Fort Collins is fairly affordable, as far as Colorado goes. My original plan was to move to the PNW after Colorado, and while that may still happen, I'm having a hard time leaving here.

I think the best thing to do would to jot down a list of possible places, visit, and see which one fits (in regard to lifestyle, career, etc).

Edited by aaronufl on 01/03/2013 18:39:44 MST.

And to the poster who complained about having to ride 15 mins on blacktop to get to a mountain bike trail I sincerely hope you are kidding...

Oregonians have a quirky habit of jokingly keeping outsiders away by making things sound awful... but the problem is it's hard to come with anything awful, so you have to pick the tiniest inconveniences and pile them up just to make the point stick. =^)

You mean like complaining about air pollution in Eugene?

The snowfree backpacking season is only 6-7 weeks long, and these days is often marred by oppressive forest-fire smoke that lasts for weeks.

Jerry.

Back in 2006 i think Eugene was top 25 in the nation for poor air quality by one measure. So it isn't just joking. Plus it is terrible for grass allergies apparently.


I think it's better. Burning the fields was a big contributor.

Edited by mpl_35 on 01/03/2013 21:09:41 MST.

Plus it is terrible for grass allergies apparently.

That's true. Supposed to have something like 27 of the 29 known allergens. My brother, who has terrible allergies to grass allergens, nearly died when he came to visit. His whole face puffed up. We had to leave Eugene in emergency. I'd forgotten about that.

Here is the reason for the grass allergy problems.

Oregon is the world’s major producer of cool-season forage and turf grass seed and a widely recognized center of expertise in seed production. Most of the acreage is located in the Willamette Valley, the “grass seed capital of the world.”

http://oregonstate.edu/valleyfieldcrops/grass-seed

Oregon had TeePee burners for wood waste for many years. Even in the early 80s you could see them burning like giant open bonfires. They contributed a lot to the pollution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beehive_burner

In areas were there was fruit production fuel oil burners were used to ward off frost in the spring. After a night of use the smoke used to hang for days. They are no longer legal to use.

Plus everybody and their brother used wood to heat with. In the heyday of old growth logging there was plenty of waste wood to heat a lot of homes. Requiring certified wood stoves and the reduction in the availability of firewood has cut down considerably on the pollution from woodstoves.

I have lived all over Oregon and I would have to say Bend was my favorite.Like most have said it rains alot on the coast.(There not called Oregon Ducks for nothing). It sounds Like you like city living and really that's all it is from Troutdale through Portland and down I-5 To Salem and Eugene.Mostly pavement and cars and people and every once in a while you will see a farm in the middle of it all.If you like seasons Spring winter fall summer you might consider further inland.Being a city person you must be used to the type of crime rates most cities have so I wont get into that.I can Vouch for Spokane Wa. its a decent little city with plenty to do. Coeur d'Alene Id (the city on the lake) is a growing city as well and both have seasons to enjoy and Lots of hiking and Biking..They have a paved biking trail thats almost 80mi long

Jennifer Mitol, I lived in portland for a few years, and work has brought me back there once or twice a year since then, so I've seen it evolve. I'm ignoring all smaller northwest cities like Bend because in my opinion they would suck to live in, small towns, oppressive as heck, and just boring. If you move to portland and take some trips and find a small town like bend or eugene and find you like it, fine, but I'd never move there to start with, you'll almost certainly regret it, unless you want very little from your town. Portland is filled with people just like you, fleeing from various states in that region and wanting to live somewhere more progressive but not too urban.

Here's the points: portland is the BEST biking city in the USA. Bar none. Others now come there to study how they are developing their infrastructure. It gets better and better by the year, they are dedicating more and more resources to it, and portlanders are biking in higher real numbers than ever. This quality biking has led, of course, to a mushrooming of the biking scene, good bike shops, coops, messenger/delivery companies, etc, which leads to even better biking.

Portland has a true peak oil task force, and is actively engaged in aggressive rezoning to attempt to be one of the cities, one of the very few, I might add, that will not totally fall apart as oil supplies grow short and prices high. Many bpl probably have no idea what this means or why it's a critical component for any city that plans on existing in the future, but portland has a lot of people who understand that if you don't prepare for the future, you're going to be very sad when it comes. This alone puts it in a tiny list of american towns who are actually taking the steps required to move into the future with hopes of success.

Portland now allows local ag, like chickens, and it's part of a national movement to localize. It's also surrounded by rural area that is increasingly being farmed by young farmers who don't believe the lies of aggribusiness and want to create a more sustainable world.

Portland is removing parking places on street and replacing them with either rows of bike parking or small water collecting mini parks.

Portland isn't perfect, it's got some really bad suburban ring sprawl around it, and beaverton is about as bad as any other suburb in the world, but as long as you stick within the core of portland, you don't really need to deal with that part.

