The Volcanic High Life

Paulina Peak from the shore of Paulina Lake

We had planned to go backpacking but the place I wanted to go was shut down due to a fire and apparently backpacking is not encouraged along that stretch of a river that we will not be talking about today.  So, our plans changed at a moment's notice to see what we could make happen at the Newberry National Volcanic Monument.

Now, I normally think of spur of the moment and camping to be two perfectly compatible concepts, but Resident Spouse had recently regaled me with the story of a co-worker who decided to go camping on the spur of the moment and, after leaving Bend, ended up encountering full campgrounds at every place down the road until finally settling for a motel room at the coast.  Needless to say, we kept this story in mind and planned on taking our chances at Newberry.  At the very least, we could have a lovely day hiking.  And what do you know? We turned into Little Crater Campground and found #3 wide open and just waiting for us.

View from top of Little Crater trail

Every time we've been to Newberry, we always try Little Crater campground first and, so far, it has always paid off.  The campground has a lovely long sinuous layout that means you have very few neighbors and every campsite has a view of Paulina Lake.  There is also a short, 1.8 mile trail up to the rim for splendiferous views of the lake and distant lands that you can reach from either end of the campground.  The trail is pretty steep in spots and Mimsy dog kept cool by trotting from the shade of one tree to the next to keep her black coat out of the hot sun.

I also love the short hike through the Big Obsidian Flow but, it being a hot summer day, we waited until late afternoon to tackle the short mile-long trail because dogs should not go on the trail (lots of obsidian shards to cut their feet).  We left our Mimsy dog in the car in a shaded and empty parking lot only to hear her start barking when we were a mere 15 minutes into the walk (she has quite the bark, that little one).  Having already gained quite some elevation, we found a place where we could see down into the parking lot and, lo and behold, a big RV chose, from the entire empty lot, to park immediately next to our car.  Rolling our eyes slightly, we went ahead with our walk, figuring that the occupants of that RV could have chosen someplace else to park and we wouldn't fuss ourselves too much about Mimsy's barking.

The Big Obsidian Flow at sunset

I think we were guilty of a little noise pollution that evening because we could hear her barking the entire time as we made our way up and down the trail.  Sigh... the obsidian flow was amazing in the sunset...

Love the Deschutes River!

I know that I am one of the lucky few (if you can call 80,000+ people, "few") that live in Bend, Oregon and this summer I am out to enjoy every minute I possibly can.

One of the gems of the region is the Deschutes River that runs from southern Deschutes County north to the Columbia and for those seeking a cool respite on a hot summer day (hovering at 97°F as I write this), a day on the Deschutes is a fun way to beat the summer heat.  Be warned though, Bend is at 3,500 feet elevation and so bring plenty of water and sunscreen if you're not used to the high desert at altitude!

Bend itself hosts a playground for stand up paddle boarders, inner tube floaters and more serious white water aficionados within city limits.  Flat water folks are well served at Riverbend Park, one in a long string of beautiful parks maintained by Bend Park and Recreation District.  Floaters traveling down stream can take advantage of an easy put-in a short distance upstream of the Old Mill and can take out at a number of publicly accessible locations, the final spot being Drake Park where a convenient shuttle service can ferry floaters from take out to put in by purchasing a day pass for $3.

Between Riverbend and Drake Park is the Bend Whitewater Park where surfers on boards or in boats alike can play in the standing waves.  Floaters can bypass the whitewater park via a portage path, or, if properly equipped, maneuver the rapids on river left.  (BTW - Pool toys and flip flops are not considered proper equipment, duh!)  There is also a fun play spot for kayakers at First Street Rapids.

My recommendation, though, is to spend the extra time and effort to get out to see more of the glories of the big Deschutes.  Taking a raft or drift boat down the lower Deschutes in the area of Maupin and north will bring you exciting whitewater and gorgeous flats.  You can choose from day to multi-day trips from a range of local services and outfitters (with fun names like Deschutes U-Boat and River Drifters, yes, there are other more normal names, too).

Want to give your kids an adventure while you and your spouse get some alone time?  Check out Bend Park and Rec youth programs.  Day trips and overnights are available with skilled staff leading the way to fun and adventure.

Train trestle bridge on lower Deschutes River north of Maupin, Oregon.

