Hiking time: 346 minutes and 3.44 seconds, or 5 hours and 46 minutes. The McCall Nature Preserve is 72 miles up the Columbia River Gorge from where we live and is halfway between the Oregon Cities of Hood River and The Dalles, and so it is east of the Oregon Cascade Crest and has a completely different kind of vegetation than the rainforest vegetation on the west side of the Crest. It is semi-arid, and this hike climbs mainly through stunted Oregon White Oak, supposedly some of them up to 800 years old. But they're the size of what you can grow in your backyard in 10 years, maybe 15 to 20 feet high and 8" in diameter. A few I saw were about a foot in diameter and knotty and convoluted, obviously very old, but still stunted in height.

This hike is in two sections, a 1,000 foot climb in a 3 mile round trip to a bald called McCall Point, at 1,720 feet. But the 1,000 foot climb is in the last mile and so it's a steep climb. The second section is a two mile round trip down a plateau with great views of the semi-arid east side Columbia Gorge and River. The plateau hike only drops a couple hundred feet in elevation. There are lots of side trails and one of them forms a loop around a pond which I never did find. There should be markers on the trail. Instead I came to two different dead ends overlooking cliffs that fall precipitously down to the Columbia River with great views of the Washington cliffs on the other side. So I was only mildly disappointed at missing the pond.

The main obstacle on this hike was the fierce wind. The temperature ranged from 68° at 8:30 in the morning to 84° at 3:00 in the afternoon, with cloudless blue skies but with a wind that frequently gusted to 40 to 50 miles an hour, practically knocking me off my feet. It was very frustrating trying to take photos on my tripod (with mountain axe). The wind averaged maybe 30 miles an hour all day long! Sometimes it blew my mountain axe right over, even though I had it firmly stuck in the ground. I had to constantly hang on to the tripod or it would have been blown over with camera and lens crashing into the hard ground. It made the hike much harder than a normal 5 mile round trip hike climbing a total of only 1,200 feet. At least the humidity was very low and I hardly sweated a drop, even with the afternoon climbing into the 80's.

Took 112 photos of which 68 made the cut. As I was taking these, I was wondering if they were going to be worthless because of motion blur due to wind shake, but the sun was so bright that my shutter speed was high enough to avoid camera shake from the wind.