Oregon - Day 22 - The Sisters, Bend, volcanoes

LaPine State Park, LaPine

Sunday, 22 May 2022

Before we left last night's park, we went over to the boat launch area so the dogs could walk one last time without passing all the campground dogs.  Unfortunately, I discovered that a large flock of Canada geese had been in the area and left lots of their poop around.  Which Dext managed to scoff a lot of before I could stop him.

He's a very trainable dog and responds best to treats for reinforcement.  The problem with that is that the goose poop and other inedibles he finds irresistible are the treats I want to train him from so I don't know how to compete.

The level of the reservoir was obviously way down and one boat ramp was closed.  I was interested to note that the restrooms there were closed with a sign saying, "Closed for Winter."  I wouldn't have thought the second half of May was still winter, but I guess in central Oregon it is.

today's route

We had to go back through Prineville, which I discovered is the Crook County seat.  They've got a nice county courthouse here, and the town is an old town - still - meaning they haven't modernized the character out of it.  Looks nice.

I passed a field with a sign: Industrial Hemp Grown Here.

I'd decided to head toward the town of Sisters, because I thought I might get a good view of the Sisters Mountains that way.  And I did.

The 3 Sisters.
The 2nd one is a bit behind the one on the right.

I'd never seen them before and wasn't sure what to look for, but as soon as I saw these, I knew I'd found them.  What you might call majestic.

I had similar views of those beautiful mountains for much of this part of the drive - really nice.  The smallest is the one on the right (9,970') and the tallest (by about 300') is the one on the left (10,328').

The road I wanted made a jog at Redmond, pop. 36,122, and at that intersection there's an incredible piece of sculpture called Thoughts of Flight.  I wasn't able to take a photo and can't find any online that aren't copyrighted, so I suggest you take a quick look at this website.   https://www.redmondoregon.gov/thoughts-of-flight  It includes not only a photo but also an explanation of why it was designed like that.  In fact, this sculpture was only one piece of public art among quite a few I saw in Redmond.

About 20 miles farther along the road I came to the town of Sisters, pop. 3,286.  For some reason there seemed to be a traffic jam and I saw a park just off the road, so I turned in there and the dogs and I went for a walk.  Nice park, called Creekside City Park, and it was in fact alongside a creek.  We ended up having lunch there, and when we got ready to leave I saw that the traffic jam was still there.  Luckily I was turning right and didn't have to be involved with it.  But how can there be a traffic jam in a town of 3,300 people?

I took a different road to go to Bend and noticed long lines of cars on the highway headed toward Sisters.  Apparently something was going on, but I don't know what it was.

In this area, Oregon reminded me of Colorado.  Mountains, and sunny but cool weather, and lots of traffic.

A campaign sign I saw read "Crumpacker for Congress," which seemed an unusual name for someone in politics.  But I looked him up and found he'd won his Republican primary and is on the fall ballot.

Twice I almost hit a car because they'd both pulled out in front of me and then quickly slowed for left turns, leaving me almost no stopping distance.  I'm beginning to think it needs to be a part of driver's ed (if that were still being taught in school) to make people drive even a small RV like mine in traffic, so they'd understand how to drive when we're on the road - stopping distance and like that.  Not that we deserve special treatment, but it's only a safety measure.  And since the Covid lock-downs, there are a lot more RVs on the roads now than there used to be.  And since the economy changed, there are a lot more full-time RVers on the road - not just weekend warriors.  Times have changed, and driving styles need to change with them.

In Bend, pop. 91,385, I was trying to get to a grocery store, but Google insisted the road I wanted was called Business Route US-97, and it gave no other name.  Bend insisted that same road was 3rd Street and gave no other name.  I had to make a lot of u-turns and detours before I finally figured that out.  It didn't leave me with a positive impression of either Bend or Google.  Especially since Bend had a highway sign telling me to turn here for that business route, and then it abandoned me, never to mention that route name again.

From Bend I headed south and passed the High Desert Museum.  I'd wanted to go there but found they charged $18 for senior admission, and that was just too much for me to learn about deserts.  Instead I went farther down the road to learn for free about local volcanoes.

The place where I stopped was called Lava Lands Visitor Center.  It included information specifically about Lava Butte, which was immediately behind the center, and generally about central Oregon volcanoes, of which there are many.  The exhibits seemed to me to be sort of jumbled with not a lot of logic in their presentation that I could see.  And that's made it hard for me to figure out what to leave out, what to include here, and what order to put it in, because their order was meaningless to me. 

