Bushytails on the Barlow Trail

We turned off the pavement and onto a gravel road and then turned left on another road that wound through stands of pine and oak. Tree roots stuck out into the dirt track and we bumped along, headed west toward Mount Hood shrouded in the clouds.
Before there was a Highway 26 that crossed the Cascades at Mount Hood, there was a trail called the old Barlow Road. In 1846, Sam Barlow and Philip Foster carved a passage through the forest to allow covered wagons to cross the Cascades, bypassing the hazardous river route.