Beer

The first time I drank a beer (like a whole beer by myself) was in 1989. I was a senior in college (late bloomer, I know) and it was a can of Miller Genuine Draft. Or at least I think it was. I hated it. Not because it was an MGD; beer just didn't taste good to me then. I kept a hold of that beer the entire night and drained the whole thing, caught between the potential embarrassment of not finishing a single beer and the equal potential embarrassment of not continuously having beer in my hands all night long. I hoped nobody would notice it was the same can all night long. Either nobody noticed or nobody cared. Or both. In the end, I survived. 

It's now 2018 and in the almost 30 years between 1989 and now, I've drank a lot of beer and I've visited a whole lot of breweries all over the United States and Europe. From tiny microbreweries in too many American towns to recognize to the largest single site brewery in Golden, Colorado to the oldest family run brewery in London, England to probably the mustiest, dankest brewery still cranking out authentic lambic in the civilized world in Brussels, Belgium, I've covered things fairly comprehensively, even if there are admittedly some holes. Needless to say, my beer journey has improved since that night in the fall of 1989. 

But before we start talking about beer in 2018, let's talk some history.

Once upon a time in the United States, the only beer available to most folks in this country of ours was a mass-produced kind of product, and a fairly poor one at that. Think Coors or Miller or Bud Light or some kind of similar suds. Although in the old old days it was more likely to be a mass-produced local sort of product. Think Stroh's in Detroit or Piel's in New York or Wiedemann's in Cincinnati. Wherever you lived, there was bound to be a mostly regional, cheap German-style lager for the men-folk to pass away their evenings and weekends.

Eventually in the 1970s, some people got tired of drinking the same old stuff available at the bar or liquor store or grocery store or wherever else they got their pints, six-packs, twelve-packs, cases or kegs. Some of those beer lovers started their own smaller breweries trying to make a drink with more taste and character and managed to make a dent in some markets throughout the country. But a dent was about all it was. Brewing, kegging, bottling, canning and distributing beer that nobody had heard of was a costly and often unrewarding endeavor. Even when the first microbreweries managed to grab on to a local market share, the taste for something different (read: better) didn't spread particularly well sometimes.

Then in the late 1970s and early 1980s, two significant laws were passed, one at the national level and one locally in the Pacific northwest. 

On October 14, 1978, H. R. 1337 was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. The bill allowed the manufacture of up to 100 gallons per year of beer or wine by an adult at home for his or her own personal use. Got two adults at home? You get to make 200 gallons a year! Now beer lovers everywhere could try their hand at making the kind of brew they liked, rather than being forced to settle for whatever they could find at their local bar or store.

About seven years later in Portland, Oregon, SB 813 was signed into law on July 13, 1985. That bill allowed the production and sale of beer on the same property. This was huge! All of a sudden, commercial beer production got a lot cheaper. No longer were you as a small brewer forced to pay for distribution and sale on other people's properties, nor did you have to invest in canning and bottling operations to get your product into stores. You could just brew up a batch of beer and sell it right out of the back of your brewery. The brewpub was born. And aspiring brewers flocked to northwest Oregon to set up shop.

Cascade Brewing Barrel House on SE Belmont Street. Get your sour on!

In 2011, I made my first trip to Portland. It was the last stop on a cross-country drive that most people make right after they graduate from college. I made it when I was 43. I picked a place to stay in town and then identified four breweries within walking distance of our hotel and engaged in a two day or so long pub crawl. Not within reasonable stumbling distance of the hotel where I was staying? You didn't get visited.

Now it's 2018 and I've just finished my second trip to Portland. This year, I didn't constrain myself to a half mile or so radius from where I was staying but instead picked places where I thought I would enjoy the beer or where something special called to me. In 2011, walking from my hotel got me to fall in love with Deschutes Brewery. This time, I tried to find more than one place I would love.

We spent the better part of four days in late June this year and around Portland. I'm sure you can visit a whole lot of breweries in the time we spent there, although perhaps not all of the more than 60 that call the city home. Between trips out of town and a strong desire to remember all of my time in each place I drank, we limited ourselves to six on this trip. Remembering my experience was important to me this time around, something that wasn't so high on my list of priorities in 2011. Here's what I found this year.

Widmer Brothers 

If there's a brewery that put Portland on the world beer map, it's Widmer Brothers. They weren't the first brewery established in the city and they are not the oldest one still around (that honor goes to BridgePort Brewing) but they were the first Portland beer to be widely distributed with any staying power. I visited Widmer Brothers this year to kiss the ring, so to speak. I wanted to pay homage.

Now, in doing this, don't think I was visiting some place with terrible beer. Widmer's original flagship beer, Hefe, is a classic American beer in the style of a Munich weissbier which is just as awesome today as it was when I first tried it. It's light and citrus-y but with plenty of body and without the banana-y flavor that comes with this style of beer sometimes. In anticipation of my visit, I even downed a few pints in Eugene on the way to Portland.

For the beer lover who wants more than just a hefeweizen to drink, Widmer's pub has plenty more choice. Like 25 or more different beers on tap, some of which are only available at the Widmer pub on North Russell Street. So just by visiting their pub, you gain access to some exclusive brews. 

To try as many as possible in this location, I opted for a flight. This is the only place I got a rack of small glasses. I went full beers everywhere else with one asterisk which we'll get to in a minute. Of the six small glasses, I thought the Le Petit Brasseur, a saison style (which is becoming one of my personal favorite styles) beer, was the best. It was light but had flavor. I also enjoyed the Fresno Wit, a Belgian style witbier that I thought had some spicy notes. And I had to add the Japanese-style rice lager called Mr. Sparkle, the title being an ode to one of the best Simpsons episodes ever (easily top 5) and Portland's own Matt Groening. I couldn't imagine a better titled beer on this trip, but then again, maybe I lack imagination sometimes.

Ultimately, none of the six small beers I drank on North Russell were the equal of Widmer's Hefe so just to say I did it, I ordered a full glass of that gorgeous brew after I finished my sampling. Ring kissed, honor paid, let's move on. Widmer's worth a stop for every beer tourist based on history alone. We got better beer elsewhere in Portland but drinking a Hefe in this place is a touchstone moment in my American beer drinking experience.

Hopworks Urban Brewery

We visited Hopworks (or HUB, if you prefer) for one reason: they partnered with Patagonia (yes, the clothing and other outdoor gear manufacturer) on a beer made from Kernza, a trademarked perennial grain similar to intermediate wheatgrass that is native to Europe and Asia. What's a perennial grain, you might ask? Well, just like perennial flowers, it's a crop that needs to be planted just once and then it will generate seeds (in this case, wheat) year after year as opposed to needing to be replanted each year after it lives and dies in a single season.

