Updated on October 1, 1998.
Burt had made some suggestions about how to get to Bend, so we took the Little Nestucca River Road over the near coastal range and then went through Corvallis rather than Salem. It was a good drive. There were some narrow bridges, but there was no traffic to contest with. We then followed US20 over the Cascades. It was a good pull going over Tombstone and Santiam passes, and coming down to the high desert the exhaust brake did well in controlling the truck and trailer.
The drive through Bend took quite a while. You go through the middle of town on US20/US97, and there are a lot of stop lights. The TTN resort is about 19 miles south of the town, just past the road to SunRiver. We pulled into the park and found a nice site near the family lodge.
The resort has a nice openness about it. The sites are large and widely spaced amongst the pines. The view to the east shows the forested sides of the low volcanoes of the Newberry episode.
As we were setting up Jim and Carol showed up. They had been visiting their daughter and family in Colorado and were heading back home. They stopped here for several days to rest and visit. Jim brought along a couple of Rush Springs watermelons, and we had one during the next afternoon. It was good, but it was not what I remember from my youth.
We drove into Bend to the WalMart and did some grocery shopping. It was also clothes washing time, so we bundled everything up and cleaned the trailer. I set out the bird feeder but did not bother to put seeds in it until I saw a jay checking it over. After fueling it, it took a couple of days, but by then we were invaded by mountain chickadees. They were delightful.
Bend
TTN also has a large population of gray squirrels. They are quite
large, made even larger by their tails which are bigger than their
bodies. During one walk I took over twenty pictures of this squirrel
before I got him to pose for me. He always seemed to move just
as I pressed the button.
During the first part of the week I watched the stock market and worked on my novel. I made some good progress on characters and plot. I finally figured out how the book could be brought to an ending. Alice and I agreed we would change our schedule for next year so we could spend several weeks in the Memphis area. That is the locale for the novel.
During that week the fiddlers started arriving for their Old Fiddlers Convention, a yearly affair at the Bend TTN Resort. It was great fun listening and stomping our feet in time with them. I got so enthused I wrote a short short story, "The Little Devil and the Fiddlers Convention". My cousin Roseann asked me who I wrote it for, and I decided it must be for myself. But I thought you folks might like it also.
Sunday we drove
to Crater Lake to meet our daughter Deb. Her schedule was for
a two week visit with us. While we were there, we took the rest
of the day driving the perimeter of Crater Lake and taking pictures.
The first picture is sort of traditional, showing Wizard Island,
the last remaining crater vent from just before the volcano went
dormant, about 6,000 years ago.
This is another
view of the lake, looking more to the west. The sides of the lake
are the edge of the caldrea. The lake itself is a clear blue except
near the edges. The Native Americans thought the lake was sacred,
and told no one about it. It was not seen by white men until the
mid-1800s. There were no fish in the lake until some were planted
in the late 1800s.
I had
a close encounter with an Oregon Jay at a view spot on the side
of Crater Lake. He and the chipmunks were very interested in whatever
people would feed them. There were a number of signs out about
refraining from feeding them, but most of the people seemed to
be illiterate.
Inside the caldrea
are the remains of one of the former lives of the volcano, from
over 100,000 years before. They show now as a set of pinnacles
pushing up out of the water. They look like a ghost ship. You
can still see snow on the inner portions of the lake where the
sun does not shine much of the day.
Deb
was very busy shooting pictures as well with her higher resolution
digital camera from Kodak. We had several lively discussions about
who had the better system. During the day it had clouded over,
and some of the views of the lake could not be captured in a photo.
One
of Deb's bid interests is pictures of wildflowers. There were
several places where flowers remained around the lake. Along one
walk I saw this interesting plant whose seed pods had already
exploded, leaving the interesting curls you see here.
In
another place, I found some flowers still covered by the dew from
the previous night's rain. It made a nice picture.
