Bend 3: We're smokin'

Saturday 9/16

Sadly, we woke to a moderately smoky sky. We decided to go for a hike anyway, and began with a short hike on the “other” side of Shevlin Park, which turns out to be part of the Bend watershed, which I am going to digress and talk about a little. Bend is high desert, meaning they don’t get a lot of rain and the air is very dry. From the very beginning, they’ve needed to irrigate, which they did by digging ditches or creating wooden aqueducts for the water to flow through. The ditches lose a lot of water to evaporation, and the wooden aqueducts get slimy and also decay over time. So they decided to put the channels underground in pipes, a project which is still ongoing. The pipes need to have access roads, and what is cool is that many of the access roads have also been opened to the public as trails for hiking, biking, and running. The trail we hiked on the other side of Shevlin (I call it the other side because usually we park in the parking lot across the road and hike the other way up the river) has a loop section, where part of the trail is along the river and the other part is on the access road. It was a very nice hike. We saw more of the mystery drips that we saw on the hike to Riley Ranch, and may have figured out that they come from dog drool. But we’re still not sure. We took no pictures.

Sage Flats from Archie Briggs Trail

The Shevlin Park hike was about 3 miles, and since it was mostly flat we felt like we had some hike left in us. So we decided to do the Archie Briggs Canyon hike that leaves from Sawyer park. We’ve done the hike before, and it turned out that the drive from Shevlin to Sawyer crosses the trail several times. Another coincidence is that the hike is almost entirely along the irrigation access road. It’s more in the sun that I remembered, and also has a steeper climb than I remembered, but it was still a good hike. Since we’re goal oriented and didn’t want to do the whole loop we had to find a turnaround spot, and there’s a place where the trail makes a sharp left to run along the canyon that was perfect for turning around. After we turned around we noticed a large and beautiful meadow on the other side of the canyon (did I mention that the trail runs along the Deschutes, which has created a deep canyon in this section? Well, now you know). We got out our map apps and discovered that the meadow is the Sage Flats section of Riley Ranch, and in fact we could see an overlook that we’d stood on. This made our brains do that thing where they rotate an internal map, one of my favorite sensations.

Archie Briggs trail from Sage Flats

By the time we got back to the truck we’d hiked about 7 miles total and we were hungry. Fortunately we’d planned an excellent lunch at Worthy Brewing, and were not disappointed in the food or the beer. We were very content after lunch, and as it was smoky it was a perfect afternoon to head back to the trailer, turn on the portable air filter, and do some serious relaxing all afternoon. When we were young people doing tent camping we would look scornfully at the folks in the campsites who never seemed to come out of their trailers. “What is the point of being here if you never sit outside?” we would ask each other, feeling superior. Well, now we know.

We had dinner in the trailer and took a short evening hike at Riley Ranch, which was looking lovely. We went to the overlook we’d seen earlier and overlooked. We were a little pressed for time since the park closes at sunset, and also my legs were really tired, so we didn’t get all the way back to the sun position overlook.

We were glad to get back to our recliners for the evening.

Smoky Sunset at Riley Ranch

Sunday

Smokier. No point in staying, so we did a quick clean on the trailer, drove home and did the quick turnaround, returned the trailer, and were happily eating lunch at Grand Central in Hillsboro (BLT’s!) by 2.