The following was written about a road trip I took back in 2003. I've left it in its entirety as I dont feel the need to edit something that was written that long ago. I do not have the original pictures anymore. I had to make do with the pictures used in the word document_ But in any case its here to share with all my friends who would like to read it. Enjoy.
As you may have known, I've gone out of town this last week. I needed to take a vacation from myself and the problems I've had going on here. So my dad and I went out on a road trip throughout Central and Eastern Oregon. The pictures in this Journal are much smaller than the copies I have saved on my computer (had to cut them down because the email size was too big and couldn't be sent), if at all you want the full size picture, let me know and I'll be able to send it to you. After 3 days and 1048 miles later, this is my trip.
The trip began on Wednesday, May 14th on a sunny spring afternoon. With our bags packed up and the Jeep ready to go, we headed out on the road. Where we ended up was determined by where our noses lead us out on the open road. We started west on I-84 which travels along the scenic Columbia River Gorge. Just about the whole trip down the Columbia was stuff we had seen before. That had been our route to Salt Lake City, Utah when we were traveling back and forth the 8 years we lived there. But this time we took a slightly different route. At Mosier, OR we got off of I-84 and took the old scenic Hwy 30. It may have been a lot slower but, we didn't have anywhere we had to be so we took our time. Saw a whole new kind of country we had never seen before, stuff that cant be seen from along I-84. Along our travel along the old windy highway I saw for the first time in my life a coyote. Sure I've seen them on TV and all, but this I was getting the chance to see with my own eyes. The creature ran across the road in front of us without a care in the world. Not even slowing down we continued out along the highway. After several miles we came to this little bridge that crossed this huge canyon. The canyon's entrance at the top allowed for people to enter through it, down inside there was a small neighborhood, protected from the heavy winds of the Columbia Gorge. Realizing that this would be a great time for a picture, we got out of the car and I took it. Here you go.
I believe that this canyon is called Rowena or something like that. If you look at a map, that's where its located because just a little along the way is a viewpoint called Rowena Crest. So I'm going to assume that this is what its called. As we drove on we reconnected shortly with I-84, we wanted to get further west before the end of the day. ? So about 30 minutes later we arrived in The Dalles. Dad always wanted to go into the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center they had there so we drove a little ways back and stopped in to see what they had. There were two museums there, one for the history of Wasco County, the other about the Columbia River Gorge. It was there that kinda got me inspired to be some kind of a photographer, there was a small gallery and gift shop there and I saw pictures that were blown up and framed selling for 150 bucks each. Finding it kind of cool that people would pay that much for some awesome pictures like that, I think I might try that here pretty soon. I'm not a great photographer, but I think I do fairly well. After the discovery center we went back into town, time for lunch or something like that. I think it was around 2 so you call it whatever you want. Mmmm… Wendies. Frosty. Burger. YUM!. Ok anyways, after we were filled up we started up again down I-84. Our trip there along the interstate came to a halt in Biggs where we decided to do something different for once. We went south from there, finally something new and different. Yeah, new and different is right, all the country between there and Bend is mostly the same, flat and barren. Farm land and stuff, but nothing really to look at. So I took over driving for a while, I needed to get some practice done as I'm not all that thrilled about driving. I drove through several small towns until we came to a rest stop north of Madras. After about 100 or so miles, I was getting slightly sore and needed a brake so dad took over. We traveled down highway 97 until we reached a small town called Metolius. There we found a road that leads off to some resort that leads to this really big recreation lake which is part of the Deschutes River. I cant for the life of me remember the name of the place though. Anyways, we didn't stop there long, as pretty as it was, I didn't take any pictures. Wasn't really worth it I don't think. Nothing really to take pictures of even though it is a fairly well known recreation spot. And again, south we go towards Bend. Wow this city has grown up a lot since I was there last. Population is now like 55 thousand people. Last time I was there it was around 5 thousand. We got hungry and thirsty and the night was coming. We stopped and grabbed a few Arby's Sandwiches and at the store got some things to drink and we left town to see about finding a place to stay the night. So we took a look at our map and decided upon trying Palina Lake. There was a campground there that might be a good place to check out. You never would of expected what we found there. SNOW! And not just little sections of it, but lots of snow. Palina Lake had snow all around it, about a foot, and there wasn't really any good spots to stay so we drove on, but not without first getting some pictures.
