automobile and taking mass transit to an extreme. Although Mount Hood is awesome, for my purposes the trip there and back was the main attraction. It had to be, because each 96-mile one-way journey took
four hours!
To get from
Wilsonville to Mount Hood, I had to take four different vehicles — two trains and two buses — which I caught in four different towns in the
Portland metro area — Wilsonville,
Beaverton, Gresham and
Sandy.
During the eight hours of public transit to and from Mount Hood, I took a total of 52 pictures which document what I saw along the way. The best 27 can be found in this album. Most of them are shots of the numerous works of
public art on display at many of Portland’s mass transit stations.
For the pictures I took during my four-hour visit to Mount Hood, see the
Mount Hood Summer Solstice 2015 album.