Deb wanted to do more sight-seeing, so we went for a car trip around the Cascade Lakes Loop. It was about 100 miles. This was a pleasant drive, but we found that there is no businesses along the way. It was good that we had packed a picnic lunch.
We went by Mt
Bachelor and then over a ridge to its north side. We drove up
to Todd Lake and found that you need a Trail Head Pass to even
park there. Luckily, we were able to get one, so we were legal.
The little lake was beautifully clear. It is about 50 acres in
size and just over 50 feet deep. We walked part of the way around
it and took a number of pictures. There are places to camp, and
it looks like a lot of people enjoy the lake.
Todd
Lake is natural. It was formed when a lava flow blocked a small
valley. In time the lake will fill and become a meadow, but for
now the outlet creek from the lake flows over the old lava flow,
creating a nice little falls, and then passes under the road.
We had our picnic lunch near that falls.
The
creek flows under the road through an old wooden culver. I have
not seen one of these for years, though this one looks like it
is not too many years old. From this point the creek flowed off
into the meadow below the lake. I do not know where it left the
meadow. The entire setting was so peaceful we felt like taking
naps, but we had to drive on to complete the loop.
On the north side
of Mt Bachelor we had a great view of the most southern of the
Three Sisters. There were times when we thought we could see the
other Sisters, but we were never sure.
When we arrived back in camp, I explained to Deb that I wanted a day's rest before going sightseeing again, so the next day we sat around camp and enjoyed the birds at the bird feeder. There were a number of mountain chickadees that kept us entertained for several hours. I also worked on my novel.
The
next day was a designated sight-seeing day, so we decided to go
to the High Desert Museum and take a look at the local Newberry
National Volcano Monument, just up the road. The museum has some
very interesting exhibits, including porcupines, river otters,
and snakes. There was also the replicae of an old sawmill and
a pioneer home, including the outhouse. Alice decided she had
to check out what they were using for toilet papers. Sure enough,
it was an old catalog.
We
went back to the trailer for lunch and then drove up to the cinder
cone. It was a circuitous route to the top of the cone, and the
road was quite narrow. We reached the parking lot, then headed
up to the lookout at the top. The lookup is 502 feet above the
surrounding valley, and the view was awesome.
Leaving the cinder
cone, we drove out to Newberry Caldrea which contains a lake of
considerable size. However, it is no comparison to Crater Lake.
Coming back we stopped at the obsidian flow out the side the Mt
Pauline. We took the trail up and walked the half mile path through
the flow.
There were many
different kinds of lava in the flow. Some of it was glassy black
obsidian. In those parts of the flow where there had been gas,
the flow ranged from very light pumice with small pores to some
that was simply more porous. This was the froth that had been
mixed with the sticky liquid flow that became the glass.
There
were a few plants in the flow, but we did not see any wildlife.
However, at the edge of the flow we found a chipmunk eating some
kind of nut. He was very obliging and photogenic. Deb came by
five minutes later and he was sitting on the same rock. This is
a delightful walk that I recommend to anyone who is in the area.
They recommend that you not wear sandles because if you hit a
piece of broken obsidian with your toe, it will cut like the sharpest
of glass.
That night Deb installed Windows 98 on Alice's laptop. I installed it on mine the next morning. It had made some improvement, but there are still some problems. We also discussed what kind of improvements we should make to our computing system.
The next day Deb did her own trip up to see the Three Sisters and the Metolius River. She brought back some great pictures of the area.
Saturday we had breakfast at the lodge and stayed for the Manager's Meeting. It was a good meeting, but the general talk was beginning to be about heading south and getting away from the colder weather that was approaching. In fact, some of it was already in town; I was seeing temperatures down into the 20s overnight.
We came back to the lodge for ice cream and then the Oktoberfest games and had a great time. Bend is a delightful TTN resort, and there are lots of things going on. We will definitely return. But at the end of the two weeks, it was time to start drifting south, this time towards South Jetty TTN resort in Florence.