This Lava Lands center is only a small part of the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, which stretches south of here for miles, ending at the caldera formed during one of the Newberry Volcano's eruptions.  Inside the caldera are 2 lakes, and nearby is Paulina Peak and the Big Obsidian Flow.  That flow resulted from the most recent eruption 1,300 years ago, when volcanic ash spread as far as today's Idaho.  In fact, scientists have discovered debris from Newberry's eruptions (ash, pumice, lava, cinder and mudflows) covered 120 cubic miles; for comparison, that's 20 times the amount produced by Mt. St. Helens in 1980.  Scientists say Newberry is a still-active volcano, and the USGS has 9 monitoring stations there to detect early warning signs of future eruptions.

Obsidian, by the way, is a volcanic glass much like window glass.  The National Park Service explains: "Unlike most rocks, obsidian is formed with minimum crystal growth and has a disordered internal structure similar to liquid."  (Sometimes I feel like I have a similar internal structure.)  A trail allows hikers to get right to the flow area.

Here are some of the exhibits I thought were interesting.

Ring of Fire

Oregon's share of those volcanoes

Lava Butte, specifically

more recent than Newberry

my on-the-ground view of Lava Butte

the official aerial view of Lava Butte

Future eruptions in Oregon

This information is about South Sister Mountain (the tallest of them).

bulge in South Sister
see detail at right

This information is about Mt. Hood which, yes, has the potential for erupting.

Sorry - I know this is a bit fuzzy, but the information is important.

They had several exhibits on other subjects that I thought were interesting:  

Geothermal energy

In these days of very high energy costs, and intimations of scarcity thanks to Putin's stupid war and the world's responses to it, more people are getting serious about developing this source of energy.  Here's what Oregon has.

Rain shadow

US-97

And in light of bewildering arguments in Congress about climate science, I was interested to see they included these definitions in their exhibits.

Tonight's campground was only 15 miles farther on, and I realized, with some little panic, that I'd been so turned around in Bend by the inadequate directions that I'd forgotten to get gasoline and was getting close to empty.  The only hope of gas nearby was the town of LaPine a few miles beyond the campground, so I decided I'd stop there in the morning.

On the road leading from the highway to the campground, I noticed that litter cleanup had been adopted by the LaPine Ya Ya Sisterhood.

I found the campground and stopped at the waste dump station, only to find it had a large puddle of water in front of the drain hole.  I'd have to wade through it - and put on my rubber boots to do it - just to dump my tanks, so I decided I could wait another night.

I found my campsite fairly easily, but that turned out to be another problem.  Without realizing it, I'd booked a campsite with only 20 amps of power.  I could make that work but would have to plug in an adapter to step down my 30-amp plug to fit the 20-amp plug-in.  But the 20-amp receptor had been installed upside down - you know, with the 2 flat prongs below the 1 round safety prong.  I could still have made that work except the adaptor cord is thick, short, and stiff and would have had to stick straight up from the plug, which the cover of the power box wouldn't allow.

The park hosts were nearby and the husband took the attitude that either I didn't know what I was talking about or I was stuck with the mistake I'd made in booking that site - in other words, not helpful.  His wife was more sympathetic, told me I was the 2nd person to say they'd booked a 20-amp site thinking it was 30 amps, and called the park rangers for me.

The rangers came, I showed them the problem with the plug, and they suggested I go check out the available sites in the other camping loops.  The camping loop I was in had an incredibly bumpy road, I was really tired after a lot of driving today, and just didn't want to contemplate driving on more bumpy roads just to find somewhere else I'd have to pay more for (they were all full hook-ups while the 20-amp site was water/electric only).  The rangers assured me that this loop was the original one to the park, the others were newer and had far smoother roads that were much more pleasant to drive on.

So I went looking and found there were dogs all over the other 2 loops, but I found an open site that was fairly level.  And because it was full hook-up, I was able to dump my tanks right there.  So that was good.

Then Dexter threw up inside the cabin, and I had to clean that up.  And when the dogs and I went out, he had a loose bowel movement, which actually he's been having lately, probably because of all that junk he finds to eat when we go out.  

When I unpacked the groceries I'd bought in Bend, I found a bag of coffee grounds had a slit in it and spilled all over the other groceries in the bag.  It was all so much upheaval I didn't get us all settled till after we ate dinner.  With everything that had happened today, I was glad for the day to be done.