My wife and I will be on the road for much of August with our Tacoma and FWC Finch, spending a few days in the Tetons early in the month, then moving on to southwest Colorado for my wife's family reunion. We were originally planning to be back in Washington by the 19th and to skip watching the eclipse, but then I started thinking, heck, why not take a few more days and try to catch it from someplace more or less on the way home, like eastern Oregon or western Idaho? I pulled out our gazetteers and started scoping out potential spots. Like a number of previous posters on this topic, I thought somewhere in the mountains east of John Day would be about as good as it could get.
My wife initially thought it would be a cool thing to do, but then there was an article in the local paper talking about how many people were going to be in eastern Oregon for the event, the possibility of major traffic gridlock, and the likelihood of very high fire danger. Now she's pretty skeptical about the whole deal. I already had an idea of the potential pitfalls, but I have to admit I'm getting cold feet as well. Reading this topic is kind of reinforcing that.
Still, I hate to completely give up on it. I was at Appalachicola Bay in the Florida Panhandle for the total solar eclipse in, I think, February or March of 1970, but it was totally overcast there, so I didn't get to see much. It was cool, though, how all the sea birds came in to roost as the totality approached and how quickly it became very dark, like a giant rheostat was dimming the light.
For the 1979 total solar eclipse, since the weather forecast for Olympia, where I lived at the time, was lousy, I convinced my then girlfriend to drive over to Satus Pass, north of Goldendale, with me the day before and camp out in the snow overnight. Since we would be directly in the path of the totality and the weather forecast was good, I thought it would be ideal. Well, not so much, as it turned out. It was warmish and the snow conditions were lousy for cross-country skiing. It was socked in the next morning. We ended up getting a brief glimpse of the partial eclipse on the back end through a break in the clouds, but that was it. Meanwhile, just south of us in Goldendale, a lot of folks got a fantastic show and, over on the other side of the pass on the Yakama Reservation, people saw the amazing spectral bands, or whatever they're called, undulating across the rolling, grass-covered hills. And back in good ol' Oly, the clouds opened up to give my housemates a spectacular view of the totality from our front porch!
So, maybe you can get an idea of why I'm reluctant to miss the chance to see this one. My inclination at this point, if my wife will go along with it, is to scope things out on the web before we leave her family's ranch in Colorado as to how things are shaping up in different locations vis a vis crowds, weather, fire danger, etc., then get to somewhere in the path by the 19th or 20th so we can, hopefully, witness this incredible astronomical phenomenon, and then get our butts safely home.
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