The attraction here by the way was Patagonia, not necessarily the Kernza. While I'm all for sustainable agricultural practices (and Kernza has water use and soil regenerative benefits which are certainly cool), I'm mildly obsessed with Patagonia as a company and I can't seem to stop buying their stuff. Some days I'm like a walking billboard for the brand which makes me feel a little silly.

The HUB / Patagonia Long Root Ale can be found in the "Easy Drinkers" section of Hopwork's menu. It's a pale ale with plenty of flavor that is certainly easy to put down. It's what I would call mildly hopped, especially compared to some of the beers today that I consider to be way over the top hopped. I would drink this beer regularly if I were to hang out at Hopworks with any frequency as a Portland resident.

Long Root was not the only beer I sampled at HUB (I mean, come on...why go for just one beer). There are some interesting sounding brews on the menu including a pineapple cider and a concoction labeled Strawberry Milkshake IPA, which is actually brewed with both strawberries and lactose. Since I've been in a substantially traditional (rather than experimental) beer mood lately, I opted for something more mainstream. I guess I could have ordered a flight and had a taste of both pineapple and strawberry but, well, I've already stated how I feel about that issue right now. No more flights after Widmer!

My second (and as it turned out, last) beer? Hopworks' Organic Survival Stout, a very coffee forward beer brewed with multiple different kinds of grain including (but not limited to) barley, wheat, oats, quinoa and spelt. Interesting beer, but way too much coffee. This part is nobody's fault but mine. The menu clearly said the brew was finished with cold-pressed coffee.

Like a number of breweries in Portland, Hopworks Urban Brewery is themed and the theme here is bicycles. There are bikes and gears on the cans, labels and tap handles and the canopy over the bar is formed out of bicycle frames of all sorts. This is a good brewery. I could give it a second chance but I'm not craving it as I write this.

Vitis Noble, Cascade Brewing Barrel House.

Cascade Brewing

Cascade was the first brewery we visited in Portland. We headed there right after a walk around Washington Park's International Rose Test Garden and Japanese Garden. We went back there two days later. Cascade was my favorite brewery of the six we visited and it's my new favorite brewery in the world. At least until we go back to Fuller's in London later this month.

Most of what you need to know big picture-wise about Cascade can be summed up by our server's question to us after saying hi: "do you guys like sour beers?" Why, yes, we do. We like sour beers a whole lot. And by "we", I really mean "I".

Now, before you recoil too much at the sour beer label, just hold on. Yes, this beer is sour in the style of Belgium's best lambic beers but some of the flavors that Cascade has coaxed out of the ingredients they use to make these brews are just incredible. I'm not sure I've had a beer with more complexity in the last five years; some of these brews were mind-blowing.

I started out with three 2 oz. tasters* after describing to our server just what I was looking for, which would be something not overly fruity. If that sounds strange to anyone who knows what a lambic is, I don't particularly care for framboises or krieks or any other sort of fruit-heavy lambics; give me high quality un-fruited gueuze (or the anglisized "goze") any day of the week and I'll be a happy man. Cascade had several options in the fruitless or fruit-mild department, including their excellent excellent Vitis Noble flavored with chardonnay grapes and their even more excellent excellent Melonius Blond, a gorgeous winey brew with a sour hit of cantaloupe on the back end. Vitis Noble was the equivalent of a perfect chardonnay for me and Melonius Blond is my new favorite beer. I have to find some of this stuff on the east coast.

If you've gotten past the sour label (yes I know that was a couple of paragraphs ago at this point) and you are accepting me as some sort of beer expert (which you might consider doing), I imagine you are ready to run right down to your local beer store and get some Cascade. Let me send you off with a warning: this stuff carries a price tag to match the quality of the liquid inside the bottles. A typical 750 ml bottle of Cascade's beer will set you back $20 with some brews being priced $10 or more higher. You get what you pay for here but it's way more expensive than most beers you'll ever come across. Still, that Melonius Blond...it's calling to me.

* I told you there would be an asterisk. Tasters are not flights. There's no minimum or limit to the amount of tasters you can get and 2 oz. is just too small to be considered as making up a flight. I did try some of Cascade's more fruit-forward beers, including the Midnight Bramble made with black and red raspberries, and I found these less successful than the Vitis Noble and Melonius Blond. But then again, I know what I like; Midnight Bramble was destined for failure with me.

Beer. Marshmallow. Why not? S'more Stout.

Base Camp Brewing

On to themed brewing company number two. I could reasonably relate to a bicycle-themed brewpub; there's no way I could relate to one with a climbing (as in mountain climbing) bent. A behind-the-bar video display of people at places like Everest base camp and carabiners on the tap handles and as hooks below the bar don't necessarily make me feel like I'm at home. Carabiners below the bar, by the way...genius!

How did the mountaineering theme affect my enjoyment of the beer? Not one bit. Didn't even notice it. And the beers aren't even named after mountains or anything. No Everest or Kilimanjaro or avalanche or whatever names. We didn't spend enough time here. 

Just like HUB, we came here for one beer: the S'more Stout, a sweet-ish stout with chocolate, smoke and biscuit flavors, everything except the marshmallow, or at least that's how the brewers described what they'd put together in this concoction. And there's no need to worry about the marshmallow missing because this beer comes with a toasted one (they blowtorch it on the back bar before handing you your drink) right on the rim of every glass. Seriously? Yep! Now you know why we made a special pilgrimage for this beer.

Too often with this kind of a beer, it's a gimmick. The promise and allure is not matched by the actual taste of what you get to drink. I think in the case of the S'more Stout, that statement doesn't apply. This is actually a good beer. Maybe not one to lead with as your first glass of the night. More of (and I hope understandably) a dessert beer. And yes, there is such a thing. The beer itself is not that sweet; think some high percentage of cocoa chocolate bars. Like 80 or 90 percent. It's bitter but rich and it needs the marshmallow. The only real problem is it needs about three or four marshmallows for a whole glass. The thing on the rim disappeared in about four or five sips and a corresponding amount of bites.

They also sell this stuff in bottles. I assume marshmallows are sold separately (and your parents have to put it together).