They are expanding their light rail, and actively embracing New Urbanism, which focuses on walkable/mass transit development, to increase urban density and decrease alienating car use.

From being a relative wasteland re food and eating out, they've gone to becoming somewhat of a foodie mecca, not probably as good as San francisco or NYC, but very good still.

It's still a small city, not a major urban area, but it's just big enough to not suffer from the problems of smaller towns/cities.

I could go on, but the positive list grows every year, and tempts me to move back almost every visit I make there.

One last thing, the cascades are not 90 minutes from portland, I was on the trail 30 minutes from portland, about, at multnomah falls, that trail led to pct eventually, which means, 30 minutes from portland, you can start walking and not stop for 1500 or so miles.

Also, totally ignore that talk about portland being wet or rainy, what it does there most days in winter is drizzle. We went day hiking all the time in the columbia gorge in winter, it's fine. Most true native portlanders can be detected because they don't usually wear rain gear. And virtually never umbrellas. A nice thick wool coat is usually all you need, or a nice water resistant fleece jacket. My normal bike trip there would involve me getting damp, a dampness that vanishes when you arrive to where you were going. Like anywhere, it also gets real rain, so I used fenders and had full rain gear for those days, which is really not a big deal either.

East Oregon is high desert, dry, and ranching country, it's not a very nice place to visit but it is worth it just to see it, but there's virtually no interaction between the more lush coastal strip and the eastern part, so that's not relevant to any decision you'd make re moving there. That's sort of like worrying about Fresno or Bakersfield not being ideal when you are contemplating moving to San Francisco.

Work in portland isn't great, but I assume you're a nurse or something else that makes it very easy to get work, so you don't have to worry about that downside.

While seattle is cool, in my opinion, biking it sucks, it's too dependent on some key freeway type bridges between its sections which leads to really bad traffic jams, and it also has a long strip of suburbs going North that is pretty dismal. In Portland you really never need to use your car, mine would often stay parked unmoved for weeks at a time, which is just how I like it.

Portland is not as urban as Seattle or San Francisco, but it's filled with refugees of states just like yours who came just for the same reason, in fact, it amazed me to no end how often I would meet people from states I'd never even seen before, like Alaska, Idaho, etc, and that's not an accident, portland is the middle ground between a large scale world city like seattle or san francisco and a way too small place like olympia or bend, and if you look at a map of that chunk of the country, you'll realize after a while that there are basically no towns like that, and that's why people flow there.

Jennifer, you might like to see this

Peak oil task force. That's awesome. It would be even more awesome if it was Peak Oil was a real occurance. That theory was developed before shale oil, and doesn't take it into account. Oops. Got off topic. Sorry.

Don't overlook New Mexico when considering a move. Great hiking, less populated than OR or WA, good weather. Downside is some people there don't understand Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) and that a barrel of oil produced from shale requires much more energy to release it from rock and pull it out (compared to simply sticking a straw/pipe in the ground). To say nothing of the environmental destruction. Peak Oil is not a "belief." It's a recognition that individual oil fields follow a bell-curve-shaped production profile and that our finite earth is a collection of individual oil fields. We're probably OK with stable oil prices for a few years, but kudos to portland for leading the way.
Tiny uptick on right is the "immense" increase in US oil production recently.

Great post Harold. Helpful. Not like those others.

Focus.

Is peak oil anything like Gold Peak iced tea? 'Cause that stuff is really good. I think you can get it in Oregon - so another reason to move to Oregon. All the peaks.

Shale oil delays the year when peak oil will occur

Eventually we'll run out of that too

Hopefully we won't go back to "gas guzzlers" to burn through the shale oil as fast as possible and then we'll be in the same spot again - not enough oil, higher spikes in gas prices,...

Somehow, I don't think the price of gasoline will go way down where it used to be, like much less than $3 a gallon

I tried climbing Peak Oil once but it kept moving, then it disappeared.

Speaking as someone who grew up outside Cincinnati, I say move west, and fast. Your only regret will be not doing it a decade sooner.


The rest is just details.


The tradeoff as a single person will generally be a bigger (i.e. 200,000 or more), more crowded area with a more vibrant scene or a quieter, smaller town where every single person over 30 has dated almost every other single person over the age of 30. In the later case the gender difference will be in your favor (assuming you're hetero), but you'll have to deal with a lot of 40 year old ski/fishing/hiking bums still doing their best to stay 22.

Answer that question, pick a preferred climate (wet v. dry/sunny; hot v. cold), and rent a UHaul.

Personally, I'd avoid the PacNW due to climate and crowds, and absolutely avoid the CO front range. Why move away from gridlock looking at cities to gridlock looking at mountains? Missoula is a mini-Portland with lesser versions of all the good things and much better outdoor opportunities (and so many fewer people). Flagstaff is pricey and a bit insular, but if you can find a good job it has the best and most diverse outdoor rec access in the US, bar none. Grand Junction is a bit sleepy, but feels like a real town and has a great mix of mountain and desert access close by.