Sound Fourth, Bend Style 2011

After a one year hiatus while the Bend (Oregon) High School auditorium was being renovated, the Sound Fourth concert is back.  For you Bendites, the time is 3:00 on July 4th (gives you plenty of time to enjoy the festivities downtown) at Bend High School auditorium.  The pre-concert show is provided by the Bend High School band.  The concert features the festival chorus directed by Dr. Clyde Thompson and the Cascade Horizon Band. 

Huckleberry Hill, Highway 101, Oregon Coast

     'Tween Newport and Seal Rock, Oregon, November 25, 2010

Walking on the beach
November 25
Skies above are grey
Sea below alive

A raft of sea lions
Is idly floating by
Seagulls land to watch
Score a meal on the sly

Eagles cry from sky and trees
Hummer's buzzing dive
In spite of freezing storm
That threatens our house to rive

Agates glisten on the beach
Clams as fossils hard
Bedrock juts like giant spine
An ancient land, a shard

Blatant nepotism - 3

One of the reasons why we operate a vacation rental, rather than a long-term rental, is because it's kind of like traveling in reverse. The world travels to us in the people we get to meet through our little house. Starting today and running through the weekend is the annual BendFilm Festival, a great opportunity to see the world of independent film in your own front yard. Here's some info about the film that's connected to me via my little part of the Bend economic scene:


SCREENING of World Peace and other 4th-Grade Achievements at Bend FilmFest

Charlottesville, Virginia (September 24, 2010) – Rosalia Films, Inc., announced that the documentary film World Peace and other 4th-Grade Achievements has been selected for inclusion into this year’s Bend FilmFest in Bend, Oregon. The film will have three screenings; Friday, 10/8 5:30pm at the Oxford Hotel, Saturday 10/9 at 5:30pm at the Tower Theater, and Sunday, 10/10 at 12:00pm at the Sisters Movie House. The one-hour film by award-winning filmmaker Chris Farina portrays public school teacher John Hunter and his 4th-grade students as they participate in an educational exercise that Hunter developed called the “World Peace Game”. The film follows the nine- and ten-year-old students over an eight-week period as they assume roles as world leaders responding to an ongoing series of military, economic, and environmental crises. This interactive experience triggers a transformation of the students from children of a neighborhood school to citizens of the world.
Hunter has created and refined the World Peace Game during his 34-year career as a method of teaching children global perspectives, collaborative learning, and problem solving. Born and raised in Chesterfield County, Virginia, Hunter began his education in segregated schools where his mother was his own 4th-grade teacher. Prior to teaching in Charlottesville, Virginia, Hunter taught in schools in Richmond, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland.

World Peace and other 4th-Grade Achievements hopes to inspire wider adoption of Hunter’s efforts to teach children the “work of peace” and promote the replication of the World Peace Game. The World Peace Game exposes children to the complex issues of the greater geo-political world that they will one day encounter. An entertaining film with a positive message, World Peace and other 4th-Grade Achievements provides a timely reminder that the future truly is at stake as we educate our children.
The film had its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas in March, 2010 and received an “Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Filmmaking” Award from the Newport Beach Film Festival in April, 2010. The film has been or will be screened at festivals in Boston, Orlando, Arkansas and Palo Alto, and will have its international premiere in late October at the Bergen International Film Festival in Bergen, Norway. World Peace and other 4th-Grade Achievements is Farina’s 4th feature documentary. His films focus respectfully on people living and working in familiar American settings that often receive little media attention. Farina will be attending the festival screenings.

Visit the Rosalia Films website at www.rosaliafilms.com for more information.

# # # #
For more information, contact:
Chris Farina
Rosalia Films
1209 Hazel St
Charlottesville, VA 22902
(434) 825-0972
www.rosaliafilms.com
chris.farina@rosaliafilms.com

Worth its Weight in Cheese

The Scene: Todd Lake
The Setting: Marmot tent, picnic table, tidy fire, and three backpacks with their guts strewn everywhere.
The Action: Dinner

Who knew that dinner would be the scene of a totally sublime gustatory moment worthy of Remy in Ratatouille? This little moment was brought to us courtesy of a local goat dairy.

Granted, everything was staged pretty perfectly for Resident Kid’s first backpacking trip. The hike was short, the weather mild, the menu included s’mores. But it was a last minute item tossed in the pack that stole the show that evening and completely obliterated the trail food we’d brought.