Determined to soldier on, and determined not to get another flight, I had to sample a second beer at Base Camp. I chose a Grisette, a saison-like light refreshing beer which I feel is severely under-represented as a beer style at microbreweries pretty much everywhere. It's a thirst quenching beer that's typically a little lower in alcohol content that can be supped in quantity for refreshment. Base Camp's version was sweet and citrusy with a mild hopped finish which went down well on an unusually hot summer day in Portland. This stuff is just perfect for that kind of a day.

It's difficult to second guess leaving this brewpub considering less than 45 minutes later I had a glass of Cascade Melonius Blond in front of me but I regret not lingering at Base Camp. I would have loved another glass of this Grisette, maybe after getting a little deeper into their menu. Note to self: go back to Base Camp when in Portland next.

Cactus Wins The Lottery! Ex Novo knows how to name beers.

Ex Novo Brewing

If there's a brewery that names its beer better than Ex Novo, I haven't found it yet. And if I hadn't been to Cascade (twice), I'd be thinking about heading back to Ex Novo every day. OK, maybe I am anyway.

Choosing breweries to visit is difficult when there are so many around you to choose from (more on that later). We chose Ex Novo because they are a non-profit. They donate their profits to "those building a better world and bringing hope to places where it is scarce." That sort of a statement is enough to get me to a brewery. But it's not enough to get me to go back. Good beer is the only thing that can really do that.

Just like Hopworks and Base Camp, I tried two beers at Ex Novo. I started with The Most Interesting Lager In The World, a Mexican-style beer with a little more flavor than the average offering from south of the border. I finished with a  Cactus Wins The Lottery! (the exclamation point is theirs not mine), a sour beer flavored with prickly pear cactus fruit. Who names these things? Truth be told I did happen to pick the two most creatively named beers on the menu.

The Most Interesting Lager In The World was absolutely not. Better than a standard Mexican pilsner? Oh yes! Most interesting in the world? Um...no. The Cactus Wins The Lottery!, though. That is some good stuff. My mouth is watering right now just writing about it.

Before this trip to Portland, I'd had unflavored, raspberry flavored, watermelon flavored, cranberry flavored and cherry flavored sour beer, mostly with the word lambic on the label, but not always. I'd never had blackberry, chardonnay, cantaloupe or cactus pear sour beer. Now I have and I got it all in Portland at Cascade (the first three) and Ex Novo (the last). Whenever I visited Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill in New York (now gone) or Las Vegas (still there), I used to get a cactus pear margarita. This beer is like that drink only way better (because it's beer). The cactus pear is a distinct flavor but one not strong enough or recognizable to make it seem like you are drinking a fruit beer, even though you are. It's not Cascade's Melonius Blond but it also doesn't carry a $20+ per bottle price. This stuff comes in regular sized cans. Need to find a way to get this stuff to the east coast. Ex Novo ended our beer run of new breweries. Great spot to finish!

This is the last post of my late June trip through northern California and Oregon. This trip started with wine in the Napa Valley and ended with beer in Portland. Both experiences were fantastic. I found wine I loved in the first three days of the trip and I found beer that I loved in the last four. As I write this post I have the 20 bottles of wine I bought in California sitting in my cellar waiting for the day when I crack one open and re-live my time in Cali. I have none of the beer I found in Portland. There has to be a way to remedy that somehow.

I now have a reason to go back to both places. I have no idea which one I'll get to first. There's a whole long list of places that are ahead of both, although honestly I could see a long weekend in Napa every two or three years quite easily. A non-stop flight to San Fran, some sampling, some shipping...I'll take it as it comes. Best beers in Portland? I'm going (1) Cascade's Melonius Blond, (2) Cascade's Vitis Noble, (3) Base Camp's Grisette and (4) Ex Novo's Cactus Wins The Lottery! Until next time, cheers!

Hey wait a minute, I said there were six breweries. We did stop by Wayfinder after we visited Base Camp. Wayfinder was on my list because of their logo and their full food menu. Admittedly, it was a Friday night but it was so packed that is was just unbearable. We left without sitting down or ordering a beer and headed straight (back) to Cascade. I'm not saying I wouldn't have liked Wayfinder's beer but the atmosphere was just not for me.



Good advice from Hopworks Urban Brewery.

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How We Did It

Beer is not hard to find in Portland. Just type "brewpub" into Google Maps and you are bound to come up with something close to you. My opinion is that beer is a lot like food. You want to find the right stuff? Get the scoop from someone who lives locally and can provide some insight rather than just picking the establishment closest to wherever you happen to be at the moment.

We find Eater.com really useful for food recommendations when we travel so we used them to point us in the right direction on this trip for some good beer. This will age of course but we relied heavily on Eater's April 2018 Essential Guide To Portland Breweries and the March 2018 Portland's Must-Visit Brewpubs For Beer And Food. If it's beyond 2018 when you are reading this, maybe you better just check out Eater's site and search for the most recent guides on their site.

Below is the current (as of August 2018) information for the five breweries we visited and drank beer from. Click on the name of each brewery and it will link to the website for the brewery. All breweries are in Portland.

Widmer Brothers Pub, 955 North Russell Street. There's a parking lot in the rear of the pub accessible off North Russell. It's small but it's way better than looking (and paying) for street parking. We were a little peckish when we got to Widmer but honestly found the in house menu lacking.

Hopworks Urban Brewery, 2944 SE Powell Boulevard. Like Widmer, Hopworks also has its own parking lot. Enter it off SE 29th Avenue one block from the brewery building. We had better luck with food at Hopworks. The pretzels are highly recommended; I'd go with two cups of beer cheese and pass on the mustard, but that's just me.

Cascade Brewing Barrel House, 939 SE Belmont Street. Go here. Go here. Go here. Go here. Go here. I liked Cascade a lot. Their beer is amazing and complex and the atmosphere is relaxed and quiet, even if you are in the middle of a city. They have a great shaded patio with picnic tables. They have a small menu and the choices are a little limited especially if you don't want pig. I thought their pork loin reuben was good and I'd eat it again. I'd also eat their salted caramel chocolate pecan bites again and again and again. Parking is on the street; we didn't have any problem finding a spot, although oddly we found the exact same spot both times we went.

Base Camp Brewing, 930 SE Oak Street. Of all the breweries we visited, Base Camp had the best food. They don't make their own but they do have two food trucks outside which you can order from at the bar and the Base Camp staff will go get and bring your food from the truck which is awfully convenient. We ordered Nepalese food from the Sherpa Kitchen food truck while at Base Camp. I'd recommend trying it for yourself. Street parking at Base Camp. Like everywhere we went in Portland, we had no problem finding a spot.

