I'm stunned by descriptions of Portland on here. Please clarify. (health insurance, homes)

[aroseinrain]

Oh boy, don't even get me started on the strawberries!

[Barleysoda]

all this talk about berries and no one mentioned mt adams huckleberries! my mom makes these fresh huckleberry pies to die for, crust from scratch even.

I just don't go walking around in the woods with a bag of bear food in my hands. lol

I'll carry my Beretta .40 instead

[sugarsugar]

Originally Posted by Barleysoda

all this talk about berries and no one mentioned mt adams huckleberries! my mom makes these fresh huckleberry pies to die for, crust from scratch even.

I just don't go walking around in the woods with a bag of bear food in my hands. lol

I'll carry my Beretta .40 instead

My bear gun was on my atv (because I am a messy picker, and didn't want to stain it But when woods go silent, in that "you've got company" way, and the berries are missing wih the juice still fresh on one side of the patch, the atv is too far away, no matter how close I park to the patch, lol.

It was bought up in Alaska, when dh used to fly there. I remember him flying into a remote airstrip, and the guy on the ground asking if he'd seen "the polar bear" as he taxied in, because it had just been spotted again. You know, the one that killed a guy there about a month ago? Ick. As I recall, it was (probably still is) illegal to fly privately without a gun in AK (you never know where you might be forced to land). It is such a different world up there.

Over here in Central Oregon, the thing to watch for are cougars (2 days ago, dh found pawprints the size of his hand by our front gate!) but at least I am not competing with the cats for anything, like I am with the berries and the bear

P.S. Huckleberries! There used to be a few bushes here and there on our property, but not enough to make even a single pie. I esp. love huckleberry jam!

[classicanne]

Originally Posted by Jimrob1

I lived briefly in Valrico while on a job assignment in Tampa 10 years ago. That area Brandon included had a very here today gone tomorrow type population. Well much of Fla has that type of transient population. I can't say Valrico Brandon Plant City area was all that appealing, but I enjoyed the Tampa St Pete region down into Sarasota. I know I don't miss one bit driving that State Rd 60 to get to Tampa. Im told that the crosstown is a toll road into Brandon now, so I guess that helps alot with the commute into Tampa.

I hope you will like Portland but it will be a huge change from where you currently live.

Yes, you have the Brandon/Valrico area pretty well pegged. Not sure about the commute, i.e. better/worse than before, though I always hear it's bad. I'm fortunate in being able to telecommute for my job (which I will be doing in Portland, as well).

Also, I agree regarding Portland being a huge change, which I am expecting it to be. And I'm ready for that!

[Barleysoda]

Originally Posted by sugarsugar

Over here in Central Oregon, the thing to watch for are cougars (2 days ago, dh found pawprints the size of his hand by our front gate!) but at least I am not competing with the cats for anything, like I am with the berries and the bear

yeah that's the one animal out in the woods that I wouldn't want to come across, those cats are out here also. A buddy of mine was deer hunting out in the Klickitat area last fall and told me that he shot a deer and when he tracked it and got to it he found 2 mt lions already chomping on it, so he shot at the biggest one and come to find out it was a 300lb cat! most of them don't get more than 140 to 150lbs. since all the regulations on cougar hunting within the last 10 years they've become a problem in rural areas and my guess is they will continue to become a bigger problem and a possible threat to people hiking with their kids. More and more people now are hiking in the woods like their in a park and don't realize that there are bears and mt lions out there, and a starving mt lion will try to eat anything it can get, especially if the cat population continues to grow like it has. I hope I'm wrong but if that does start happening then it won't suprise me too much.

the bears I've seen in the deep woods will run their a** off away from you, but the bears in the gorge are used to people and aren't afraid and won't always run. there's nothing more scary than a big black bear following you and won't leave, or even try to hide from you. in 2001 my buddy and I had a black bear follow us up table mt and when we stopped it also stopped and would just look at us, like one of us were breakfast. I only had a .357 magnum in my pack and I wasn't sure if that would be enough to take it down if it charged us. believe me, we were pretty scared. so we hiked on and when we got to a spot where we were a little above it we started throwing rocks towards where it was in the under brush, and it finally ran but we were watching our back the whole trip after that. in hindsight it was probably just following us looking for dropped food, or knew we had food in our pack, but thats a wild animal and you just never know.

I would have really been frightened if I was carrying a bag of berries and ski poles and saw that.

