Siuslaw National Forest

Fridays = easy running day, so with only one nice short run to do it seemed like a perfect opportunity to get out of Eugene for a while and explore one of the national parks on the Oregon coast. It wasn’t raining either which was a bonus.

We decided to drive to Siuslaw National Forest which is about 2 hours drive north west of Eugene. We hadn’t decided on a specific place within the forest that we would go to, but it’s a forest so there is bound to be a whole load of walks and trails right?

So we got to the forest pretty easily and decided to stop off at the first likely walk. So we drove, and drove and drove some more. After another hour of driving we were starting to get a little worried that we weren’t going to find anywhere. Other than an odd car park between the road and river for fishermen (and with no walks leading off from them) there was absolutely no where to stop. We eventually decided to call it a day and begin to head back as it was soon going to get dark. We did see a lot of the forest and had a couple of stops for photos but we were pretty disappointed not to find anywhere to park up and explore. The national park did look pretty though with it’s very tall leafless tress and roaring river.

We decided to cheer ourselves up by stopping for a hot chocolate when we passed an appropriate café. It really wasn’t our day though and other than a McDonald’s (and we’ve seen enough of them recently thanks to the free wi-fi) there was nothing tempting. So it was back to Eugene empty handed with a plan to visit the tourist information in the next few days to see where we went wrong!