PORTLAND COOL: Bikes, MAX, and Food Carts

Portland leads the nation in food carts, with hundreds of delicious mobile choices–just don’t call them roach coaches!

I grew up in Detroit, where from the 1970s on, essentially nobody from suburbia ventured downtown, because of a fear of crime. As a result, the city withered and largely died, though today there are brave artists and urban farmers and other souls hoping to spur a renaissance of that historic rust belt city.

In contrast, Portland, Oregon, amazes me with its pulsing vision of what a thriving downtown can be. The heart of Portland looks like what Detroit may have been 75 years ago, with good restaurants, shops, hotels, and galleries everywhere. Light rail trains (MAX) and streetcars roll through the city and out to distant suburbs. People are everywhere on the streets, giving pedestrians a feeling of participation, excitement, and safety.

Bicyclists commuting to work across the Hawthorne Bridge

Bicycles are also everywhere. Portland has a slogan, “Bike City USA,” and over 6% of workers commute to their jobs by bicycle–an incredible number! Bicyclists zoom over four bridges crossing the Willamette River, and some cyclists double their green creds by boarding MAX with their bikes.

Hungry? Portland is the nation’s capital for food carts, with over 450 choices available throughout the city. Food carts are usually tiny trailers that each sell a limited menu of often ethnic cuisine. At noon, office workers pour down to the “pods” (pods are groups of food carts, usually set up around the perimeter of a parking lot) to get their choice of Thai, Polish, hippie, Indian, vegan, Mexican, fusion, sushi, and scores of other kinds of food. There is usually no

seating area, so people either stand around eating, take the food back to the office, or walk to a nearby urban park. I did the latter, with my excellent turkey, cucumber, and creme fraiche sandwich on a crusty long bun, where I sat near a group of scruffy teens who came to the city for the day to hang out with friends in the park. It took me back to the hippie days of old, when kids in bell bottoms and shoulder length hair and guitars would gather in parks all across America.

I enjoyed spending the day walking around town, camera in hand. On the other hand, there were all the beggars asking for spare change and foul-mouthed transients and a homeless gathering place along the Willamette. Portland certainly isn’t exempt from contemporary issues of joblessness, homelessness, and hopelessness. But it’s still a very cool city, and is a magnet drawing 20-somethings from everywhere.

Portland is a blend of modern skyscrapers, such as the Fox Tower, with delightful elements on the human, streetscape scale

A modest facade belies the fact that Powell’s Books in downtown Portland is the largest independent new and used bookstore in the entire world

The Pianobike Kid livens the streetscape in Portland with a moveable feast of music

TriMet MAX light rail trains run from the city to the suburbs, and are usually packed with passengers

Portland is known as the “Rose City” and “Bike City USA;” two residents boarding a MAX train illustrate why it deserves the nicknames

The Hawthorne Bridge viewed from Tom McCall Waterfront Park, a park named for a popular anti-growth Republican Governor who famously said, at the height of the first mass environmental movement in 1971, “Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.”

A blend of old and new, as a MAX light rail trail crosses the old Steel Bridge

I took this photograph along the bike corridor across the Steel Bridge, because I think it represents the “look” of industry a century ago

Colorful Mexican sodas lined up at the front of a food cart selling good food inspired by cuisine from south of the border

Portland is justifiably proud of itself, billing itself as “the city that works;” this sign greets visitors coming into the city

For those who want to know more about the food cart culture of Portland, go to Portland Food Carts

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website

ICE CAVES: Mt. Rainier and the Goat Rocks Wilderness

Interior of ice cave carved by the Cispus River in the Goat Rocks Wilderness of Gifford Pinchot National Forest

Standing before the ice cave entrance, I felt the menacing breath of the ice age upon me. Outside, the day was sunny and mild; inside the cave entrance, the atmosphere was dark, with a thin fog carried by the breeze coming down the long and icy corridor. The wind smelled of elemental rocks and ice, and carried a message of unrelenting cold.

Lower entrance of an ice cave in the  Summerland subalpine meadows of Mt. Rainier National Park

Ice caves, as they are known here in the Pacific Northwest, occur where a creek tumbling down a mountain cuts under a snowfield. An ice cave gradually enlarges as the summer wears on, and it eventually collapses and disappears with the melting of the snowfield. The summer of 2011 was colder than normal, and there was a heavy snowpack from late mountain snows last spring, so some of the snowfields will remain and will grow in thickness with new snow in the cold seasons ahead.

Translucent walls of the Summerland ice cave

The walls of ice caves become scalloped, much like the sun cups that form atop snowfields. The flowing stream, warmer than the frozen snow and ice, causes melting. And the patterns and colors are extraordinarily beautiful. In fact, I could become addicted to photographing every ice cave I found, except for one thing:

ICE CAVES ARE NOT SAFE!

The constant melting and collapsing along the route of the stream is exceedingly dangerous for humans. This point was brought home to me several years ago when my wife called and said she had been on a backpacking trip and was one of the first on the scene of a tragedy. A woman from Seattle had ventured into the entrance of an ice cave, and the roof suddenly collapsed, sending tons of ice down on her head and completely burying her. Despite the heroic efforts of hikers to dig her out using an ice axe, she was dead. This kind of tragedy has happened with regularity during the years I’ve lived in Washington State, and it serves as a warning to me.

Cispus River Ice Cave

Despite the look of my pictures here, I did not venture more than five feet into an ice cave, and I was crawling on cold earth with my feet in a frigid stream. Overhead, the ice layer was up to maybe six inches thick, and I made a calculated risk that even if the ceiling collapsed it didn’t have far to fall and wouldn’t have the momentum to kill me. To further hedge my bets, I had the camera on autofocus and autoexposure and shot blindly, by instinct, rather than trying to contort myself impossibly (and thus disturb the walls and roof of the cave) to look through the viewfinder. I used the LCD to check my results, and adjust my angles and exposures accordingly.

By the way, the beauty of these ice caves is an ephemeral beauty, since they normally disappear each year. Almost none of them have names, since they are essentially invisible to most hikers. In fact, the Big Four Ice Caves in Washington State’s Mt. Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest is the only named ice cave I can think of. These caves are off-limits to hikers because of deaths that occurred in 1998 and 2010, though there is a well-maintained trail that leads to the vicinity of the ice caves so that people can see the entrances.

 A Summerland ice cave at Mt. Rainier

There is another type of ice cave I would love to photograph: an ice cave through a glacier. Mt. Rainier had a spectacular ice cave near Paradise that lasted for decades, but it disappeared in the late 1980s with climate change and the retreat of Rainier’s glaciers. This cave was immense and was flooded with an eerie blue light that I associate with nuclear reactors. Alas, I’ll have to go somewhere else to see such a sight. Perhaps Iceland.

Upper entrance of a Summerland ice cave, with a torrent of meltwaters cascading into the snowfield

Scalloped walls of a Summerland ice cave

Atop a snowfield at Summerland, showing the melting formations known as suncups

Entrance to a Summerland ice cave

Upper entrance of the Cispus River ice cave, with the Goat Rocks (remnants of an old volcano that blew its top) in the distance

The Cispus River ice cave is colored by the deep blue of compressed snow and ice, and the red tint of watermelon snow–a coloration caused by a dense concentration of algae

Sculpted interior of a Cispus River ice cave

A final view of the Cispus River ice cave, which was small enough that it may no longer exist this year

To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com

To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website