[Barleysoda]

Originally Posted by Barleysoda

yeah that's the one animal out in the woods that I wouldn't want to come across, those cats are out here also. A buddy of mine was deer hunting out in the Klickitat area last fall and told me that he shot a deer and when he tracked it and got to it he found 2 mt lions already chomping on it, so he shot at the biggest one and come to find out it was a 300lb cat! most of them don't get more than 140 to 150lbs. since all the regulations on cougar hunting within the last 10 years they've become a problem in rural areas and my guess is they will continue to become a bigger problem and a possible threat to people hiking with their kids. More and more people now are hiking in the woods like their in a park and don't realize that there are bears and mt lions out there, and a starving mt lion will try to eat anything it can get, especially if the cat population continues to grow like it has. I hope I'm wrong but if that does start happening then it won't suprise me too much.

the bears I've seen in the deep woods will run their a** off away from you, but the bears in the gorge are used to people and aren't afraid and won't always run. there's nothing more scary than a big black bear following you and won't leave, or even try to hide from you. in 2001 my buddy and I had a black bear follow us up table mt and when we stopped it also stopped and would just look at us, like one of us were breakfast. I only had a .357 magnum in my pack and I wasn't sure if that would be enough to take it down if it charged us. believe me, we were pretty scared. so we hiked on and when we got to a spot where we were a little above it we started throwing rocks towards where it was in the under brush, and it finally ran but we were watching our back the whole trip after that. in hindsight it was probably just following us looking for dropped food, or knew we had food in our pack, but thats a wild animal and you just never know.

I would have really been frightened if I was carrying a bag of berries and ski poles and saw that.

I found this interesting about mt lions. this is mainly about southern Oregon but would apply anywhere in the NW. the last paragraph before the contact button pretty much says it all.
just FYI.

http://www.oregonphotos.com/Cougar1.html

[dlb8685]

Not as scary as the cougars with martinis!!

j/k

[Deezus]

Originally Posted by dlb8685

Not as scary as the cougars with martinis!!

j/k

There's been a lot of sightings in the Pearl District lately. I got attacked by a couple cougars at happy hour at the Portland City Grill last month.

[sugarsugar]

Originally Posted by Barleysoda

I found this interesting about mt lions. this is mainly about southern Oregon but would apply anywhere in the NW. the last paragraph before the contact button pretty much says it all.
just FYI.

Cougar Puma Mountain Lion in Western Oregon forests

The bear story is making me rethink a couple of things - first, whether blackberries are really all that important, and second, how under armed I am when I hike on this side of the mountains in what has become overpopulated cougar country (central, but almost the edge of eastern Oregon). I hike daily right from my back door when the weather permits, but consider myself at risk, because what I carry has to be light otherwise I can't hike very far with the weight. Given what has gone on here in the last few months, I just take dh and the dogs in the jeep to various places for short walks here/there, and don't hike for long distances (and no more running, which I used to do with my dog out there).

That is a great link, thanks. 300# is an unusually large cat. Last year, our rancher neighbors told us that they'd lost a calf and had a very injured momma in a pen right up by their home. They called us to make sure it was okay if their state paid hunter came through our land, should the cougar head that way. The guy brings a mule and a pack of dogs - I think this was through a program called APHIS (?); however, I also heard they were considering scaling it back due to budget concerns.

My dh has a cougar tag. We lost 2 calves this year to some sort of predator (couldn't be certain due to when we finally found them/weather, and condition - could even have been a coy-dog), but that is the first predator loss we've ever had in our herd. The male cat whose tracks dh saw at our gate (> a mile from the house) has left tracks & been seen by several neighbors (both alone, and once running with another cat past some road workers, unusual thing to see). Both of us have seen some over the past few years here; the last one was last year, in a tree on the bottom branches, near that same gate (he was in the truck waiting as I closed the gate behind us - that is too close). It is no longer a rare thing to spot one here. We've had an huge population of deer (even more elk) over the last so many years here, so it isn't starvation that is moving them in this close to the few people who live out here.

Right after I read your post/saw that link, a wood cutter on a neighbor's land called to say he thought our bull had wandered over there (over 3k acres - not a small search area). They are doing a "juniper restoration" project, which means cutting it all down to burn in place later, so the land is an awful mess. You can't take a horse or atv off the roads now because of the downed trees. We did spot him from a road a few miles in, and normally, I'd have trailed him by foot, but with those cat images fresh in my mind, I decided I wasn't in the mood to be cougar food

Hopefully our bull will make his way back on his own - we just had 2 days of Portland style rain, which has turned into 4" of snow overnight. Bet he is going to be hungry.

[sugarsugar]

Originally Posted by dlb8685

Not as scary as the cougars with martinis!!

j/k

The martini cougars are a whole different breed than my furry friends over here