Ex Novo Brewing, 2326 North Flint Avenue. Ex Novo is in an old industrial building with a roll up door near Lillis Albina City Park. Ex Novo was the only place we didn't eat. Street parking again here and again, we found a spot along the edge of the park pretty easily.

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Slow Boat To China

Imagine you've been working non-stop for weeks on end and you finally got a break and manage to get a weekend off. You are tired, sweaty and your body is sore from working for about the last month. You head into town for a shower, a change into some clean clothes, a drink and maybe see what you can get up to. You wonder if you are in a bit of a sketchy part of town but hey, everyone else around you looks just like you do ready to unwind on a Friday night. One drink turns into two, two drinks turn into three, maybe you get offered something special by the bartender in your watering hole of choice and pretty soon you are maybe one or two sheets to the wind in pretty short order.

Then all of a sudden BAM!!!! The floor seems to drop out from beneath you and you are out cold. When you come to you are in pitch blackness and of all things your shoes are gone. Maybe there's someone near you but you can't see a damn thing so you don't really know. You are cold, disoriented, hungry and more than a little hung over. You feel a little bit of fresh air in the dank spot that somehow you've ended up in so you feel and inch your way towards it, stepping on something sharp along the way that feels like its cutting into the soles of your naked feet. When you finally get to the fresh-er air, all you find is a metal grate in a brick wall, solid and unforgiving with bars like a jailhouse cell. Maybe you can make out someone moving beyond the iron you are now gripping so you yell for help. Absolutely nothing happens. Ever. Nobody cares.

You may not really know what's happened to you right at that point but you've just been Shanghaied. The next three to six years of your life are going to be hell on Earth, if you even make it that far. The worst part is, you don't really understand how bad it's going to get yet. You will when the buyers show up.

Hobo's. Note the roped off grate in front of the window.

There's a place in Portland's Old North End today called Hobo's Restaurant and Lounge. It seems like a nice enough place on the outside. Maybe even a good place to get a drink or two or three on a Friday night. You might have to walk past a few actual hobos on your way to the entrance, a symbol of just what the homeless situation is like in Portland, but you'll be fine. Open the door to the place and you'll find a classic dive bar, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Long bar, dimly lit with wooden bar stools notched and worn by countless barflies, shelves stocked full with liquor and tap beer in front of a mirrored wall.

Go to Hobo's at just the wrong time, though, and you'll find some shady characters there, men or women determined to lure you underground and tell you about the city's dark past of kidnapping and coerced labor, of young men and women taken against their will and forced into servitude. They'll have you walking around pitch black basements that seem to go forever, terrified of seeing ghosts. If you are lucky, they'll even give you an operable flashlight and let you see the light of day again. 

That's exactly where we found ourselves on the last night of our stay in Portland, determined to learn something about the city's more sinister history. And we actually paid these shady characters for the pleasure of taking us underground. Strange happenings indeed.

Opium den? Or something more pedestrian? Difficult to say.

Portland, Oregon was established for good in the middle of the 19th century. The place where the current city is standing was used as a stopping place along the Willamette River in the 1830s before the city was named in 1845 (based on a coin flip) and incorporated in 1851. The site proved an ideal one at the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia Rivers with both a deep harbor and an easy journey to the Pacific Ocean.

When the early settlers of the Pacific Northwest started arriving in Portland, they found themselves surrounded with old growth forests. And of course like any member of our species looking to make a quick buck, they figured why not start cutting all these trees down. Who cares that they have been here for decades or centuries (some reports have Douglas firs in this neck of the woods at 300 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter!), let's make them into timber, build ourselves some homes and stores and make a little money in the process. The first west coast sawmill was already operational in Fort Vancouver, Washington as of 1827. All the place needed was some customers and some workers.

About 20 years later, the Oregon Trail was open for business. What had started as a pathway laid out by fur traders and navigable by foot and horse only had by the mid 1840s been widened and improved to allow the passage of wagons, which meant families and settlers and anyone just looking for a new start somewhere different. Hello, customers! Hello, workers!

Logging back in the 1800s in Oregon was tough work. I imagine that kind of work is completely backbreaking anywhere in the world today. But in Oregon in the second half of the 19th century? Think axes and saws worked entirely by hand. Think frontier life! Think no infrastructure to get around meaning you likely stayed out in the woods for days or weeks on end. Think poor sanitation and worker safety. Think no labor laws. And have you ever been in the woods of Oregon? These trees are tough and the land is mountainous. People started out cutting down trees next to the Columbia and floating them down the river. That kind of quick and easy method of getting lumber to market would only last as long as there were trees near the river. After that, they would need to be moved by the muscle and sweat of young men.

So given all that kind of life, it's pretty easy for me to understand how loggers would feel about cutting loose in the Old North End (sometimes known as Old Town Chinatown among other things) on payday after a few weeks felling trees. But if they didn't keep their wits about them and a sober head on their shoulders, they might find themselves in a dark cell under whatever bar they chose that night in a lot more trouble than they ever wanted to be in their lives.

Box of old loggers shoes mysteriously discovered in the tunnels below Portland's Old North End.

Back to Friday night at Hobo's and we've met one of those shady characters I talked about earlier. We'll call her Cindy because, well...that's her name. Cyndi works for the Cascade Geographic Society, a non-profit organization under the leadership and guidance of one Michael P. Jones, which is dedicated at least in part to keeping the history of Portland's Old North End alive and well in the 21st century. We've met up with her for one purpose: to head underground into the spaces where some unsuspecting logger out for a good time on a night in town might have found himself suddenly and very much against his will about 150 years ago.

We met Cyndi and a group of people just like us who were curious about the legends of the Portland underworld (literally the underworld) in the courtyard of Hobo's for a quick safety and history lesson before daring to head down underneath the place to see what we could find. A few notes before we start and we'll skip the safety stuff here because you don't really need that to read a blog now, do you?

First thing we need to know is that in Portland in the 19th century, kidnapping drunk young men and selling them to sea captains willing to take a chance on buying the abilities of an unconscious (or is he dead?) potential sailor was fairly common. Sure you paid money upfront and didn't really know what you were getting but its not like you need to pay them for their services, right? I mean, you just bought a person. You own them. All you have to do is keep them alive. And maybe then even not. This practice was called crimping or more commonly Shanghaiing because you would likely end up at some point in Shanghai, China after having been forced to cross the Pacific as property probably less valuable than the cargo the ship was carrying.

