Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversary) Part 43: Hwy 22 Through The Coast Range

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Like I said earlier, there's a certain 'gateway' feeling, like passing through a door, when you take a certain path away from a place going to another place. This is a powerful feeling when you're a child of the Willamette Valley in any way, because if you're leaving Lincoln City you begin to fell inland as early as Neotsu, and certainly by the time you hit Otis. 

These two locations are within three miles of the Pacific beach, Neotsu in particular now actually existing within L.C.'s boundaries, but if you're headed home, and home's the Valley, the Ocean may as well be three hundred miles away instead of just three. You're going home, and the beach is nowhere near it, and that's all you feel from there on out.

The journey eastward from L.C. to the Valley took us along OR 18 which handed us off to OR 22 as we passed through the Grand Ronde Valley which straddles the boundary between Yamhill and Polk Counties. Passing by Spirit Mountain Casino is hardly the event one expects; It's just a big resort hotel, really. Just past this, across the floor of the Grand Ronde, just after OR 18 receives OR 22 from the north at Valley Junction, the highway has become an expressway of sorts, the sides of the highway separated by long string of Jersey barriers, and one fully-separated expressway interchange (Fort Hill Road, which is EXIT 25, despite being the only such exit along 18 or 22 in the Coast Range, because giving exits a number based on a milepost is a standard now in Oregon). 

As the combine highway leaves the Grand Ronde, OR 22 splits to the right. This is how you come back into the Valley, bound for Salem.

Now, I'm going to be a little sacrilegious here, or at least sound that way, but OR 18 and 22 crossing the Coast Range is a bit of a paradox. It is beautiful, Oregon Beautiful. It is simultaneously dreary. It's the same beautiful up and down the pike, all the way, and it's a longish drive, so you begin to yearn for some city (unless you're a country mouse, in which case, you don't have to go to West Virginia for Almost Heaven; it's right here). The VanDuzer Forest Corridor, which you drive through over the Coast crest (a clever thing; they harvested trees only to within a half-mile of the road, so the clearcuts remained tastefully out of sight and mind) is a beauty; you leave it, and farm land clings to the road here and there. Eventually, the view from the car looks like this:

This is 100% full-on Oregon countryside, the ones the colonists came to farm. As perfect a modern farmland idyll as can be had on a road trip; it seems as though a great deal of it has never changed and never will, and is as distant as can be.