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About Appeal tribune. (Silverton, Or.) 1999-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 4, 2019)
Appeal Tribune ❚ WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2019 ❚ 1B Outdoors INTO THE WILD Jim Border, who volunteers to help members of the public spot whales during Spoken Here Whale Watching Week on the Oregon Coast, scans the horizon for signs of spouts from the tip of Cape Lookout. ZACH URNESS / STATESMAN JOURNAL Head into the great outdoors for a post-holiday adventure Zach Urness Salem Statesman Journal USA TODAY NETWORK If football and turkey are not your idea of a good time, and the outdoors beckons far stronger than the television screen, the weekend after Thanksgiving brings lots of opportunities. There’s annual “Green Friday” cele- brations mean free fishing and entry to Oregon’s state parks and the arrival of Christmas tree hunting season means it’s time to sharpen your handsaw. Add in the major dump of fresh snow that’s hit Oregon’s mountains, and you have a lot of fun places to explore. Here are fourfive adventures and ac- tivities to enjoy for “Green Friday” and into the holiday weekend and beyond. Free fishing across Oregon Oregonians are allowed to fish, crab or clam for free anywhere in the state without a license or tags on Saturday. If you have relatives or friends visit- ing Oregon, they can fish for free as well. Although no licenses or tags are re- quired, all other fishing regulations ap- ply. In other words, you can only keep the normal limit of fish for a given wa- terway. See the Oregon Sport Fishing Regulations to find out more. For ideas on where to catch fish, see the recreation report from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. In general, beginning anglers can tar- get lakes and ponds stocked with trout — they’re hungry this time of year. Crabbing can also be good during the winter months — it’s currently in bays and estuaries, and on beaches, docks, piers, and jetties. Get the right gear and consider crabbing in Siletz Bay right next to Mo’s Restaurant. Cut your own Christmas tree from Oregon’s national forest U.S. consumers paid an average of $78 for a Christmas tree in 2018, accord- ing to the National Christmas Tree As- sociation. If that seems pricy, consider paying $5 for a permit and heading into the for- est to harvest your own tree. The Forest Service allows cutting five Christmas trees per household for that modest fee. The closest place to harvest a tree is Willamette National Forest, about an hour east of Salem. You can purchase a permit online at — https://openforest.fs.us da.gov. If you don’t buy one online, you can stop at a Forest Service ranger station for a permit. Detroit Ranger station is open Monday to Friday. On the week- ends, local businesses often provide permits at places such as Mountain High Grocery in Detroit. The best trees, including noble firs, tend to be in the higher elevations around 3,000 to 4,000 feet. One good option is to drive to a place such as Max- well, Big Springs or Potato Hill sno- parks, which are plowed, and go explor- ing for a tree. Sno-park permits cost $25 for a full year of winter recreation and can be purchased from ODOT or local businesses. The Christmas tree permit typically comes with a map showing where har- vest of a Christmas tree is allowed. For other questions, contact a Forest Ser- vice ranger station. Hike to a waterfall! With the rain finally arriving — along with the snow — Oregon’s waterfalls should start pumping out normal No- vember power. A few favorites closest to Salem in- clude Silver Falls, Shellburg Falls and Henline Falls. Sunshine hiking on the Oregon Coast It’s not exactly going to be warm, or anything close, but it will be bright and sunny on the Oregon Coast this week- end. Winter Falls, a 134-foot waterfall in South Falls at Silver Falls State Park. MICHAELA ROMÁN/STATESMAN JOURNAL That means glorious views and a likely solitude at places including Cape Lookout, Hart’s Cove and The Knoll near Lincoln City and Tillamook. Check the National Weather Service website in advance to ensure winds won’t launch you off a headland, but otherwise, savor the chilly sweep of blue that comes pretty rarely on the rain- soaked coast. Zach Urness has