Exploring Oregon

I love the idea of exploring the world. But since I cannot afford to travel internationally at this point in my life, I would settle for exploring the State of Oregon since it has such a diverse landscape.

I wanted to plan and catalog my exploits but "exploring Oregon" was such a general idea. My overall idea was to go to every "town" in Oregon, but I had to narrow down what that meant. If I wanted to go to every 10-building hamlet in the state, the list of destinations would be close to 1000. I had to come up with some criteria by which to separate places that I "have" to explore those that are optional. Eventually, I came up with a the following list of types of places:

• Incorporated Cities
• Census Designated Places
• Communities with dedicated Zipcodes

Cities and CDPs cover much of the state and would make a solid list of places to visit. But there were some smaller communities in more quiet and remote parts of the state that I wanted to see. If I were to simply go to Wikipedia and grab a list of all "unincorporated communities" from each county's page, I would be given a massive list of locations. Some of which include 10-home places like Ashwood, which would be an appropriate target place, and others include seemingly barren locations that have no trace of even the name of the community posted anywhere: an example being Donnybrook which is 10 miles away from Ashwood down a gravel road. I realized that many of these outlying rural areas usually need a zipcode. Since there is a central service area for each code (usually named after the most populous town in the area), this would present a reasonable criteria that would filter out the barren places. Following this rule, instead of going to Ashwood, Donnybrook and Horse Heaven, I could instead only go to Ashwood, and save myself a 90 minute roundtrip on a hilly gravel road.

I also wanted to visit the (accessible) ghost towns of Oregon. There are some that are very remote or on private property that I would skip, but there are surely others that are reachable and would present a very unique exploration experience. Ghost towns can be categorized into different groups per Ghost Town Classifications:

• A: now barren location; may have some foundations of buildings at most
• B: Rubble and/or roofless buildings
• C: Completely abandoned place with standing structures that may still have roofs
• D: May still have a small population, but there are many abandoned buildings
• E: Many historic buildings, and the population is severely reduced from its boom years

Now that I have a list of places to visit, I need a way to track that I have actually been there. I eventually came up with a list of types of things to photograph as proof. Types of things include city halls, city welcome signs, post offices, municipal parks, or simply a photograph of the entire location if a place is small enough. With a list of places to visit and types of things to photograph, I was now ready to start exploring the state.

Oregon Journeys

Click on the images to view my journeys. Here is my tracking sheet that I use to track where I have been.