Great Leaf Moments, A Series, I

You're looking west. This is the intersection of West Burnside and NW 23rd Avenue, to the right, and SW Vista to the left. To get you oriented to previous posts, I could have turned around after I took last week's photo looking east down Burnside, the one that showed you Jim Fisher Volvo and the trianglular building, and seen this intersection. I didn't take this one right after the other one, though, because the sun wasn't up enough to do the leaves justice.

On Oct. 13, after Mama, Duncan and I got into the car, this is the first photo from our tour of the neighborhood. One week later, the first tree in the row alongside Burnside, the one right above the white van, had lost every single leaf. Like I said, it's been raining and blowing a good bit. Within weeks, leaf-less limbs will branch out from trunk after trunk all over the city, so I'm embarking on a series of sorts to share this beauty with you, in a rush with nature I suppose you could say.

The small brick building on the left houses a State Farm Insurance office. Across from it you can see a sign that reads Zupans--that's a nice high-end grocery store. Up the hill to the left you see a pale building with many windows and the word Envoy top center. Here's a bit from the Web: "The Historic Envoy, built in the 1920's, has been renovated to its original charm and converted to condominiums. Units feature vintage hardwood floors, paned windows and covered off-street parking. Many have city and mountain views." The few I found for sale are in the $330,000 plus range, even the one bedroom. Y'all are beginning to understand why Mama and I happily rent, right?

An hour or so later after driving the twisting and turning roads above our neighborhood to the west, we've stopped on NW 23rd Avenue, waiting to cross West Burnside, so that we can take SW Vista up into another part of the hills. Burnside divides Portland into north and south, hence the direction change for the streets. Some but not all streets also change names, like at this particular intersection. Here's the corner from another angle.



After driving up Vista and making a couple of right hand turns, plus stopping to take a few photos from a stairway hanging on the side of a steep hill--or at least that's how it seemed to me, the one with a pronounced fear of heights--we arrived at the intersection one last time.

You can see from this photo how steep Vista is as it heads south from Burnside. It gets even steeper very quickly. My goal is to be able to walk up it so that I can go to the Vista Bridge and take photos from the 120 foot tall bridge--there's no where nearby to park, so why not? Well, to tell you the truth, it will be scary as all get out, as we say in the South, but I'm going to do it because I want to take photos from it. This photo-blogging is positively changing my life.