Grand Tour of the West: Day 4

The next morning, we stopped at the river and took pictures of some wild geese on the river.  There were many lovely homes as many lumber men live there.  Saw beautiful hotel downtown built like a Swiss chalet.

From Bend we traveled south on Highway 97 through deep snow to Klamath Falls. The country here was the most beautiful of any we saw on our trip.  The sky was bright blue and the snow was gleaming white in the sunlight.  Everywhere we saw large timber, fir and spruce, jack pine and lodge pole pine.  In some places the snow was as high as the car.  The roads had been cleared with a rotary snowplow and the highway department places poles about five feet high along the edge of the pavement to guide the snowplow.  In some places these poles were covered.  At one place we stopped at an oil station to get gas and they had one path shoveled around the pumps.  The snow was higher than the car but it wasn’t very cold.  The air was clear and very pleasant.  We passed a U.S. Army Lumber Camp.  We stopped at a restaurant and oil station near the route going to Crater Lake and were told there was 40 feet of snow on it.  Noticed when we passed the cut-off that the snowplow hadn’t been through and there was a solid band of snow about eight feet high. 

We stopped at the Klamath Indian Reservation Trading Post and Post Office and had a bottle of pop.  This was down in the valley. We could see many deer tracks in the snow beside the road.

The road ran beside Klamath Lake and quite a number of people were fishing.  There was the tail of an airplane sticking out of the lake and we were curious as to how it got there but we never did find out. 

Klamath Falls is a lumber center and there are many sawmills there, the biggest we had ever seen.  This was where Brennen and Cahoun (my former employer) had built a Marine Hospital. We stopped downtown and shopped.

Drove from Klamath to Dorris, Calif. where we were stopped, and our car was searched.  We were issued a certificate to the effect that we had brought no bugs in California. Soon we were in sight of Mt. Shasta. It was just at twilight and as it had been a fairly clear day, the mountain was beautiful.  There was a lot of snow on the peak which was surrounded by a wreath of clouds and the whole mountain seemed to be in a blue shadow.  It was the most beautiful mountain I have ever seen anywhere.  While we were admiring its beauty, we were brought up short by a loud report from the rear and stopped the car to find we had finally blown out a tire. 

Arrived at Weed and spent the night at a camp on the edge of town. It was on a hillside and the road was quite slick. 

Walt’s Comments

I couldn’t find any information about the wrecked plane either. There were a lot of planes (and crews) lost in training flights during the war. They weren’t always well documented, particularly if nobody was killed.