been an outdoors re- porter, photographer and videographer in Oregon for 11 years. Urness is the au- thor of “Best Hikes with Kids: Oregon” and “Hiking Southern Oregon.” He can be reached at zurness@StatesmanJour nal.com or (503) 399-6801. Find him on Twitter at @ZachsORoutdoors. The real cost of trying to save a few dollars Fishing Henry Miller Guest columnist Trust me; I have a master’s degree. Although, admittedly, it’s in Journal- ism. And I scamm… er, matriculated, a couple of decades ago. Today’s upper-division class is in Fishenomics 101, better known as the delusional fallacy of thrift, or for the non-academic, the “I can save a bundle if do it myself ” fantasy. It’s a cross-disciplinary seminar that also applies to home and vehicle main- tenance and repairs. Seeing the holiday ads for locally caught dungeness crab for $8.99 to $9.99 a pound, it was seemingly a no- brainer (and that analogy works on sev- eral levels) that – repeat after me - “I can save a bundle if I catch them myself.” So I press-ganged longtime clam- ming buddy and ace SJ employee David Davis into a crabbing outing to Taft just south of Lincoln City. With four fishing-pole crab traps be- tween us, I figured at two 12-crab limits each, this was going to be a real bargain and a welcome surprise at our Thanks- giving celebrations. The first pull was surprisingly heavy, occasioned by about 12 pounds of sea- weed that had snarled the empty trap on It only took about six hours and a family pack of chicken drumsticks to score this lone $20-a-pound dungeness crab. DAVID DAVIS/STATESMAN JOURNAL the outgoing tide. After moving, we reeled up lots of crabs, every one either females, which are illegal to keep, or undersized, or both. On my own behalf, it should be noted that I passed the Advanced Crabbing Ethics final, twice. Although not with flying colors, given the continuing frustration. On two successive pulls, I caught male dungeness crabs that were, no ex- aggeration, about a millimeter, a cat’s whisker, undersized. The proctor for the ethics exam was a local Taft crabber who said that, yes, the wardens were on hand to check on sev- eral occasions when he was there. David and I decided to call it a day just after the tide hit low slack. And whaddaya know, there was a lunker legal in my trap on the last pull of the day. Success! So let’s pencil it out: A family pack of chicken drumsticks for bait at $6.63, about 5.5 gallons of gas in the truck at $3.07 a gallon or $16.89, lunch at the Lighthouse Brewpub, $18 for two (ap- proximately). So that crab, at let’s say a generous 2 pounds, and not counting wear and tear on the truck or the seven hours or so of time, came to $20.76 a pound. Hmmmmmm. Not bad, considering. That is fishenomics in action. Happy leftovers! Be Free this holiday! If you needed another reason to give thanks during the holiday weekend, this one’s a keeper. Friday and Saturday, Nov. 29 and 30, are Free Fishing Days in Oregon, during which no licenses or tags are required to go fishing, clamming or crabbing in the Beaver State. So if you’ve made Thanksgiving weekend a family affair, including out- of-state guests, free fishing can be, ahem, a relative experience. And hatchery trucks have been roll- ing across the Willamette Valley plant- ing rainbow trout during the run-up to the holiday weekend. Walter Wirth Lake at Cascades Gate- way Park in Salem was scheduled to get 1,300 fish; Waverly Lake (700 trout), and Timber Linn Lake (500) both in Albany, and Junction City Pond (1,000) south of Junction City off Highway 99, all were on the stocking schedule. Bivalve bonus! If you’ve got a flashlight, headlamp or lantern and are spending the holidays at the coast, there are clam-worthy low tides the evening of Saturday, Nov. 30, minus-0.77 feet at 9:22 p.m. at Garibaldi on the north end of Tillamook Bay, mi- nus-0.47 feet at South Beach on the south side of the Highway 101 Bridge on Yaquina Bay. If you plan on going crabbing or clam- ming, be sure to call the toll-free shell- fish safety Hotline at (800) 448-2474 or check online at https://www.oregon. gov/ODA/programs/FoodSafety/Shell fish/Pages/ShellfishClosures.aspx Henry Miller is a retired Statesman Journal outdoor columnist and outdoor writer. You can reach him via email at HenryMillerSJ@gmail.com