getting to know I-5

This blog has been getting so much attention ever since Jaime started the TBTL Meta Blog. And that's awesome. This has occurred concurrently with my birth into the bizarre world of twitter and I have been twittering pictures of my travels so I'm not sure what I'll have to post here. I suppose I will have to get more interesting and less "then i took x from y to z." The extra attention is also a good motivator. thanks people.

I did not stray far, for the whole last 2 weeks, from Interstate 5. In fact, when I made this move (from the east coast) i was told/warned that this is how freight moves in the west. Unlike the east which has a dense coastal population and a good distribution of people throughout the Appalachians and Midwest, the west, aside from the dense coastal cities has almost no population and as such, no manufacturing and no demand for goods (relatively speaking). So I don't so much mind driving up and down the I-5 since I get paid by the mile and if I am sitting in Roswell, New Mexico for a day and a half I don't make anything. (and roswell is not a place i would choose to vacation, especially by myself).

I-5 begins, or ends, at the Mexican border, just south of San Diego and north of Tijuana. Immediately east of here is the area called Otay Mesa which is where the vast majority of the truck traffic from the maquiladoras enters the US. (Maquiladoras are Mexican assembly plants who import parts, tax free, and export finished goods for the US market. They are almost all in border cities like Nuevo Laredo, Juarez, Mexicali, and Tijuana. Does this make them essentially "wage shelters" where US companies can get long hours for low wages free of the tiresome and costly worker's rights laws (like the luxuriant $6.55 min. wage) of the US government? Yes, yes it does, but I'm not really trying to start that conversation.)

From there the freeway heads north through Orange County and into the LA Metro (Large limited access roads are called "Freeways" in California (mostly out east the term "highway" is used.) California gives names to all their freeways and different names to different sections. I-5 or "the 5" is known as "The San Diego Freeway" "The Santa Ana Freeway" and, for the majority of its route through California "The Golden State Freeway.)
North of Los Angeles the freeway passes through the San Fernando valley home of movie studios before climbing up to summit Tejon Pass and tumble into the San Joaquin Valley.
The entirety of southern California is a great low, mostly dry, valley. Through extensive aqueduct projects that move water from rainy northern California and the snowy Sierra Nevada down the length of the valley it has become one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country (25% of the nations production (cash value) (according to wikipedia)). Grapes for one provide much of the less expensive wine (like that sold in 1.5 L bottles or, better yet, boxes.) They also turn grapes into rasins. Almonds are a huge crop, and as i mentioned last week, they are in bloom currently and very much what you notice at this time of year. This area also produces a lot of the early season vegetables for those people in parts of the country that need vegetables at the wrong time.
North of Stockton, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers flow together toward the Bay Area estuary, you enter the Northern Central Valley, or Sacramento Valley whose products are similar to that of the southern San Joaquin, but add rice, olives and plums for making 2/3 of the worldwide production of prunes (again wikipedia).

Just before Redding the terrain, which has to this point been relentlessly flat, flatter than most of the midwest (though always with mountains visible in the distance to the east and west) begins to swell and rise a bit before climbing up into the Siskiyou/Klamath/South Cascade mountains. The road passes Shasta Lake, an impoundment of the Sacramento River, which provides much of the water for central valley irrigation projects. It is currently drastically low, a result of a three year drought in California.

I-5 skirts along the edge of Mount Shasta, which, when it is clear, is pretty dramatic. It is sort of the southern bookend to the Cascades (as Mount Baker in Northern Washington is the northern).

At the Oregon border the highway crosses Siskiyou Summit, the highest point on I-5 and the descent northbound is the steepest interstate grade in the US. Add to that frequent precipitation (frequently at temperatures at or below freezing) and you got yourself a pretty treacherous bobsled run.
All of southern Oregon (and northern California) is basically a big clump of mountains that separate the Central Valley of California and the Willamette Valley of Oregon (The Willamette was where you were heading during those hours of caulking wagons, shooting buffalo and repairing axles in Oregon Trail.) So in order to get from nice flat road to nice flat road you must pass a number of summits and traverse the valleys of mountain streams like the Rogue and Umpqua in Southern Oregon.
Finally, at Eugene, you're out of the mountains for good (on I-5 at least.)
The Willamette valley produces a lot of berries and hazlenuts, as well as hops (for all those Oregon microbreweries) and sod/grass seed. Oh yes and wine grapes of course.
Here again, the terrain is flat and lush and mountains are visible to the east and the low coast range to the west.
Portland is where the Willamette flows into the Columbia and where I-5 enters Washington as it follows the Columbia's northward bend to the cities of Kelso and Longview. The land is hilly and densely forested with trees that someone is aching to cut down and make into paper or a soon to be foreclosed on house. Joining the basin of Puget Sound at Olympia you can see the state capital dome prominently (I have heard that it is the second highest masonry dome in the world after the Duomo (designed by Brunelleschi) in Florence. but wikipedia says 4th tallest (damn them))
Between Olympia and Tacoma lies Fort Lewis, a large Army base, and that's all i have to say about that.
Tacoma, as I noted earlier, smells bad.
After Tacoma I-5 passes through the suburbs of Seattle/Tacoma like Fife, Federal Way, Tukwila and the beautifully named "SeaTac" (home of the airport) and all their terrible traffic, terrible probably because it all has to squeeze through the narrow space between the Cascades and Puget Sound.
North of Seattle (an area I have not traveled much by truck) there are the alluvial plains of rivers like the Snohomish and Skagit as they spread into marshy convergence with Puget Sound (The Skagit river delta is known for its tulip production) and then a small range of mountains and the basin of land around Bellingham Bay. North of Bellingham the land is quite flat and essentially in the valley of the Fraser River (the river that flows through Vancouver, BC). The road ends, or begins, at Blaine, about 30 miles south of Vancouver.

I'm not sure how this became a route description of I-5 but there you have it in about 1/100 the time it takes to drive it.