Spencer's Butte

Katie D.

February 14, 2009 - 11:30 PM

Happy Valentine's Day! And, even better, Happy Birthday, Oregon!

Probably everyone has something to say about Valentine's Day: either the romance or the frustration of the over-comercialized holiday. Whatever. I'm single, but even on the Valentine's Days that I've been dating I've never been a huge fan.

So I'll spend my Valentine's Days celebrating Oregon's birthday. And this year is a big one: 150 years of Oregon greatness. What an awesome thing to be a part of.

My friends and I hiked Spencer's Butte today. It was so beautiful; Oregon is so beautiful. I can see Spencer's Butte from the front door of my house. I love the mornings when I look south to see fog on the butte, with the trees and that special early morning air quality. But I've only actually climbed it once before, during the spring of my freshman year. I was excited to go back to see the Butte again.

It was a lovely day to be hiking. It was really, really muddy, but the clouds were so dramatic and the view is spectacular. From up there Eugene looks really small, and you can see that it is really surrounded by beautiful forested areas. I love the hills and mountains stretching out in all directions from that high point. It's worth the hike, which surprised me at the end with some rock scrambling and more and more mud. We took pictures from the top: my friends all together, the heroic individual shots, and the ever-popular jumping pictures (which require about ten pictures taken per single quality shot).

Oregon landscape is still somewhat of a mystery to me. Growing up on the Front Range in Colorado, the Rocky Mountains dominated my childhood landscape. The Rockies are very dramatic: they stand in a huge unified line to the west of Denver. My drive to school every morning was always focused on the mountains as we drove west: the gray-green foothills, the deep blue-purple mountains, and the snow-covered peaks. They are so dramatic because they rise out of relatively flat and featureless plains. Denver is high in elevation, but not mountainous in its own right. I'm from flat and dry, if you get right down to it. If grass is green in Denver someone's been watering it. My landscapes are almost all artificial: the landscaped gardens, watered lawns, and trees coaxed into living where really only cottonwood and willow grow along creeks without assistance.

Then I arrived in Eugene, where even in winter the dominant color is green. Really GREEN. Green lawns, green trees. Even in winter the trees are green. Moss doesn't just grow on trees in my neck of the woods. To be quite honest, the trees here in Eugene look like a bad movie set to me out here. The kind of over-the-top set design that no one really buys into. It's a shock to my shades-of-beige world view.

And so are the mountains. Spencer's Butte is huge, and right in the middle of basic flatness. And that is odd enough. But even more strange, to me, are the Cascades (which are incredibly beautiful and I love them, although they're not quite on the same scale as the Rocky Mountains-there it is, the Colorado mountain snob coming out). You pass through the Cascades that are basically big hills to my eyes, until all of a sudden there's a huge, random mountain off all by itself. While I theoretically understand the idea of volcanoes, the reality of a huge extinct volcano just stuck out by itself in a string of small mountains looks very odd. We're talking about single mountains here, where all I've known before are mountain chains: peak upon peak continuing upward in a unified whole until you reach the Continental Divide and then move down the Western Slope. The Oregon mountains are dramatic in a different way: in their biodiversity, in that show-off green, and in those random mountains, snow-covered and showy in the midst of the rolling of the smaller mountain chain.

Perhaps this split perspective, this simultaneous mountain snobbery and green envy can only come from someone who grew up at 5,280 feet. I have the mountain love that tells me the Coastal Range are just forested hills, and then the shades-of-gray accustomed eyes that nearly fall out while driving through them. The view from Spencer's Butte is magical, like a scene from Lord of the Rings as I imagined it when I first read the Tolkein's trilogy as a child: the rocky hill, the moss hanging from the trees, and the fog rising out of the mountains in the distance. There were even faint towers of smoke rising from homes outside of the city proper. Middle Earth: magical.

I stood on the highest point of Spencer's Butte, considering my adopted home. I traded my Colorado mountains for Oregon landscapes, a starting elevation of a mile for a majestic vantage point on a butte 2,052 feet in elevation.

And that, for me, has been a fair trade.