Well you would of thought I had seen enough snow then. We drove up and a little bit to another lake just east of Palina Lake easily enough called, East Lake. And guess what? More freaking snow! We got up there and there was like 2 feet of snow along the side of the roads and the lake was iced over. I did get a chance to get this really cool picture before the sun went down though. Iced over lake and sunset, great combination I think.
Just to give you a bit of information about the locations, this is called the Newberry Caldera. All around the lakes is ancient lava flow. Probably from volcano's gone long ago. Anyways, you'll get to see some of that cool stuff here later on, I took them the next day. So anyways, we stayed the night here in East Lake. Cold as hell, let me tell ya. And this is near Bend, would you believe it? Well anyways, going to bed…. See you tomorrow at the Lava Cast forest ;).
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Ok, I'm awake, how are you this fine morning? ? Ok, well time to take off again on this little trip. Its cold this morning. Need coffee. So we went into town and got our morning brew from one of the "8 7'11's on one street!" (inside joke, hehe). Hmm… White Chocolate Cuppacino. Drools…. Ok and here we go. There are a lot of ice caves that were created down from way back then that are nestled down in the lava flow. We decided to head back south and try and see if we can find some of these caves. We took a small road named China Hat Rd which is like right on the edge of town. The road heads east and eventually come back to Hwy 97 totally encompassing the 2 lakes we visited the night before. A few miles off of the HWY and not too far after we discovered unpaved road we came across something really cool. I thought it was a hawk up until last night when I was able to blow up the pictures a bit on my computer and get a closer look. But it's a vulture. We drove past it a little and down in front of it is a dead coyote, looked like it had been there a while. Here is the picture of the vulture and even managed to get it to spread its wings, my guess it was protecting its dinner from us.
I took over driving here shortly after. Woohoo, 55 mph on dirt and gravel road with twists and turns… I learned that was a bad idea pretty quick. We kept looking for all the Ice Caves but every time we found one there was a sign saying it was closed. Apparently back in old times, some guy named Arnold would go to the ice caves, chizzle off some ice and bring it back to town to supply it with ice. He'd get so far down into the ice that he put in stairs and lights just to see his way down to get the ice. When electricity came along they didn't need the ice cave anymore but it came part of an attraction. Now you can go to the cave and the ice formed back up to the top, you can see stairs and lights that go down beyond the ice. I didn't see it this time unfortunately but I had seen it a long time ago before I moved to Utah. We did finally come across an Ice Cave though. But before I do that, you'd think that if you saw the name of a place on a map called China Hat, and they named a road after it, that it would be something cool to look at right? Wrong, even though the map marked it as something to see, the damned thing is just a hill. GAH! Ok, now for the ice cave. Hey look, the one and only picture of me on the trip. Feel lucky, real lucky.
Sign said outside said caution: Many Yellow Jackets near entrance of cave. Ick. Didn't see any though, my lucky day. I didn't wait long enough to find out if they were "out to lunch" or not though. So we took off from there. Finally after lots of road came across the first other sign of civilization since coffee this morning. A semi-truck. Wow, almost 2 hours and we had only seen like one or 2 people. Hope we don't get lost! After finally coming across HWY 97 again we headed back north towards Bend. We saw a sign for the Lava Cast forest and figured we might as well check I out. Aren't you glad we did? If not, you will be here soon. I drove up about 2 miles to a place to park and we got out and stretched our legs a bit. Well… we got out and went for a walk along the mile long trail they have that takes us along the lava flow showing us the lava cast forest. Now what this place is, is kind of cool. When the lava flow came through the forest it came across trees (obviously). Some of the lava got cooled and hardened around the tree. So along the path we found all these little holes where there were once trees. Its amazing thinking about what it might have been like when this happened. Here are a few pictures of our visit to the Lava Cast Forest.
