About

I’m Doug Alexander. I live in Portland, Oregon, where I taught middle school science in the Portland Public Schools system for thirty-five years before retiring in 2022.

This blog doesn’t have a strong thesis. I started it because I needed somewhere to put things — trail notes, half-finished thoughts about woodworking, observations from drives up the coast. My daughter, who actually knows what she’s doing online, suggested I write things down somewhere permanent instead of texting her about them. She was probably right.

I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest most of my adult life. Before Portland it was Eugene for graduate school, and before that, a childhood in Eastern Oregon that gave me an early education in how much weather a person can put up with if the landscape is good enough.

What you’ll find here, more or less:

• Trail notes and hike reports from around the Cascades and the coast
• Woodworking projects, usually documented after the mistakes are already made
• Road trips and day trips around the region
• Whatever else seems worth writing down

I’m not a professional writer or photographer. The photos I take are with my phone. The prose is what it is.

If you ended up here looking for a different Doug Alexander — there seem to be a few of us — I hope you found what you were looking for somewhere else.