Good luck.

Joe Clement Douglas Ide, while it's always cute to see people, particular guys like you, totally non-critically (yet totally predictably) fall for mainstream media spin and agressive marketing of stock prices, this isn't the thread for that discussion. Read http://theoildrum.com for ongoing analysis of that new set of myths. theoildrum is to energy extraction matters as bpl is to geeky ul chat. Let me put if very briefly and simply: shale oil (aka 'tight') is not a new thing, production from those long known and worked on resources happens when peak oil pushes prices up high enough to be economically viable. It's expensive both in dollars and energy to extract that tight oil, and each well has catastrophically steep decline rates, up to 80% in one year, which forces very fast drilling cycles. Drilling isn't free, nor are licenses on the land, and also, they are now drilling the best, ie, highest yielding, fields in those tight plays, which means it's not going to get better in those fields over time, it's going to get worse. Drilling firms study geological data when they pick where to drill. As for profit, ideally, enterprises, they pick the best sites first. Since there are no longer any good sites of standard oil in the usa, what they are left with is the garbage, like tight oil. The fact of high oil prices is the cause of this new production, it doesn't 'disprove' peak oil, it proves it, but to understand that, you'd have to have at least a hint of a clue about the topic. I'm including some links so you can start working on that, if you want. Or just keep believing fairy tales, if you want, personally I don't care what you do. Expensive production methods like those that tight oil extraction requires are enabled only once the overall oil price rises high enough (it's about 80 a barrel break even if I remember now for tight oil, about 60 a barrel for tar sands, compared to old stuff of 1 or 2 a barrel). When you start accessing known inferior oil supplies, like canadian bitumin aka tar sands, you aren't 'beating' peak oil, you are scraping the bottom of the barrel, and that's not disproof, its proof, since that junk was known for decades and ignored because it was too expensive to produce, and too low quality.

The difference between towns who have no plans and live in cornucopian fantasies spun by media and energy groups who are trying to dump their shares on suckers as fast as they can and Portland is that Portland actually has a plan, and are acting on it. Plans like this take decades to implement, it's not something you do when it's already too late, and you don't drop these plans based on a short term blip of tight oil production increase of about 700k barrels a day, give or take.

The alternate, which you two predictably demonstrated, is to do nothing, sit back, watch the news, uncritically, making sure only to believe what you want, then complain as prices rise, go out and buy a big vehicle, complain as it costs more to fill it. Then blame the liberals for geological oil production limits, while being totally and utterly ignorant of any actual facts, such as that the US has maybe 90% of the worlds total oil wells drilled, and is better at tertiary recovery of oil in place than anywhere else in the world (which is what helped smooth the downward, post US peak production since the '70s), and hit its own peak of production in 1970 or so, exactly as predicted, and that this recent shale/tight oil bump is just a little notch up in the overall decline. Then, having ignored all the actual facts and data, complain some more. Then one day, whine about no gas being available at your local station, which of course is incomprehensible since it's a fundamental american right to have all the gas they want, no matter what nature or geology has to say about it. That's a fine strategy, and I hope it works well for you, and I also hope you work on blaming others rather than creating solutions as things progress, which is the norm from what I can see from your types. To me that's not smart, but then again, that's why progressives work at progressing, and others work at complaining that the old ways aren't working anymore. Have fun. But objectively, I know perfectly well that whatever the mass media you pick tell you, you will believe, so we'll just have to see what they have to tell you as this stuff progresses.

Here's a few recent overviews (warning, these have big words and contain content and analysis based on real oil production data, and are not designed to pump up shale/tight oil producing companies).

Does the U.S. Really Have More Oil than Saudi Arabia?

Drumbeat: January 5, 2013

Search the comment threads for: ROCKMAN he's a conservative texas oil geo, and I like him particularly because he shows that not all conservatives are totally clueless. He's a real conservative, by the way, so you can feel comfortable with him, he's not a pretender or closet liberal. alaska_geo is good too, as is west texas, a lot of these guys are working or retired oil company guys. But ROCKMAN says it like it is, if you don't like what he says, then you don't like reality, which is probably I'm sure the case...

I could post hundreds of these links, but these are fine to start with. tod (it has a nickname too, like bpl) has had a good time chuckling at the way suckers fell for stock price pumping on shale gas and oil, plus the way a small blip in production has been escalated into some massive amount of oil that changes everything.

The second is a news overview they do 4x a week, the comments are generally also informative if you know which posters to pay attention to. Rockman is the best, he's a working texas oil engineer who basically can tell it like it is because his company is privately held and has no stock prices to protect. darwinian, though annoying, tends to be pretty on the spot with this production data. You won't find views based on ignorance tolerated there, by the way, so you might not feel at home.

