The Dalles, a town in Oregon, sits in an 80-mile-long gulch formally known as the Columbia River Gorge, but everyone here refers to it simply as the Gorge. Although it’s only 85 miles east of rainy Portland, The Dalles, population 16,000, lies on the dry side of the dividing line between wet western Oregon and the arid country of the east. Just 20 miles to the west, in the rain- and snow-shadow of the Cascade Mountains, moss and evergreens grow on the Gorge’s walls above the town of Hood River. Once a sawmill hub, Hood River now runs on tourism; downtown, you can find a Fjällräven boutique, a place for facials called the Hood River Skin Bar, and psychics who will tell your fortune and sell you your birthstone.
The Dalles, however, sits in a high desert. Although the Columbia runs right past it and is filled with more than a million salmon, The Dalles gets only 14 inches of precipitation a year. Two summers ago, the temperature reached 118 degrees. Little more than scrub brush grows around The Dalles, and the Gorge’s constant west wind blows tumbleweed up against the fence lines in the industrial district. In wintertime, everything here—the scrub brush, the ground it grows from, and the volcanic rock that forms the Gorge’s walls—are all the same dull matte brown color of stale gingerbread.