Secondly, we are lucky to know all this thanks to Michael P. Jones, who stumbled upon a series of tunnels under the buildings of downtown Portland as a seven year old boy with the help of an old sea captain who passed along his accounts of what happened below the streets. The fact that there was (or still is) a network of tunnels below the city makes Portland unique as a crimping town; in other cities, the Shanghaiers would need to wait for ships to come into port before knocking out and selling potential seamen into slavery; in Portland, the tunnels served as holding cells. Cool, right? And I get that this all sounds pretty Scooby Doo and a little on the unbelievable side but just bear with me a little. We'll get to all that.

One final thing: the tour is not just about Shanghaiing. There may have been white slavers selling women into prostitution and, um, don't be surprised if you encounter a ghost or two. Um, what was that? Tell you more about it underground. Let's go!

Heading underground. Follow Cyndi and grab a flashlight from the box on the right on the way in.

To this point, we've accepted without question that there's this underground maze of tunnels below the city of Portland. Why is that, exactly? Cyndi had that explanation handy for us. 

River cities all over the world often look like they are a solid landmass built up to support mankind on either side of a wide waterway. The current picture the traveler sees when visiting may be way different than the original landscape and Portland is no exception. Apparently there were a series of streams that were buried below the city grid in the 1870s and captured inside arched brick tunnels. Buildings that formed the early downtown Portland were built on top of these tunnels and businesses often found it handy to have a basement, especially when some were connected directly to the Willamette River along the tops of those tributaries that were buried.

As the city filled up, human waste became a problem. The first solution was open troughs in the centers of city streets but (and with no surprise here) this situation soon became intolerable. Where the old streams went, the sewers were destined to go in the 1890s. Like the streams, the sewers were also buried in tunnels below the buildings of downtown and routed to dump right into the Willamette River winding through the city. Nice, right?

Incredibly, this dumping-raw-sewage-into-the-river-situation lasted until the mid-1920s when the smell at the waterfront from exposed sewer pipes at low tide and periodic floods of the Willamette which backed sewage waste into downtown streets and buildings became just too much. The solution? Build a floodwall along the river and pump the sewage elsewhere. When this project was finished in 1929, there was a basement below almost every street and building in downtown Portland which used to be the buffer for sewer backups. Every building including those in the Old North End. Voila! The Shanghai tunnels!

Comfy bed for a quick nap? Don't believe it. It's so the merch won't get damaged.

Our entrance to the Shanghai tunnels was through a steel door in the sidewalk right in front of Hobo's. One minute we were on NW Third Avenue; the next we were in the basement below the bar with a flashlight that didn't work. For the next 90 minutes or so, I'd be walking around listening to Cyndi regale us with tales from the tunnels while hunched over so there was no way I could possible hit my head on doorways, ceilings or wet sewer pipes (ewww!).

This crimping enterprise was some seriously nasty and sinister stuff. The imaginary scenario I started this post with seemed to be all too real and anyone could be in on the gig except the target himself. Think you are getting a good deal when the bartender offers you discounted liquor or something extra special from the back because you look like a gentleman of discerning taste? He's probably either a Shanghaier or in league with someone who is and trying to get you incapacitated as quickly as possible.

That moment the floor seemed to drop out below you? It probably actually did and you were just too drunk to notice. Bars and saloons had trapdoors (they called them deadfalls) in the actual bar areas which could be opened to drop you right down into the basement onto a mattress (don't want to damage the merchandise by breaking bones; need a soft landing) with a couple of guys down there to welcome you into a cell and quickly re-set the deadfall.

And that feeling of stepping on something sharp with bare feet? Shanghaiers knew you couldn't get far without shoes (which they removed), especially if there were shards of glass mixed in with the dirt. Even if you did manage to get far, they just needed to follow the trail of blood to find out where you got to. We saw all this stuff: a deadfall with an old filthy mattress below for a soft(er) landing, a box of old loggers shoes found somewhere in the labyrinth below the city and we even got to reach our fingers through one of the old cell grates. Creepy, creepy stuff indeed.

If you got snatched, by the way, you could count on at least three to six years of forced labor, that's if you even made it to Shanghai or wherever the ship that had enslaved you was taking you. If rations got tight, some ships' crews were know to engage in cannibalism and there was nobody lower in the pecking order than a Shanghaied sailor. Hearing all of this with the sounds of boots and shoes walking back and forth on the circa 1885 floors of Hobo's above you made it somehow even creepier.

Chair in a box. No desire to ever spend time somewhere like this.

As if all that wasn't bad enough, apparently the tunnels were used for other purposes too. Able bodied men weren't the only victims of kidnapping who spent time involuntarily below the Old North End. There were likely countless numbers of women who were snatched and forced into sexual slavery or prostitution. Cyndi showed us a wooden box with a chair that these women were held in while their captors "broke" them to accept that their fate was hopeless. She did this while relaying the story of one especially ruthless white slaver who claimed he could break a kidnapped woman or girl in just 24-48 hours. Chilled by tales of men losing years off their lives while in slavery? The women never came back.

We also gazed with wonder at a room with a three tiered bunkbed allegedly used as an opium den. This was Old Town Chinatown at one point after all and there's nothing like whiling away the afternoon on a bed smoking some opium to make you feel a little chilled out. And yes, getting raided by the police was a risk so the operators of these dens set up their own security system in the pitch black tunnels consisting of a series of empty tin cans on a string. Hear the sound of cans clanking and get the heck out of there. By the way, the bottom bunk of the three we saw was the most expensive; closer to the ground means less distance to fall.

And wasn't there something about ghosts in there? Yep for sure. Cyndi started us off with warnings not to freak out if the women on the tour heard someone talking to them or the men felt someone who was decidedly not there tugging on their shirts. She claimed she'd witnessed both as well as the door to the wooden box with the chair mysteriously closing on its own.

And that's not all. People have claimed to have heard a baby crying or a woman singing lullabies in one part of the tunnel where a prostituted woman and her child were kept. There have also been reports of full body apparitions, particularly of a prostitute turned police informant who was killed in the tunnels by the very police she was helping out. Believe in ghosts? I do (not kidding). I'm freaked out a little by the very suggestion of the supernatural.

The way out! Finally!

Concerned for my safety at this point? Don't be. I'm back out of the tunnels and secure at home unscarred and mercifully ghost encounter-free. About the scariest thing that happened down under the floors of Hobo's to us was our flashlight not working. And let me tell you, iPhones are better than flashlights. 

