When I arrived in Minneapolis, the one thing that I knew I 100% wanted to go see was the famous, original George Floyd mural. Ya’ll know I love street art. This is arguably the most famous mural in the world right now, so I had to make the pilgrimage. I had some vague awareness that there would be some remnants from the protests around it… but I was not prepared for what I found here.
George Floyd Square was one of the most powerful places I have ever visited. I’m not sure how long it will stay in its current form… but I hope some sort of city ordinance intervenes to preserve it this way forever. Let me show you what I saw here.
I think this post takes the cake for the farthest total distance traveled within a single street art post. These murals were SPREAD OUT. The Twin Cities is a massive place. And on this particular weekend, it was hotter than the devil’s butt crack. I hope you are reading this in a nice climate-controlled space because when I think back on this weekend… I feel sweaty.
Well, I won’t bury the lead. Let’s see some STREET ART, EH?
The Welshman Gareth Bale has been one of the most notable players in the world since the late 2000s when he transferred from Southampton to Tottenham Hotspur. This was before my days of fandom, but I think he really became a star after his 2013 transfer to Real Madrid. His is a name that American kids grew up knowing, mostly likely, thanks to the FIFA video games. He’s a big deal. But he’s getting older now and hadn’t been playing much at Real Madrid anymore, so ahead of his appearance in the 2022 World Cup, he made a surprise transfer to LAFC. Honestly, the golden age of Gareth Bale was a bit before the start of my fandom, but this was a huge “get” for MLS! You can find his insane highlight reel here.
Chush Falls (pronounced “shoosh”) is actually nestled right up against the Sisters Mountains and Broken Top. The drive to get to this trailhead was about an hour from Tam McArthur Rim, all over gravel roads. Oh, and it was absolutely STUNNING. Honestly, even if you don’t do this hike, the drive is still well worth the effort. This was already bringing me closer to these mountains than I had yet been. Looking up at the snowy slopes, I could see every little rock and wisp of cloud clearly and was able to even capture some of this with my camera. And, miraculously, the weather really was clearer over here.
This many mountains is just insane to me. Prior to this trip, this was not what I pictured when I thought of Oregon. This was downright RUGGED! And it was gorgeous. The three mountains in closest proximity to Black Butte, and to one another are the Three Sisters for which this area is named: Middle Sister, North Sister, and South Sister. All three of these mountains are sleeping volcanoes. The North and Middle Sister last erupted ~14,000 years ago and scientists think it’s unlikely that they’ll ever erupt again. However, the South Sister erupted as recently as 2,000 years ago, and could feasibly erupt again. There have been sporadic reports of volcanic rumblings deep within South Sister since 1866, and there have been a couple of minor scares since the late 1980s. Nothing has ever happened, but there is a big pot of magma a few miles beneath the peak of South Sister. Did I mention that South Sister is also the easiest of these mountains to climb? Sign me up for that!! 😵
Making our way out of the Cascades, winding through these forests was very cool, but to really understand why this region is so jaw-droppingly gorgeous, you have to zoom out. I don’t know what I expected to find out here, but it sure as hell was not a bunch of majestic snow-capped mountains! I had heard of the “3 Sisters” mountains before, but I had no idea just how large they loom over this area. Also, they’re not alone. There are a whole bunch of other peaks around them that make Central Oregon feel like a high-altitude fortress. THIS is where the Wild West still exists. Eastern Oregon/Washington, Northern Nevada, Idaho, Montana… there’s a whole lot of empty space out here. As somebody who has never lived west of the Mississippi River, it kind of blows my mind that all of this exists in the same country I live in. In the next 2 articles, we are going to get out into these mountains, so I am not going to explain much more of this right now. For now, the following gallery will have to be as mysterious to you as it was to me when I first arrived here.
I’m going to do something a little different today. I love piecing together articles on street art wherever I can. It’s a great way to get to know a place! I had a hunch that Portland was going to have some really cool street art, but to my surprise and slight disappointment, I didn’t find quite the density of murals that I would have needed to merit a full article.
However, as I walked around the city, I began to notice that nearly half of all public surfaces that I walked past—be they street signs, telephone poles, or brick walls—were absolutely PLASTERED in stickers. And I’m not talking about some garden-variety smiley face stickers. Each of these was custom-made, artistic, and—for the most part—completely outrageous. Seriously, viewer discretion is advised. This collection of stickers would make my childhood pastor WEEP!
Portland is the southernmost major city in the Pacific Northwest, and, driving northward from Sacramento, it’s the next major slice of civilization you’ll find on the West coast. Although, I should clarify that Portland is not actually coastal. It is a “port city” because it sits at the convergence of two major rivers that are connected to the Pacific Ocean: the Willamette and Columbia rivers. It’s about a 1.5 hour drive to the Pacific coast, which leads me to another thing that I want to highlight about Portland: it’s proximity to nature. This is a common theme among cities in the Pacific Northwest—including Seattle and Vancouver. All of these places are great gateways to some incredible natural beauty. And Portland is no exception. With Portland as your “home base,” you can (for example) do day trips to 1) surf, 2) snowboard, 3) hike, 4) rock climb, and 5) sail on 5 back-to-back days. For the “outdoorsy” among us, it’s a great place to be.
I actually came to love Los Angeles during my last visit (right before COVID hit)—it is a very distinct place. And as Venice beach unfolded before me like some sort of surreal virtual reality, I realized that this might be the most “LA” place I’d yet seen. It is the stereotype of what this place is. It was Saturday night and everybody was out having fun. I hurriedly crossed the boardwalk and made a B-line for the beach so I could catch the sunset. It did not disappoint. I’ll postpone additional narrative in favor of just showing you the pictures I took.
Orcas, or Killer Whales, were something of a feared creature in the olden days. Apparently, back in the 1800s when this part of the world was first being explored by Europeans, their technical/scientific classification was actually “Monster.” Hilarious as this might seem, it does make some sense. Black whales with sharp teeth and shark fins? Yeah, that would have definitely felt somewhat monstrous to me if I was an early sailor of these waters. The conventional wisdom of the day was that, if you fell in the water, you needed to get out ASAP so an Orca wouldn’t eat you. If you hadn’t already guessed this, there is, in fact, no record of an Orca ever eating a human. But this was still a legitimate fear as recently as the 1960s when they actually mounted a machine gun on a coastal bluff known as Chatham Point with the aim of shooting as many Orcas as possible. 🤯 Somehow, for the time when this gun was actively scouring the seas, the Orcas stayed clear of this area and there were no casualties. So Orca/human tensions have never escalated to be anything more than a cold war. And it was not long after this that human sentiments toward Orcas began to change for the better.