Now on our way back down from this cool place things got a bit more interesting. Dad was driving this time cause I was still a bit tired from before and as I was looking out my window into the forest, trying to spot some deer, I saw some smoke. With a quick glance it looked like no one was there watching it so we stopped the car and got closer to it for a quick inspection. The area around looked like it had recently been burned in the last few days and it looked like this was something that might have been rekindled by the wind. So we called 911 and let the Sunriver Fire Department know that we were at a fire and that we'll stay until its taken care of. Soon after the US Forestry Service was out on patrol and came across us. He stopped to check things out and we told him what was going on. Right after that the Fire Department arrived and went in to put out the fire. They told us it's a good thing atleast we caught it now instead of a month later when things were dryer or when this thing was bigger. So now aren't you glad we checked out the Forest? From here we went back into Bend and grab some lunch. Hey look, more Arbies. And then we drove out of town 130 miles east to Burns. And then traveled north on to John Day. We saw a number of different animals this leg the of trip, 4 antelope, and what almost became dinner, a deer. It wasn't my fault the deer was hanging out in the middle of the road! Pretty much another stretch of road with nothing much to look at besides the occasionally forest and mountain twists and turns. After about 3 hours of driving we were getting hungry again. Stopped in John Day and had the greasiest McDonalds Double Cheeseburger I have ever had. We began a new direction in our trip, and started out sort of in our way home. A little ways outside of John Day we stopped at the Fissil Beds lookcout there along highway 26. Wasn't much to see really, just showed a bunch of moved dirt and showed us a view of the valley. Got a few pictures, nothing that great though. And we continued on down hwy 26 trying to make our way to Prineville. And you'd never guess what we saw yet again…. Sure enough just east of mile post 92 we discovered yet another fire. This time we were out of range to even call someone for help and we drove as fast as we could to the nearest town. Came across Mitchel that had a pay phone but even that barely had any reception. But being the good guys we are, we reported the fire anyway 40 miles away from where it was. It was starting to get dark and we were tired. We slowly made our way into Prineville. It was late, we were tired, We wanted a hotel. And got HBO! Nothing is on HBO anymore, not that late. We watched our shows CSI and ER instead. ? And then we rested. *sigh*
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Damn, no coffee this morning. Oh well. Prineville isn't big enough to have "8 7'11's on one street" like Bend does. Not to worry, we had Pop Tarts and Gatoraid. The third and final day of our trip was kind of the end of us. We were both tired but we had fun. We wanted to go back along highway 26 towards the town of Mitchel again and see if we could check out 2 of the John Day Fossil Beds we hadn't seen before. The first one we stopped at was the Painted Hills Fossil Beds. I don't even know how to explain what we saw there, the landscape was amazing. From what I can understand the Painted Hills are made of ash of some sort. I don't know all that much more to say about it other than that. Here's a look at what we saw.
And after driving a bit north to the famous town of Fossil, well known for a place to go to dig up fossils behind the football field of the high school. We went west towards Shaniko where we would connect with our old friend HWY 97 and head north back to Biggs where we started our journey south. Along the drive to Shaniko we came to another one of the John Day fossil beds. This place reminded me a lot of the formations you can find down in Southern Utah. What they are Is several layers of mud, rock and layer that have been formed on top of each other after several different eruptions. These layers are called lahars. The lahars I guess are kind of like a slow flowing mud slide and as they moved they'd pick up leaves and sticks and rocks and whetever else was in their way. So naturally, there is lots of fossils in them there mountains. Below is a few pictures looking up at the lahars and following is a picture of a leaf fossil we found in one of the builders below them.
So from here on we traveled to Shaniko and began out trip back to civilization. The leg back was the same trip down so to spare you of repeating stuff we had already seen I'll leave you with a picture of something we didn't see on the trip. Farewell, Jason.
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