For those of you who are skeptical of this entire story, you are not alone. Try looking all this stuff up on the internet and you might not find much of it at all. I know because I tried. Hard. What I did find was any number of online articles or blog posts casting doubts about the history of the tunnels under Portland's Old North End. These same folks claim the tours run by the Cascade Geographic Society and another outfit offering similar experiences are nothing but tourist traps and cite the complete lack of physical record as proof that nothing shady ever happened.

For me, I have no real idea whether what we were told that Friday night in the courtyard of Hobo's and then in the old tunnels below the place was a hundred percent accurate or not. The accounts are related as folklore passed down from an old sea captain to Michael P. Jones himself. And folklore by its very definition is as a good a part legend and myth as anything else. Do I believe there are ghosts down underground where we were taken? Maybe. Maybe not. I might prefer to believe because it makes the whole experience more real and intriguing to me. Do I believe something illicit or illegal happened in those tunnels, including maybe kidnappings or murders or selling men and women into slavery? Absolutely. I don't need any proof to believe that. There's no way everything that happened in those tunnels was on the up and up.

Here's what I do know. I paid less than the cost of a couple of beers to spend an hour and a half to get into an historic part of Portland that I couldn't possibly get to myself. I got treated to a story for that entire 90 minutes that fascinated me, intrigued me, connected me better to the history of Portland and maybe made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck at one part or another. Do I believe it all? No way. There are parts of the story that just don't add up to me. Do I believe some or most of it? Ab-so-lute-ly. I know I was told some tales that were totally truthful, even if I can't pinpoint exactly what parts those were. Don't knock it without trying it. Go underground and tell me you don't believe any of it then.

I'm out! And totally unharmed.

If you don't believe any part of the story that Cyndi and her counterparts tell you on these tours, I'm sure they might be OK with your skepticism. But there's one thing that they tell you towards the end of your time underground that they do want you to believe and that is that human trafficking is alive and well in our world today. And not just in some far off third world country. I mean right here at home in the good old U. S. of A.

The statistics from the Polaris Project, an anti-human trafficking organization are staggering. Over 40 million victims of human trafficking globally. 25% of the victims are children and 75% are women. The Ricky Martin Foundation is a similar organization based in Puerto Rico and the statistics on its website are equally, if not more, disturbing. The average cost of a slave is $90. A minor becomes a victim of sexual exploitation every 3 minutes in the United States. Check out a full list of organizations working to fight this evil on CNN. This stuff is real. Sorry to bring you down at the end of this post. And yes, it's THAT Ricky Martin.

That's all I have to say on this one. If you are ever in Portland, I think it's worth a couple of hours to go and do this. I know I don't regret it. All the photographs in this post were taken by me but they are used with the kind permission of the Cascade Geographic Society © 2018. I appreciate the courtesy extended to me.

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How We Did It

We made our way under the streets of Portland with the Cascade Geographic Society. They offer tours most all days of the week. Times vary. Sunday tours are at 4:30 pm; Monday through Thursday tours begin at 6:30 pm; and there are typically multiple times available on Fridays and Saturdays. The best thing to do is to visit their website for more information. 

Online reservations are quick and easy. Meet your group at the completely excellent dive bar Hobo's at 120 NW Third Avenue in Portland's Old North End. We found street parking plentiful and totally free.

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Lewis & Clark, Part 1

The title of this post is somewhat optimistic. It suggests that there will be more posts on this same subject coming. And while I can well believe that will be true since there are many, many posts I can imagine writing about the 1804-1806 trek across the continent by Lewis and Clark, right now I have no specific plans to do so. We'll see if there's ever a part 2. I guess ultimately I do have some control over that.

In July of 1803, President Thomas Jefferson, with of course the full backing of Congress, went shopping. The merch in his shopping cart that month? The Louisiana Territory, a piece of land that included all or parts of 15 present day states and two Canadian provinces that would about double the size of the less than 30 year old United States of America. This was not an uncomplicated purchase. It involved delicate negotiations with France (the seller); smoothing over hurt feelings with Spain who used to own the place and never really came to grips with France possessing it in the first place; threats of overstepping the bounds of presidential authority; and a whole boatload of cash, like 68 million francs in cash and forgiven debts. That's about 600 billion of today's dollars. Yes, billion!

The story of the Louisiana Purchase could fill books. I'm not going to write any more about it because this post isn't about that slice of American history.

Before he had even taken possession of his new territory, Jefferson was already planning to have the place explored. Call it due diligence, if you will, although in this case he was exploring it after he had put it in his cart and checked out. I guess I would have preferred to know what I was getting before I plunked down millions and millions of francs for a piece of land, but in Jefferson's defense, it probably turned out to be a good investment.

To lead this expedition, which became known as the Corps of Discovery, Jefferson turned to his private secretary and army veteran Captain Meriwether Lewis. Co-captaining the journey would be Second Lieutenant William Clark who had met Lewis while serving in the army in Ohio and the Northwest Territory. Their stated mission was to explore the Missouri River to find the most practical navigable waterway across the continent. There may have been some secondary goals like making sure the Native Americans who were already on the land understood that their land now belonged to the United States and some other, you know...minor stuff like that in there. Typical white man conqueror stuff, you know?

On May 14, 1804, William Clark left Camp River Dubois in Illinois where the men of the Corps had spent the winter and headed (along with those men) to join Meriwether Lewis in St. Charles, Missouri. The Corps of Discovery was off, a band that would ultimately involve 57 men, one woman, one child and one dog. Most of them would not be seen again until they arrived back in St. Louis on September 23, 1806, more than two years and four months later. Long time.

The courtyard of Fort Clatsop.

I am fascinated by the Corps of Discovery. I mean, it's just at the turn of the 19th century, the average life expectancy is like the late 30s and here's this opportunity for a bunch of young men (plus one woman, her child and a dog in case you didn't get that the first time) to go explore a completely unknown land potentially filled with innumerable and brand new ways to die and they are all in. 

So they set out with a couple of years worth of food and a boat that they are supposed to be able to dismantle to carry around waterfalls and things like that and venture into a land where they know they will likely run into people hostile to them who are better armed and know the territory better than they do. They are charged with a mission that we now know is completely insane since there is no water route through the continent but which somehow seems like a reasonable request I guess. And they do it anyway. All of it.

