Taking a Bend in the Path — YOFO Adventures

Volcanic outcropping on Paulina Peak with more volcanoes in the background

We’re playing catch-up here - we missed a couple blog entries last fall that preceded our arrival at Success Lake. We know our 5 and a half readers would be sorely disappointed if we did not share our fun near Bend, Oregon last October. Oddly enough, as we write this we are back in Oregon heading north...but more on that later in a future (and not so tardy) blog!

Big Ponderosa Pine - record holder! Fun find in the SP.

As we pondered our route from the Boise Idaho area heading west across Oregon, we had initially planned to camp at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Besides being in the news a few years ago (think standoff with the Bundy brothers), it promised scenery and critters, but a predicted storm system also threatened overnight temps in the teens and twenties. We’ve learned (the hard way) to generally try to avoid camping in temps in the 20s unless we’re connected to power. Since we would’ve been off grid there, we bypassed it (for now) in search of a campground with power. Looking farther west, we found La Pine State Park just to the south side of Bend and put in a longer than usual driving day to get there. As we pulled in late in the afternoon, the sign showed that the campground was full. Ugh - sphincter-clench time. We decided to do a lap through the campground anyway (hoping that folks had left on a Sunday and the sign was behind the times). Victory! There was a great spot available and we set up camp!

Volcanic evidence everywhere - that’s an obsidian flow spilling out

One of the true pleasures of YOFO is the ability to reconnect with classmates, friends, coworkers, family, and people who overlap categories. So our first priority was to meet up with Dawn’s classmate Carol. We’re so happy she was able to come out and play on a school night and introduce us to one of her local favorite restaurants! And she unintentionally threw down a gauntlet by recounting a recent multi-hour bike ride she took! You could almost see Dean’s gears spinning as he began to ponder the possibilities.

When you drive into or through the Bend area, you can’t help but notice the volcanic influences - cinder cones, lava rocks, cratered peaks, and more. We noticed some brown signs for Newberry National Volcanic Monument and Dean instantly began plotting a way to convince Dawn to ride to the top of one of the craters.

Tree working hard to grow in the obsidian and pumice flow.

Even though Bend is best known for its mountain biking, we also did some hiking in the area - our campground in La Pine State Park has a nice trail network that gave us several nice trail runs. And just across the street (Hwy 97) from La Pine is Newberry National Volcanic Monument. We hiked to the top of Paulina Peak (at a smidge under 8,000 feet) and were rewarded with impressive views - there was a ltitle smoke haze that day from the many California and Oregon fires, but on clear days, apparently you can see Mount Shasta to the south in California and Mount Ranier to the north in Washington. Even with the haze we could still see a full panorama of Oregon’s peaks - Mount Hood and Mount Bachelor were stunning. From the top of Paulina we could look down onto an old lava flow and a quick check of our trail apps showed the Obsidian Trail that runs through it. So of course that became our next destination. And wow, it turned out to be a short trail, but super cool. You wind your way through the flow walking on broken natural glass from all the obsidian and pumice. There was everything from arrowhead-sized flakes to boulders of obsidian. We thought about collecting some dagger sized pieces of the dragon glass to protect us from the White Walkers (Winter is coming!) but then remembered we were in a federally protected area where such taking of any natural objects is frowned upon (aka punishable by law) so we skipped that idea and stuck to our usual reliance on rule numbers 1, 3, and 4 to deal with the impending arrival of the White Walkers. (I’m sure you don’t need to be reminded but just in case: Rule #1. Cardio!, 3. Beware of bathrooms, and 4. Wear seatbelts. We skip #2...neither of us are much into gun toting despite our combined 50 years in the Army). Did we digress? Oh, yeah, Big Obsidian Flow Trail - very worthy. Just do it.

No action shots of Mtn biking Bc it requires two hands at all times.

We finally busted out the mountain bikes since we were in one of the country’s hotspots for mountain biking. Fitness still trumps skills for us, so we stuck to mostly green (beginner) and blue (intermediate) trails. We now get why Bend is so popular for bikers; it was some serious fun and we left so many trails unexplored that we feel a return trip is in order at some point in our wanderings. As is some toughening up of the saddle contact points system before we get into the multi-hour adventures that the trails seem to demand! As they say, taint leather... t’aint gonna grow by itself!

We also wanted to keep exploring and playing on our “other” bikes. Before we left PA, we bought a second set of rims so that our road bikes were more gravel/dirt-capable enabling us to play around on more varied terrain. We swapped out the road wheels and Dawn picked the route. Dean is presently not allowed to select routes since his criteria is generally “it can’t just be scenic, it needs to also be a workout” (grumble). Despite being reasonably good at “maths,” and possessing impressive map reading skills, Dawn calculated that “it’s only about 12 miles to get to here” and then “it’s only a few miles from there to ride to the cinder cone climb” and concluded that an out and back would only take a couple of hours. No big deal, right? Well, Dean looked at the map, did his own maths and with a rather evil, gloating smile just said “Swiggety swoogety, let’s do it...it’ll be fun!” Of course his calculations were far more accurate and showed that we’d be in the saddle for over 5 hours, and damned if he wasn’t right, but did he tell anybody?? Sure he did. But not until we were almost halfway! Luckily the ride was never a slog because the scenery was great and we were laughing the whole time, but our tusches were not exactly prepared for what turned out to be almost 5 1/2 hours of toodling around! Dean's smug little deception of not challenging Dawn’s clearly flawed route planning means he will continue to be on route selection profile for the foreseeable future.

We *almost* ran out of daylight. Maths is hard.

We could’ve / should’ve stayed longer in the Bend area, but we were trying to catch up with a mail drop in Mammoth Lakes and had to get down to California. We’ll save Mammoth Lakes for another blog post (yes, another recap), but as for Bend, it’s already on the list as worthy of repeat visits.