Road Trip: Warrenton

Today, Google Maps let me down.

It doesn’t mention when a road is private, or that it may not be what you’d really call paved.

Skipanon Drive sounded promising, seeing as how I was looking for a site on the Skipanon Peninsula, a little spit of land which sticks out into the Columbia River at Warrenton, close to where the river meets the ocean. The LNG project at Warrenton, funded by a company called Oregon LNG, makes a fair amount of sense as far as location goes — I guess — except for its connector pipe, which would cut across farms and forests for 117 miles to get to Molalla. But the terminal site, at least, is close to the ocean, in an area with a lot of other industry, and in place that, frankly, people don’t care too much about.

Astoria is gorgeous and verging on too touristy. But cross over to Warrenton on 101 and the scene totally changes. Instead of gothic Victorians and a gussied-up small town main street, you’ve got big box stores and ugly little spread-out houses.

I didn’t get too far on Skipanon Drive because it’s gated off: property of Wayerhauser. I could see piles of logs in the distance.

Nearby, though, I found a paved walking trail that looks like it was built over old railroad tracks. It seemed to be headed in the right direction to give me a view across the inlet to where the LNG terminal would be located, so I started walking. It’s a beautiful walk through the forest that opens out, at one point, for a view across the water. There’s bench where a sad-looking woman was sitting. She told me she didn’t know what the park was called.

Eventually the path ends at a place where they were moving big logs around with a crane. Other than that it was peaceful and felt like an oasis of unadulterated nature, with herons and frogs and tall reeds. I took a photo out across the inlet, towards what looked like the undeveloped other half of the peninsula, which may someday be covered with an LNG facility, the view blocked by huge tanker ships.

I returned to the car and decided to drive around the other way, to get closer to the actual site. According to my map, N.E. King Ave. would take me to Bay Fort Road, which supposedly goes straight to the proposed site.

Turns out, King is an unmaintained stretch that was once paved, but is now full of huge potholes (all full of muddy water, no way to tell how deep they are) with ragged shards of pavement sticking up here and there. The Honda handled it better than I expected, and after a long, bouncing time, we got to a big sandy clearing. No Bay Fort Road in sight, just a bunch of off-roader’s tracks going off in different directions into the sand, with tall bushes all around so you couldn’t get any sense of where the water is.

You couldn’t see if from far off, but the whole interior of the area is well-worn tracks in the sand, made by the tires of Jeeps and motorcycles, I think. It is so NOT pristine and untouched.

As I was leaving, a sedan came bucking way too fast up King Ave., full of grinning teenagers who were holding big wax-paper cups of soda in their hands. They disappeared into the scrub.

Moral of the day: If you want to fight LNG, you’re going to have to come up with a more concrete argument than the old, “but look at this place! You’ll ruin it!”