They start out by rowing their boat upriver on the Missouri; almost get killed by the Lakota; get attacked by grizzly bears (which they have never seen before) and killer mosquitos (which might be worse than the bears); have to spend the winter in the middle of North Dakota (although it wasn't called that then); find out there's no water route across the continent when the Missouri gets too small to navigate; almost die of starvation twice before getting bailed out by the Shoshone and Nez Perce; and that's not even considering the fact that they almost froze to death in the Bitterroot Mountains in present day Idaho. Along the way they lost one man. ONE! And he died of appendicitis. And they made it all the way back again. How badass is that?

I get that I've way abbreviated all the hardship and near death that these people endured 200 plus years ago in the prior three paragraphs or so but the point there was to express why I am intrigued with this journey, not to tell a complete tale of their journey there and back again.

William Clark's triumphal message.

Lewis and Clark's voyage from St. Louis to what is now the western coast of the United States is probably the first epic American road trip, although for reasons detailed above they probably wouldn't label it quite that way. In 2011, I made my own version of the cross country drive across our nation. From Washington, DC to St. Louis, we improvised, going where we had the most interest as we weaved our way across the midwest. But starting at the Mississippi, we pretty much followed the route blazed by the Corps of Discovery all the way to the Pacific, although admittedly after traveling up to the border of South Dakota we hung an abrupt left rather than following Lewis and Clark and Co. into North Dakota.

Understandably, there are tons and tons of sites along the roads and rivers from the Gateway Arch to the Oregon-Washington border that were touched by these two men and the rest of their crew. To visit every one of them would probably take about as long as it took the Corps to get out to the west coast, or at the very least several months. But seeing as we were all the way out in northwest Oregon in late June and seeing as I'm a little fixated on the story of the Corps, we figured we may as well check out some of the spots where they spent some time at the end of their journey before they decided to turn around and do it all over again in reverse.

Fort Clatsop. There's a Columbian black-tailed deer eating lunch or breakfast just to the left of the main gate.

I can't imagine what a relief it was for William Clark when he wrote "Ocian (sic) in view! O! the joy." in his journal on November 7, 1805. Almost 18 months after the start of their journey, the object of the whole quest in the first place was in sight even if they didn't make it the whole way on water like Jefferson had imagined they would.

Unfortunately for Clark, the Pacific Ocean was not actually in sight. What he had mistaken for the ocean was just a very wide part of the Columbia River. The Pacific would show up about two weeks or so later after they had gone a little further west down the Columbia. By the time they got there, I imagine Clark and the rest of the Corps had to have known that they were not turning back any time soon, that winter was coming (or was already there) and that heading back through the Cascades or the Bitterroots or the Rockies was just out of the question right then. They'd have to spend the winter around the mouth of the Columbia and they would need to set to work solving that problem immediately.

After a little searching, they found a spot on a tributary just south of Youngs Bay right near where the Columbia meets the Pacific. Today that river is called Lewis and Clark River and the place where they made shelter for the winter is the center of the Lewis and Clark National and State Historical Parks, a joint venture between the National Park Service and the states of Washington and Oregon, consisting of 12 separate sites arrayed along a distance of about 40 miles along and near the Pacific coast of the two states.

Visiting all 12 sites in the Park will likely take you the better part of a day, if not more than that. We decided to visit two of the 12: the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washington's Cape Disappointment State Park and Fort Clatsop, a 2006 reconstruction of the log fort that the Corps ended up staying in from December 7, 1805 to March 23 of the following year. The Interpretive Center is just awesome. If there's everything and anything you could want to know about the Corps of Discovery once they cleared the Rocky Mountains and made their way into Washington and Oregon, you can go to Cape Disappointment (how awesome a name is that by the way?) and learn yourself all of it.

The interior of Fort Clatsop.

The Interpretive Center was a great bonus to our Lewis and Clark day, but we didn't set out from Portland to make that the centerpiece of day out. That honor was reserved for Fort Clatsop and a site just a bit to the north in Long Beach, WA. But we'll come back to that second one.

Of the many many many sites associated with the Corps of Discovery that I referred to earlier in this post, very few have actual tangible objects associated with what happened on the voyage to the Pacific and back. Most are "Lewis and Clark stopped here" sites. Indeed, most of the pieces and parts that make up Lewis and Clark National Park are just those kinds of places. Fort Clatsop stands out as an exceptional site in this regard. Not only do they have something for us to look at that's real, it's a replica of a building where the expedition actually stayed for a few months. It's not the first replica, by the way; the first one was built in 1955 and lasted until it was destroyed by fire in 2005.

With all our comforts of modern life, it is difficult to imagine that 31 people (and a  dog) could last an entire winter in northwest Oregon in an un-insulated, seven-room fort made of logs, especially when you consider that four of the seven rooms were pretty much devoted to about 20% of the people living there. I guess the business of staying alive likely kept them way more occupied than we are today with that same task. Most of their waking hours were probably spent hunting for meat and trading for vegetables with the native Chinook and Clatsop around the Fort area. 

Oh...and apparently of the 106 days the company lived in the fort, it rained all but 12 of them. I can't imagine that made things any better.

It doesn't take long to check out the entirety of Fort Clatsop, and that's if you linger at the area at the back of the Fort used for meat curing and cooking. It was, I am sure, a tough winter for everyone but of course, everyone made it through alive (I didn't write this earlier but the one death of the trip happened in present day Iowa, not out west). I'm sure it helped that Lewis and Clark insisted on running life at the Fort like they were in the military (which I guess they really were anyway), with the routines of hoisting and lowering the flag daily and posting a sentry on guard 24 hours a day.

William Clark's dimensioned sketch of Fort Clatsop.

The Fort replica looks incredible. I'm sure it's a product of it being just 12 years old at the time of our visit. In fact, it looked so good that I questioned if the original fort back over 200 years ago was anywhere close to the quality of workmanship of the replica. I highly doubted it. I also questioned the veracity of the reproduction. I mean, it's not like there were photographs of the original Fort, right? And there's no way it survived for many years after it was abandoned in the spring of 1806.

Turns out I might be wrong on both counts. In their company, Lewis and Clark had a man named Patrick Gass, who had worked as a carpenter or carpenter's apprentice for five years before volunteering for the Corps of Discovery. And at least some of his experience was in house building. I'm not sure that he was building log forts and I'm sure he didn't have the resources at his disposal that our National Park Service had in 2006, but I guess it's feasible that he came somewhat close to what's standing in western Oregon today.

And of course, there's a dimensioned plan of the Fort for the Park Service to build from. William Clark drew one on the cover of his journal. No three dimensional renderings or anything but I guess written descriptions probably got the NPS close enough when they rebuilt the thing.

