On the Road Arterial – Scenes from Interstate Five

Travelers along I-5 in Northern California

On the West Coast, when you’re trying to get from point A to point B with relative efficiency, chances are you’ll spend some time on I-5 (especially if you’re headed North or South). Cities like San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland, and Seattle are all strung together by this pretty ordinary, businesslike highway. With family and friends spread all along this corridor from Northern California to Northern Washington, I’ve spent a lot of time driving up and down I-5, and if I haven’t come to love it, I have at least come to appreciate it.

A fruit orchard in Northern California

The landscape is varied as you move out of the coastal urbanity of the bay area into the cultivated valleys and rolling hills of Northern California on your approach to the Cascades. At one point you come over a crest and the full majesty of Mount Shasta, the crown jewel of this part of the Cascades, rises impossibly large in front of you.

Rolling green hills in Yolo county, Northern California.

Shasta stays with you for a while as you climb up through the Cascades and into Southern Oregon, with great views of the volcanic peak from many of the small Northern California and Southern Oregon towns (my favorite viewpoints are in and around Weed). After Shasta, the mountains give way to rolling hills around Ashland, and then to the flat plains of middle Oregon as you head towards Eugene.

Looking south towards Mt. Shasta outside of Weed, California

From Eugene all the way up to Seattle, Washington, the changes in scenery are less dramatic, but there are still interesting things along the way. Outshined by the beauty of US-1, the Pacific Coast Highway that winds along the bays and coves and hills of the Pacific coast, I-5 is pragmatic, and straight, and full of sometimes-scary semis stocked with commercial freight going to and fro between the many major and minor cities along the way. Though you would never mistake I-5 for a scenic conduit through the west, I nevertheless felt compelled to document some of the more appealing features of this scenically second-fiddle highway.

As noted, there is Mount Shasta, which is, in my estimation, one of the more beautiful peaks anywhere in the US, and especially among the Cascades. Then there is the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge, easily accessible from I-5, where you might catch sight of a Bald Eagle or three, and are very likely to see several other raptors and bird species along with a gaggle of folks bedecked with all manner of exotic optics for viewing and photographing wild critters.

In Yolo county in Northern California there are a series of impossibly green, rolling hills straight out of Windows XP, and in many places along the drive you find yourself bracketed on either side by distant mountains, hills, or some combination of the two. From the legion sheep in Central Oregon to Portland and Mount Hood to Seattle, a city divided into pieces by water, there are numerous opportunities to see and explore wonders both natural and man-made. I-5 takes you through some of the most appealing cities and towns I’ve had the privilege to visit, and though it is itself utilitarian, it is a means to any number of whimsical and beautiful ends.

A valley farm framed by mountains, Northern California

Love it or hate it, the highway is clearly an important artery that bears a long, continuous stream of commerce. Even if we can’t or won’t celebrate it in the same way that we praise the more startlingly beautiful scenic routes of this great and varied country, let us at least appreciate it for what it is, to look at it, to record it, to appreciate the abundant beauty of the Pacific Northwest that fairly bursts with variety off either shoulder of this homely strip of pragmatic macadam.