Category: Travel

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A view and a warning

Oregon Trunk Railroad Bridge

Located just north of Redmond, the Peter Skene Ogden Park is the perfect stop if you’re heading south. A rest area that features three bridges spanning the Crooked River gorge. The railroad bridge that is about 100 years old, a highway bridge no longer in use, and the new bridge.

Oregon Trunk Railroad bridge is a steel arch built in 1910. Workers climbed rope ladders and waded through the river to get to the other side. Later, 300 feet above the gorge, they would “walk the plank,” crossing over on narrow boards that bounced with each step.

The Crooked River High Bridge allows pedestrians to walk the 464 feet over the Crooked River gorge to some dizzying views of sheer basalt walls leading down the 300 foot canyon face.

Also, if you are so inclined, there is a platform set up for bungee jumping.

Speaking of jumping … one alarming note…there  were many signs posted on the path to the gorge’s edge. They all offered a very explicit warning about the fate of many dogs (gulp).

Needless to say. I left both Tip and Jack in the car.

 

 

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A stop in Warm Springs

Deschutes River, near Warm Springs

This year winter was three weeks long and started four weeks ago. On Feb. 24 there was four feet of snow in our front yard. Today that is down to about six inches. Not complaining. We enjoyed winter and three weeks was a nice amount.  But when you are looking for hiking opportunities, this amount of snow makes that difficult. So our weekly excursions kind of stopped.

Road trips started back up this week and the other day we headed up to Warm Springs to check out “The Museum at Warm Springs.” 

Located just over the Deschutes River on Highway 26, the Bureau of Indian Affairs established a reservation school in 1890, on the site of the Warm Springs Agency. The settlement that developed around this is an unincorporated city or census-designated place.  A 1855 treaty ceded 10 million acres of traditional Indian  lands to the United States, keeping only the portion we now call the Warm Springs Indian reservation. The Indian Reorganization act allowed the Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute Indians to establish a tribal government and take over control of the reservation land.

Beaded Bag Courtesy of The Museum of Warm Springs Permanent Collection

To preserve the language and culture of these tribes, in 1993 the confederated tribes opened The Museum at Warm Springs. This beautiful rock and brick building serves as a central point in sharing not just the historical aspects, but also educational and artistic views.

The collection of baskets and bead work is worth the trip but there are also changing exhibits and on this visit we were treated to art from K to 12 students. The exhibit was great! These were class projects and most of them centered on native culture themes and made use of mostly recycled objects with a focus on traditional crafts and customs.

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Found a great Public House

Oregon has lots of places to find craft brews. So many, there is often little difference between one or the other. Faced with way too many Indian Pale Ale  and seasonal brews …sorry but pumpkin spice is really only palatable in scone form… we are always looking for something different coming out of the tap. This can be a brew style or even how the beer is being delivered to the glass.

The pints poured in your local establishment are likely moved by carbon dioxide, a practice that adds to the effervescence of the pint and sometimes, can be a bit too much. If you’re lucky your local watering spot offers nitro or nitrogen gas-powered lines. Nitro is less bitter and adds smaller bubbles to the drink.

A better way to have your pint without all the bubbles is to use a British style hand pump or beer engine.  A traditional British public house tap uses a lever’s energy to move beer from the keg to the glass. This style of beer delivery usually means the final fermentation was in the cask.

Hand pump pours are, in my mind, superior pints leaving just the cast conditioned character of the beer in the glass and a creamy froth on top.

We were really pleased to find Porter Brewing in Redmond, where they only serve cast conditioned beer hand pulled.

The Porter is pleasantly smoky, the stout chocolatey, and my favorite the Extra Special Bitter which was better than the nitro ESB at Red Hook.

In addition to the tap offerings, there is a BBQ food truck adjacent that offers great pub food. We’ll be passing Bend more often to hit this great little english pub on the north end of Redmond.

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Geological structures

In Central Oregon you are at the mercy of winter’s weather whims.

Sun-filled days are broken up with snowfall which makes road trips unpleasant. Right now we are in the middle of a February snow-dump and have spent the last week close to home. When the roads, as well as the sky cleared, we were ready for an excursion.

East of La Pine, about 40 miles on the Fremont Highway (State Route 31), is according to our trusty Oregon Roadside Geology book,  a “garden of volcanic oddities.” Big Hole, Hole-in-the-Ground, The Devils Garden and Fort Rock were all formed about 13 thousand years ago in and along an ice-age lake that became Silver and Summer lakes. Basically, at the same time Mt Mazama was making Crater Lake.

Geological spectacles are usually enough to pique our interest, but just a few weeks ago we discovered that Fort Rock State Park was also a destination for birders.  In particular, you’ll find falcons and eagles using the unique structures of Fort Rock to launch hunting missions across the prairie and farm fields to the east.

 

The state park at it’s northwestern edge is the starting point for a series of trails that take you into the ring of volcanic ash and around it’s outer perimeter.

This scouting mission didn’t align with optimal birding times, but we saw a couple of bald eagles and a few falcons soaring in and around the rock faces.

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An Eastern Loop

With an outlook for sun and no snow storms, we headed northeast to take a couple of days and do some birding along the Columbia River flyway. There have been a lot of day trips to nearby hiking sites, but a bit of cabin fever and the prospect of seeing a wide variety of migratory birds drew us to Boardman and the Umatilla National Wildlife Refuge.  Fifteen hundred of the 23 thousand acre reserve is irrigated crop lands providing cover and food for the waterfowl and raptors.

Highway 97, north of Grass Valley and almost to Biggs, was covered in freezing fog that left a beautiful covering of rime frost on everything. The ODOT trucks had been through with de-icer so roads were drivable and we enjoyed the photo ops the eerie scenery offered.

We stopped off at a dog-friendly motel in Boardman and did a quick refuge scouting trip in the evening light. The skies were covered with a solid blanket of gray and temperatures hung just above freezing. There is permitted hunting on the refuge that would have closed on the 12th of January, except a government shutdown shortened that season even more. The area we wandered is dotted with trails and hunting blinds making access to viewing really easy.

What strikes you first is the cacophony of sound as you exit the car.  There aren’t any ducks or geese in sight, but you hear what must be hundreds of them. There are eagles and hawks in nearly all the bare trees that sit in groves throughout the area.  We returned at sunup to even greater numbers and a louder chorus. A longer (higher magnification) lens is on JQ’s wish list, but still we got some great images.

The trip home started by heading farther east to Pendleton and catching Highway 395 south along the eastern edge of the Blue Mountains.

A few miles out of Pendleton we drove into a bank of freezing fog and frost-covered scenery that lasted nearly to Battle Mountain Summit.

The highway winds southerly through forested valleys from Dale to Long Creek, finally turning west at Mt Vernon. Here you pick up Highway 26 and drive through the geologically rich Picture Gorge and John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.

Of course we sidetracked to the Painted Hills unit and here we got treated to stark evening sun that brought definition to the folds between painted mounds just for JQ’s camera.