Big Names Like Travis Pastrana & Small Crowds To See It All

After a quick continental breakfast on the morning of Saturday, May 17, 2008, we navigated our way to the Washington County Fairgrounds in Hillsboro, Oregon, to catch some Oregon Trail Rally action.

We found one other Evo 10 during the weekend - one of few Evos period! Upon arrival, the first thing that I noticed was that there were hardly any spectators to check out the big-bucks race teams that had shown up. Able to get up-close-and-personal with the cars and drivers was a pleasant surprise. How else do you think I was able to pull off that picture with Travis Pastrana? He ended up winning the weekend's rally in his 2006 Subaru WRX STi #199 car, along with co-driver Derek Ringer! Despite an underrepresentation of Evos in the rally, the 2006 Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 9RS #20 car of Andrew Comrie-Picard and co-driver Marc Goldfarb took second place overall, and the 2005 Mitsubishi Evo 8 #39 car of Carl Jardevall and co-driver Amity Trowbridge took third place. These two red Evos are pictured under my fan shot with Travis. 

    
After catching some of the action at the Water Splash spectator stage at the Washington County Fairgrounds, we headed to the only other spectator site of the day, off of McGregor Road, which was a dirt road in the middle of the forest. This was fun, as the supposed two-way road quickly became a one-way road once spectators parked haphazardly along the side. After finally turning around and parking, we hiked to the spectator spot, which was literally a corner that we were able to view while perched on a forest hillside. Luckily, after what seemed like hours of waiting (which resulted in a slew of "forest-boredom-photos"), we were lucky enough to catch Pastrana spin out in that corner.