Bill saw the Willamette Valley open up ahead just as he reached Cottage Grove. It was the first real open country that he had seen since leaving the Medford Valley. The other valleys had been so narrow that they looked entirely too small to amount to much from the airman’s point of view, but Willamette was wide and had numerous farms, orchards and open spaces. It was a real valley, but after their flight from San Francisco to Roseburg the pilots knew that such wide-open spaces would seldom be found in the Northwest woods.