Crystal and I spent July 9-12 around Grants Pass, chasing the Southern Oregon Lavender Trail. The trail runs a passport program every summer: six farms scattered through the Applegate Valley and the hills around the Rogue, a stamp at each one, and a raffle entry if you fill the book. We managed four of the six – The English Lavender Farm in Applegate, Applegate River Lavender in Jacksonville, Charsaw Farms out in Williams, and Lush Lavender Farm in Gold Hill. Dos Mariposas and Kingfisher Farms will have to wait for next year. We simply ran out of time, which tells you something about how easy it is to lose a whole day standing in a lavender field.
And the fields deserve it. Mid-July is peak bloom, and every farm was humming, literally. The rows lean under their own weight, the air smells like a linen closet in the best possible way, and the bees outnumber the visitors a thousand to one. They could not care less about you. My favorite stop was a drying barn strung floor to ceiling with hanging bundles, the floor dusted with fallen buds. Crystal tied off a fresh bouquet with a purple ribbon and it rode home on the dashboard.
Home base was the Weasku Inn, a 1924 fishing lodge on the Rogue River just outside Grants Pass. It is the kind of place that has photos of Clark Gable and Walt Disney on the wall because they actually stayed there. Log walls, a big stone fireplace, the river sliding by below the lawn. Highly recommended if you want somewhere quiet to come back to after a day of fields and small towns.
One day we drove down to Oregon Caves National Monument in the Siskiyous near Cave Junction. Crystal took the ranger-led tour of the marble cave and came back glowing about it. I did not go. I have a firm, lifelong policy about voluntarily going underground, and I am at peace with it. The forest up top is beautiful and I had the trees, my camera, and zero tons of rock overhead.
We also poked around the downtowns in Ashland and Medford, which are made for wandering: bookstores, galleries, little shops we had no business spending money in but did anyway. We ate well the whole trip, better than a pair of tourists deserved, and we found Apple Outlaw, a cidery in Applegate making ciders with lavender and berries grown at the same farms we had just been walking through.
Two honest notes for the record. First, it was brutally hot, the kind of inland-Oregon July heat that makes a coast dweller wilt by ten in the morning. Plan your farm visits early. Second, on July 10 the E Evans Creek Rd fire broke out in the hills northeast of Rogue River, not far from where we were staying. When we first saw the smoke column it was a reported ten acres. By the time we drove home on the 12th it had grown to around 2,700 and the sky was the color of an old bruise. As I write this it has burned past 15,000 acres, with crews about two-thirds of the way to containment. It puts a trip like this in perspective: the same heat that ripens a lavender field primes the hills around it to burn. My thoughts are with the folks who live out there and the crews on the line.
The photos below are all from the lavender farms. The bees held still for exactly none of them.
