Jaci Dawn

I have very little time for the computer tonight (I’m behind on reading blogs but I *will* get caught up). How time just flies right now.

Last Saturday we crossed over the Cascades and dropped down into the more arid part of the state. It always fascinates me how you can be in the midst of fir forests with thick underbrush and moss on one side and on the other side, you’re into tall Ponderosa pine forest and a different kind of underbrush. Right on the Santiam Pass, the forest is all dead sticks: a reminder of forest fires past and a legal battle over salvage logging. The loggers lost that battle and the snags stand rotting, but the thick undergrowth provides a different kind of habitat and smaller mammals thrive. The corridor into Sisters and Bend has been managed to look like a forest preserve along the highway with all the undergrowth burned out (presumably to help stop wildfires through all the resorts).

Once past Sisters, we veered into Redmond and Prineville and country that is a mix of sagebrush land and pine forest, sometimes giving way to juniper forest. We took a back road to Post (the geographical center of Oregon) and on to Izee before we dropped south on a Forest Service road. A side note on Post: we once stopped there when the entire town was having a yard sale.

Don had an idea that we could camp at a USFS designated campground but when we got to that site, it was full. And full was really not what we wanted with two big dogs that like to bark at other dogs and children on bicycles. So we back-tracked a little and took a chance on a spur road and found a beautiful site right on a creek.

The only problem was…

We got to clean up after the previous campers.

There were more in the trees everywhere. Nearly all of the junk had been purchased at Safeway, so my bet is that the culprits live in Burns (the nearest Safeway). They used the cans for target practice. After we cleaned it up, the site was nice. And on our way through Burns, I deposited all the trash in the Safeway trash cans. Had anyone attempted to stop me, I would have pointed out that it was all Safeway trash and they ought to thank me for cleaning up the campsite and returning the items to the store that sold them.

It’s one of my pet peeves: people can haul all this stuff out into the woods (or on a backpack trip) when it’s full. But when it is empty and no longer weighs anything, they can’t be bothered to life a finger to pick it up and haul it back out. Yeah, I see that as real macho.

But garbage aside, we were beginning to relax.

We didn’t see many wild animals (probably pretty gun-shy after the last party), but we were at least in a healthy strip of Ponderosa pine with currants and sagebrush and wild grasses still green for the undercover. The stream had a healthy population of frogs, fingerling trout, and dragonfly nymphs. The mosquitoes were minimal, but that could have been our fancy new ‘Skeeter Beaters and the fact that the temperature dropped to less than 37-degrees (F) overnight.

Yeah, it got cold. Good thing we pack our winter coats when we go on vacation to the desert in August: I wore mine all morning plus a pair of fleece gloves to keep my hands cold. No camp fire: fire danger was “Extreme” or “High” everywhere we went. And just around the corner from this camp was a grim reminder of why a camp fire in August is not such a great idea.

I took the photo on the move, hence the window reflection.

Love the cows.

Until the next post – Jaci