2012/05 Western USA trip - La Pine and Newberry |
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Monday May 21st
We woke up to find ourselves camped in a lake which was steadily growing as the rain pelted down. We decided to give up on the coast. “How about going to 
a desert?” I suggested, thinking that the eastern parts of Oregon are sagebrush country and usually dry.
We climbed over the Coast Mountains to Salem (not the Salem that had the witches), still in the rain, and then over the Cascades to Sisters, where it was dry, as expected. The rain caught up with us again south of Bend as we drove through lava fields towards La Pine state park. There was some brief excitement when we spotted elk on our way into the park but then we realized that it was an elk farm, not quite the same.
We went for an evening walk along the Deschutes River; it was showery but we could handle that. This was a strange nostalgia for me, as Intel used to give their microprocessors code names, based on the Northwest’s rivers. I worked on a Deschutes-based system in the nineties. Intel eventually marketed it with the product name of the Pentium II. It was nice to actually meet the river.
Tuesday May 22nd
We had blue sky at last; it came with a cold blustery wind, but it was better than rain. We’d been surprised to find a state park with showers, but they proved to be on the wrong side of lukewarm.
We left the Little Guy behind and set off to explore the Newberry volcanic monument, but our first stop was at the nearby “Big Tree”, a massive ponderosa pine, not as big as the coastal hemlocks and spruces but still worth a look.
Our next stop was the High Desert museum, just to check it out. We decided that it was a bit too expensive for a quick look; it was really an all-day place, and we just looked at the (free) Oregon Trail wagon and the tipis in the parking lot.
Our first piece of Newberry was the rather gaudy-looking visitor centre at Lava Land but it turned out to be closed! Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised as it was early in the season, but we couldn’t see why the roads to the lava beds and the lava caves had to be closed. Luckily we found another road that took us to another part of the Deschutes River and we walked the trail to Benham Falls. There the river has cut a path down through the lava beds, more of an extended rapids than a falls, but an impressive show, definitely worth the walk. We found a path that took us from the 
forest up to the lava beds and we walked far enough to take some pictures, but it’s impossible country to cross, boulders of lava and pumice at all sizes and angles, very unfriendly to the ankles.
I wasn’t willing to give up on Newberry though, and we took one last drive up into the mountains to the Newberry caldera. The volcano last 
exploded about 1300 years ago and since then the caldera has partially filled with water to form Paulina Lake. We managed to get to the lake shore but most roads from there were closed, still deep in snow. Edna was busy taking pictures of snow, a novelty for her. This was a shot of a piece of the caldera’s wall high above us, lava and snow against the clouds, a black and white world
Back at La Pine the campground was swarming with bus-loads of kids, noisy and overloading the bathrooms but well-behaved. We went for another walk along the river, this time in a fine drizzle.
Wednesday May 23rd
It was a cold night for John and Edna as the gas ran out and they didn’t want to risk changing gas bottles in the dark. The kids were off early in their buses so we had little competition for the cold showers.