Jennifer, consider this an example of why you want to live in a community filled with smart, forward looking progressive people, they can actually work on the future and not frantically cling to a fading past, being around those types of people is frankly sad and depressing when the data is so well understood in almost every area. It's not longer time to chat and babble, it's time to act, your instincts are absolutely right in this matter. What you want is to be around people working for a real viable future, not fantasies that simply mean: don't want to change, fear change, resist change. But that's what makes progressives progress, lol. Maybe I'll see you up there one day, we'll see. But do consider those two guys here way of thinking as the exact thing you are trying to get away from, and it's exactly why portland is one of the few US cities out there that actually makes sense long term to relocate to. Believe me, it's refreshing to have your daily world filled with people who are actually using their lives to change the norms.

Joe Clement Douglas Ide thanks a lot for providing Jennifer with an example of exactly what she's trying to get away from, and I do wish you luck on your plan of business as usual while business grows more and more unusual, while not a very interesting plan, I'm sure it is easier to follow than changing anything of substance in your lives.

Sean Heenan, you must not have tried very hard, maybe you need better gear, or better sources. The prediction by those who study the matter was for around 2005-2012. After that we'd be on an undulating plateau of production, which is exactly where we are now. Actual real oil total global production did in fact peak around 2005, the first article I linked to I think talks about some of the myths are you stuck in. All serious analysts put the peak at around 2000-2020, with the more serious middle case being around 2010, that proved to be exactly right. Of course, one no longer needs to even see the numbers, all one needs to do is see the prices, the global political and economic repercussions, and the moves, ini increasing desperation, to the lower energy yielding sources that lower prices had made very unattractive. You take the best first, when that is gone or going, you take what is left, and which you wouldn't have considered. Obviously, since this is a finite resource, production has to hit a peak, and equally obviously, since we grabbed the best and easiest to access first, at a certain point, we hit the peak. It's impossible not to, this is not magic.

My apologies for not adhering to the apparently standard format of posting a supposedly witty sentence or two in substitution of actual data or analysis, particularly on critical and core things involved with modern culture, I know that's how I'm supposed to do it, the less actual content I include the better, of course. Now if those pesky liberals would just stop quoting facts and figures and return to cute sayings and slogans, it would all work out better, I admit it.

I have to admit, I didn't think the peak oil comment would draw much attention, it's a small feature of portland that simply shows that they have people with understanding involved in the city, and this subsequent topic drift simply points to yet another great thing about portland, they are working in reality, not fantasy, and they are working for the future, not some misguided attempt to maintain business as usual, the plan most US cities seem to be embracing. So while boring and offtopic, I would consider this as a very concrete demonstration of just how progressive portland is, and why it's so desirable to live in such an area in these times. Working to the future doesn't happen by typing short terse comments in forums, it takes actual work, planning, long range changes, development changes, all kinds of things.

Now for the next witty short contentless rebuttals, sigh, repeating something without any actual data or background understanding.... I suggest y'all take it over to theoildrum.com I'll get a laugh out of reading that, but here, not so much, it's kind of boring repeating facts that are very well understood outside of the mass media. Another good reason to move somewhere like portland, of course.

Edited by hhope on 01/06/2013 13:26:57 MST.

hhope,

Please quit derailing a great thread. I know others gave pitched in, but you instigated it. Even if unintentionally.



OP,

The PNW summers rock, but the constant mist/rain is a downer. And I'm on the east side of the Cascades...

Bend or others closer to the mountains sounds ideal IMO.

Flagstaff is beautiful.

The west is open to you. Visit. Heck, visit them all and pick. Goodluck.

Edited by mpl_35 on 01/06/2013 15:08:41 MST.

"Joe Clement Douglas Ide, while it's always cute to see people, particular guys like you, totally non-critically (yet totally predictably) fall for mainstream media spin and agressive marketing of stock prices, this isn't the thread for that discussion. "

Ah, Harald, such an arrogant ass you are. And not witty at all, to boot!

But you're right, it's not the thread for that discussion, which is why I tried to steer it back to Portland with a little humor. I was rebutting nothing. Of course, because you're so much smarter than the rest of us, you couldn't help yourself, right after saying it wasn't the proper thread, giving yet another of your stuffy dissertation responses anyway. You, sir, often make me laugh, so I guess we're even on that score.

Now for the next insufferable, probably long, haughty response, sigh, repeating something as if the rest of the world is so clueless ... I suggest you take it over to Whiteblaze. I'll get a laugh out of reading that, but here, not so much, it's kind of boring reading your dissertations, even though most of us know what's well understood outside of the mass media, regardless of whether you realize that or not....