Resident Kid is pretty typical in that a favorite food is mac and cheese, so that was on the menu as being easy to transport and cook along with sugar snap peas with dip, grapes and the previously mentioned s’mores. But Resident Kid also likes more complex (and often stinky) cheeses and had talked me into buying a small chunk of Pondhopper made by Tumalo Farms at the St. Charles Farmer’s Market one Friday not long ago. The consistency is somewhat like a chedder with a rind but the flavor comes from goat milk and, as the label says, a local microbrew (Mirror Pond Pale Ale, I wonder?)

As I brought it out, Resident Kid helpfully pointed out that the chunk cost $5.00, to which Resident Spouse responded, “Then the dog doesn’t get any.” And indeed, the poor Mimsical creature didn’t get anything but a taste of some mac and cheese that night because we three were entranced with the Pondhopper. We savored thin and sometimes not so thin slices alone, or with sugar snap peas or, best of all red globe grapes. That flavor combination was the one that caused the fireworks and rendered the mac and cheese that was on the menu, completely bland.

For someone on a budget, the price is high, but this is a farmstead cheese crafted locally and definitely delicious. I’d say we got our $5.00 worth.

Upcycling

I had the good fortune of seeing the Sara Bella booth at the Tour des Chutes post ride gathering recently.  Lovely merchandise made of plastic bags and banners that have been upcycled into tote bags, wallets, aprons, purses, and on into the imagination.  These items are well constructed for a multitude of duties with the designs from the "parent" materials whimsically built into the upcycled product.  I opened one wallet to find wee baby footprints walking across the interior.

Now I am a long time Sara Bella fan, having had the good fortune of receiving a Polartec baby hat from the original incarnation of the Sara Bella brand that included marvelous baby wear.  The hat no longer fits Resident Kid, but I've been holding on to it for perhaps sentimental reasons related to Kid's babyhood.  But them I am fond of hats and have quite the collection myself.

I asked Sara if she had yet considered making an upcycled hat.  "Yes!" came the happy reply.  There are design issues involved that need to be solved, but I look forward to the new fruits of Sara's lively imagination.

Heat Wave 2010

We just came through our first little heat wave of the summer. I think the temps got into the 90's (F) and the highest overnight low was about 61. My own lack of planning and/or laziness got the better of me and contrived to settle all my errands on the hottest day of that period. Otherwise, we engaged in our usual "chill the house" routine at night with its concomitant annual discussion of what the best way to achieve this task.

I am of the belief that you chill the house fastest by putting the box fans in the window to blow out and exhaust the hot air. Spouse likes to feel the breeze and wants the fan blowing in for cooling effect. I don't prefer this because it cools the one room the fan is blowing in towards but the rest of the house stays warm.

So a few years back, after a stunning (I mean stunning!) demonstration of the cooling effect of two box fans exhausting the house, we compromised. We put one fan in the lee window of the house blowing out and one fan in our bedroom window blowing in. Resident Kid could care less what we do, because no matter what we do during these times, the house is too cold in the morning.*

And perhaps it is. After all, I feel victorious if we get the house down to 65, and one night this week, we kind of overdid it and the house was a frigid 62. Yes, a little excessive. The boon of these shenanigans being that the house rarely goes above 75 as it heats during the day. I revel in the natural air conditioning we reap in this region and that connects us so closely with the diurnal swings of the season.

Occasionally we bemoan the extra vacuuming and dusting that comes with open windows and the pollen season can be annoying, but I can't envision living with an air conditioner separating me from the outdoors at this time of year. The connection is too valuable to let go. Besides, who could miss the opportunity to be awakened by the local deer herd trying to sneak past your window to pillage the garden?

* Which gives me another glorious parental opportunity to exhort Kid to "put on a sweater." In July!

Asterisk Pass

Yesterday the fambly and I and my bro and niece headed to Smith Rock State Park for a little hiking and poking around. The day was drop dead gorgeous with crystalline blue skies and not a cloud in sight. The serrated rocks cut the sky with a crispness in sharp contrast to another day I spent at the Park. But I will defer that story for the moment.

Yesterday was just about the perfect temperature for the park. Warm but not roasting in the sun and cool but not freezing in the shade. What a Goldilocks moment. The Mimsical creature got a little toasty, being a black critter, but a dunk or two in the river seemed to cure that ailment and she scrambled up and down the rocks to Asterisk Pass like a little goat. I didn't quite make the pass, being on the road to recovery from a chest cold a couple weeks ago the lungs were willing but not able to sustain the effort. So I sat in the shade partway up and penned a draft of this entry.

