Cascade Lakes

Back in the early to mid '90s, my extended family (sisters and cousins and aunts -- literally) held several family vacations at Black Butte Ranch,  an upscale resort near the town of Sisters, Oregon.  So Cherie and I knew how beautiful the central Oregon Cascades are and wanted to include the area on our trip.  In particular, there is a road called the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway which I had heard about at Black Butte and have wanted to drive ever since.

This was our opportunity.  We took I5 south from Portland and turned off near Salem onto US 20 which follows the South Santiam River up into the Cascades, across the Santiam Pass, and down into the town of Sisters.  Although there was plenty of beautiful scenery along this route, we didn't stop because we hadn't left Portland until mid-afternoon, and we wanted to get to our campground at the Bend Sisters RV Resort before dark.

We arrived shortly after 6:00 PM  to find an almost totally empty park.  Although this was a new and highly unusual experience for us, it wasn't completely unexpected.  That's because a major forest fire,  the Pole Creek Fire, had been burning near Sisters for the past two weeks.  We first got wind of this (sorry, bad pun) as we had headed north from Portland.  At that time, there was a preliminary evacuation order in effect for Sisters, and very poor air quality due to smoke.  Fortunately, however, the fire was 80% contained by the time we left Portland heading south, and indeed when we reached the campground we couldn't even smell any smoke.  There were only a handful of RVs in the park that holds about fifty that night.  And I must say, although the scenery didn't compare with The Living Forest or Sol Duc Hot Springs, the facilities were the best we've seen.  Every site was flat level, had a paved pull-through driveway, a groomed lawn, and a fire ring in the midde of a small paver-stone patio.  And of course full hookups.  The bathrooms featured curtains, travertine floors, and easy chairs.

The park is located immediately adjacent to the Sisters Rodeo grounds, and we immediately noticed that the rodeo grounds were full of tents, porta-potties,  portable showers and mess kitchens, and other paraphernalia associated with large-group camping.  At first we guessed it was Cycle Oregon, a week-long bike tour that takes place every fall.  But we quickly discovered that it was the main Pole Creek firefighters camp.  Ever wondered where hundreds of out-of-state firefighters sleep and eat for weeks on end while they go out to do battle on the fire lines every day, and sometimes all night as well?  Well, now you know.

The next morning we hit the road bright and early for our big day in the Oregon Cascades.  The first 10 miles or so of the byway consists of the road to the Mt. Bachelor ski area:

After the turn-off to the ski area, the road circles around Mt. Bachelor and passes close to the South Sister.  There are three peaks close to each other west of Bend which are called the (south, middle, and north) Sisters.  They are volcanic in orgin, as are all the major peaks of the Cascade Range.  Not too far past Mt. Bachelor, we turned off, more or less at random, at Sparks Lake and had lunch in the Enterprise:

There was a beautiful creek running through the meadow:

After lunch, we followed an awful dirt road with lots of washboard and potholes for a few miles, because I had a hunch that Sparks Lake would be worth seeing.  I was right, as you can see from the first photo in this post.  This was the "money shot" for the trip.  And it really did look like the picture.  Although we passed nearly a dozen more lakes on the byway, none were anywhere near as spectacular.

As sunset approached, we arrived at Crater Lake National Park, our last scenic stop of the trip.  We had incredibly lucky weather on this trip -- not a drop of rain -- and the sunshine held nicely during our stay at Crater Lake.  Spending three and a half weeks in the Pacific Northwest without a drop of rain is a serious accomplishment.  The fact that we bought expensive rain gear before we left was probably responsible.  It's an elaboration on the old idea that if you bring your umbrella it won't rain.  But having sunshine at Crater Lake is critical because it's the only way you can see the amazingly deep blue:

And I was even more fortunate on this shot to have a total absence of wind on the lake, which accounts for the mirror-like surface.  Wizard Island, which you see sitting near the west shore of the lake, is the top of a volcano which collapsed into its empty magma chamber after a gigantic eruption 7700 years ago, forming the crater which filled up with snow melt over the next several hundred years.   Before the eruption the mountain was 12,000 ft. high.  Now the rim elevation varies between 7000 and 8000 ft.  This is actually quite a lot of elevation if you're hiking uphill -- there's significantly less oxygen than you get at sea level.  It's also high enough to get a lot of winter snow -- they average 44 feet of snow per year.

Driving around the rim of the crater, one finds many interesting photo ops.  I'll leave you with my favorite:

The Third Best City in the World

The Economist Liveability Ranking of world cities for August 2012 ranks Vancouver third in the world out of a total of 140.  It was edged out by Melbourne, Australia and Vienna, Austria.  (No. 140 was Dhaka, Bangladesh.)  There were no US cities in the top ten.  We only spent one and a half days there, but that was enough time to understand the ranking.  It's beautiful, clean, and has good public transportation.  There are several other liveability rankings based on various criteria, but notably none of them rank any US city in the top ten. So instead of continually repeating the mantra that "we're the greatest country in the world", it might be worthwhile to actually look at the rest of the world and see what we might learn.

We crossed the Strait of Georgia from Nanaimo aboard the MV Queen of Oak Bay, operated by BC Ferries.  This ferry was a big step up from the Coho which brought us to Victoria.  Bigger, much better cafe, nice gift shop, and free internet.  It was sad to have to leave the Living Forest Campground (previous post) but we once again found ourselves pressed for time.  On future camping trips, we have resolved to allow at least twice as much time as we think we might possibly need.

Our first stop on the British Columbia mainland was Grouse Mountain, because it's on the way in to the city from the ferry terminal in Horseshoe Bay.

 I visited Grouse Mountain one night back in the 70's on our way to Whistler and remembered very clearly the highly unusual experience of seeing the lights of Vancouver as we skied.  You can get to the base of the tram on a city bus.  Back in the 70's, there was just a restaurant at the top.  But when we got off the tram on this trip, we found a few more attractions,  such as this:

and this:

There are two grizzly bears living on top of Grouse Mountain, in a 5-acre enclosure surrounded by an electric fence.  They were both brought there as orphaned cubs.  Grizzly cubs usually stay with their mother for several years, and have almost no chance of surviving on their own.  So it was decided to try an experiment where instead of being destroyed (the usual procedure)  the cubs would be placed in the enclosure and food would secretly be scattered in various places.  That way, it was thought, they would learn to forage for food and not to depend on humans.  Then when they grew up they could be released back into the wild with no danger that they would seek out humans for food.  But it was eventually decided that releasing them would be too dangerous because of all the contact they had had with humans, and so they remain.

The next day, being short of time, we decided to take the GrayLine tour, and saw some highpoints of the city:

At the beginning of this trip, we thought we would have time to explore more of British Columbia, but this was not to be.  We headed south out of Vancouver,  back across the border at Blaine WA, stopping for lunch with a high school friend of Cherie's in Seattle, and then pushing on to Portland and a second visit to the Jantzen Beach RV park.