The beginning of the path to Clark's Tree.

Between the time William Clark mistakenly identified the Columbia River as the Pacific Ocean and the completion of construction at Fort Clatsop, the Corps of Discovery did actually reach the west coast for real. And when they did on November 19, 1805, Clark made his mark for anyone in the future to see. According to his journal entry of that day he carved "my name on a Small pine, the Day of the month & Year, Etc." The alleged official inscription he gouged into the tree he selected for this purpose was "William Clark. November 19, 1805. By land from U. States."

This was not the first time either Clark or Meriwether Lewis had made record of their passage (or in this case, arrival) by inscribing their names and the date into something. There are other locations in the "U. States" where such carvings exist, most famously at Pompey's Pillar National Monument in Yellowstone County, Montana. But this one was the last on the way out for sure, since it marked the discovery of the Pacific and anything else was on the way back.

What are the odds that tree is standing, either dead or alive, some 213 years later? Well, actually...zero. It's gone. I read one account that it was removed by a road cleanup crew but since the article offered no more proof than that opinion or any details about the date (I mean, not even a date range...) then I'm just extremely skeptical of its accuracy. Nonetheless, it ain't there anymore and it hasn't been for a while.

There is, however, a replacement tree in Long Beach, Washington for the Lewis and Clark faithful to visit and feel like they've checked one more box on some mystical Corps of Discovery checklist. After stops at Fort Clatsop and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, we made our own way to Clark's Tree, which is not an actual tree but a bronze sculpture of a tree by artist Stanley Wanlass complete with the words William Clark is alleged to have carved.

This experience, accessed by walking down a path to the beach shown in the photograph above can either be a check the box experience or a pivotal stop at an historic point in American history, depending on the level of romance you choose to bring to the occasion. I prefer the latter. This was as valuable as spending some time at Fort Clatsop; I felt like we were standing at the point where something super-historically important happened, even though I admit I have no idea whether the spot where Clark's Tree stands today is the exact same one as that pine Clark wrote about in his journal a couple of centuries ago.

Clark's Tree. Stanley Wanlass, artist.

The Clark's Tree sculpture is one stop on The Lewis and Clark Discovery Trail, a 16.4 mile long path along the Washington shore. Other stops along the Trail include a statue of Lewis and Clark and a sculpture depicting the skeleton of a grey whale that the Corps encountered during the winter of 1805-1806. I wanted to see the Tree and Fort Clatsop so we skipped those two, along with the other ten sites that make up the Lewis and Clark National Park. There's only so much of a completist about this subject I can be and that's as far as I chose to push it on this trip. Plus, you know...there's microbrewed beer in Portland that was calling my name.

I have no idea whether I will ever make it to another important checkpoint of the Corps of Discovery but I can think of four or five spots that I would love to find or return to. There's a long list of places still to go. I hope one day I'll get to write a blog post called Lewis & Clark, Part 2. But before I end this post, I just have one more thing to say which as it turns out will actually take five paragraphs.

Sacagawea, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau and Seaman the dog. Cascade Locks, OR.

The Corps of Discovery ultimately counted among its number 59 people. 56 of those people were white men. Three were not. Among their company were a Shoshone woman named Sacagawea, her son Jean Baptiste Charbonneau and York, William Clark's slave. Sacagawea was part of the expedition because Lewis and Clark hired her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, a trapper from Quebec, as a guide through the western part of the journey. And where Charbonneau went, so did his wife, whom he had purchased one or two years earlier from the Hidatsa after they had kidnapped her in a raid on the Shoshone. York was part of the Corps because he was Clark's property and if we thought Sacagawea had little choice in whether she went along or not, York had even less. Jean Baptiste was born along the way.

Both Sacagawea and York had important parts to play in the journey to the Pacific. At times it appeared they were treated like full and equal members of the company as they were both recorded as full voting members in a decision as to where to look for a campsite in the winter of 1805. By all accounts, York enjoyed more freedom while traveling across the continent and away from the east coast than he ever had in his life. I said "more freedom", not "freedom". He also probably worked as hard if not harder than all the enlisted men and likely received less, if any, compensation, although I could find no evidence either way so I'm really just speculating here. Accounts of what happened to York after he returned to the States are unclear. Versions of the tale include that he was freed by Clark either immediately or after a ten year period and some even indicate he was freed and then voluntarily returned to slavery. That last point seems ridiculous by the way.

Sacagawea's role in the Corps seems more certain. She was a factor in Lewis and Clark engaging the services of Charbonneau, as she was the only member of the expedition who spoke Shoshone and it seemed pretty certain that they would bump into that nation at some point along the way to the coast. 

They did. In August of 1805. And Sacagawea was probably responsible for saving the lives of everyone in the expedition. By that point, the Corps of Discovery was almost ruined with no boats, no horses and no way to cross the mountains they would need to pass to reach the Pacific. Their only hope lay in Sacagawea's ability to convince the Shoshone to trade some horses, a task made eminently simpler by her recognizing that the chief of the village was her brother Cameahwait, whom she had been separated from some years earlier when she was taken by the Hidatsa. Who knows if she would have been successful if she didn't have her brother to help her, but that connection couldn't have hurt.

She also saved all the records and journals of both Lewis and Clark in May 1805 when she jumped into the river to save these items which had fallen from a capsized boat. Where would history be without this woman?

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How We Did It

The Pacific coast of Oregon and Washington are about two to two and a half hours' drive west from Portland, depending on which site you are traveling to.

Fort Clatsop and the Visitor Center for Lewis and Clark National and State Historic Parks are open from 9 am to 6 pm in the summer months and 9 am to 5 pm the rest of the year. They are closed on Christmas Day. Check the Park's website for when exactly summer starts and ends. 

The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center at Cape Disappointment State Park is open from 10 am to 5 pm daily from April 1 through September 30. Outside of that date range the Center is only open Wednesday through Sunday but it keeps the same hours. The Center is closed on some holidays. Check the Center's website for the particular details. There is a fee to park in the Park. There is a parking machine that dispenses tickets near the Center.

Clark's Tree is in Long Beach, Washington on the beach. You can access it at the end of 26th Street NW in Long Beach and it's about maybe a half a mile from where you are no longer allowed to drive. We found parking at The Breakers hotel parking lot. I have no idea if you are allowed to park there to visit the Tree but nothing bad happened to us when we did it. Interestingly, the hotel's website has a picture of Clark's Tree front and center on their homepage.

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