As I looked eastward I remembered another day we had spent at Smith Rock with some friends from Hungary. It was not a perfect temperature day, I think it might have been August and the sky had that hot hazy look to it and the edge of the rocks were smearing against the sky. A stiff hot breeze kept the air moving and things somewhat more comfortable than if the air were still.

We had just set up a top rope on a short pitch and were about to do some climbing when we noticed little wisps of smoke passing overhead. Clambering up to the top of the pitch (and the parking lot) we found that the park was full of dark smoke so we pulled up our rope and headed for the car (which was all of perhaps 100 yards away). Driving back through the park, we were berated by park personnel for lingering so long in the fire zone, while we wondered why park personnel hadn't check the series of pitches where we were climbing because they were so close to the parking area and were popular climbing spots for that time of day (being in the shade).

Later we found out that the fire started because a park employee was welding a fee box for the bivy area and with the stiff hot wind caught the nearby grasses on fire and it spread fast through the rest of the park.

Yesterday, about 15 years later, it was hard to pick out signs of that fire. But maybe I missed a few as my lungs labored to recover from the trek back up the grade to the parking area. The Mimsical creature provided invaluable assistance by pulling on her harness to give me a little boost up the tough parts. I thought she well deserved the ice cream cone (minus ice cream) to chew up on the way home.

2010 Wild Rye.mp4

Here's a video of the local (Bend, Oregon) band, Wild Rye on YouTube.  This debut appearance at the Tower Theatre contained some technical difficulties, but the band played along, even if partly unplugged for a chunk of the performance.  I attended the gig the following night when they were spot on, technically and musically.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATeh5TRyLuk

Locally Grown Rye

Wild Rye is defined in Wikipedia as "a term used for several grasses. They are natively found in parts of North America (as well as elsewhere) and are valuable in the control of exotic invasive plants and as a rotation crop."  A pretty boring description from a non-botanist's point of view.  Especially because the name itself connotes a certain image - full of waving tufted seed heads in a plains-y kind of land.  Wide open spaces and big skies.  The kind of place where a certain Mimsical dog would streak around with wild abandon until finally plopping down panting in the shade of a shrub.

The music that arises out of such a vision is also tinged with wildness and abandon that comes from the roots of the land, which is a reason that I think the locally grown band, Wild Rye, is aptly named.  The roots of this group's music reach into Irish and Scottish traditional fiddle music with strong influences from modern takes on the genre from the likes of Alisdair Fraser, Natalie Haas, and Hanneke Cassell (you can see a clip of Natalie and Hanneke playing at  www.hannekecassel.com).  Which isn't to say that the band's influences are entirely Celtic, because they've pulled Americana and rock songs into their unique style, including a great version of REM's "Driver 8." 

While there may be some resistance or perhaps bias in some quarters to being defined by the term "Celtic," I thought it was interesting to do a quick look at the history, Wiki-style, to find that the heartland of Celtic culture appears to have been southern France and: 

"Genetics suggests the Celts were descendants of people who originated in southwest Asia between 4,000 and 8,000 years ago.^[7][8] Celtic origin legends recorded in Medieval Scotland and Ireland suggest a possible beginning in Anatolia and then to Iberia via Egypt. It has been noted ^[9] that the distribution of the gene for lactase persistence apparently originating near the Baltic Sea between 4,800 and 6,000 BP indicates a spread from there to both the British Isles and to Iberia."  

An interesting article, all in all, particularly given that one of the citations is entitled, "How did pygmy shrews colonize Ireland?"  But I digress from my point, which is that, given the historical spread of Celtic society and the more recent (the potato famine being recent in the grand scale of things) spread of the Celtic influence to the music and dance of southeastern states in the US, there are few cultures today that can't claim some tie to this heritage. 

And I think Wild Rye, the band, pays homage to these deep and varied roots by blending traditional musical elements with modern texts and tunes.  Take a quick listen.  Imagine those gently waving tufted seed heads...imagine that touch of wildness and abandon....

Blatant nepotism - 2

In the spirit of "Buy Local," I recommend that you patronize a family-owned vacation rental the next time you travel.  Not only do you get the comforts of home, but you also save on restaurants by availing yourself of that fully equipped kitchen.  These are micro-businesses that contribute directly to the local economy.

Yes, we own a vacation rental and I will now shamelessly put in a plug that the next time you visit marvelous Bend, Oregon, stay in our lovely little house very close to the river and downtown.  Check us out at www.westlakecottage.com.