Vacation in Sisters, Oregon

We just returned from a week in Sisters, Oregon. It is one of our favorite places to visit, and lately we have been going a couple of times a year. I like to go in the spring, even though our favorite high-country hiking trails are snow-bound. This year, the snow was especially plentiful. In fact, the mountains got another few inches of snow while we were there.

The weather for most of the week was cool and often overcast with a few showers (and a heavier rain during one of the nights). It forced us to revise our plans. For instance, I had wanted to bike-ride to the top of MacKenzie Pass before it opened to automobile traffic, but it turned out the highway department hadn’t begun to plow the road yet. There were 30′ deep drifts at the summit.

We stayed in an upstairs condo in Sisters that was very nice—clean and nicely decorated. It has a view of the mountains (from a small section of the dining area), although we rarely saw the peaks because of the clouds.

In no particular order, here are some of the interesting things we did. We did fill our days with activity.

We started the week with a visit to REI to use our 20% discount coupons and I bought a new pair of boots—a lightweight pair of Merrill Ventilators. In the mid-afternoon we started a short hike at the fish hatchery along the Metolius River (crowded at the hatchery given it was Memorial Day). It was a short hike because it began to shower and we were getting a little too wet. If I were a fly fisherman, the Metolius would be heaven, and a lot of fishermen were experiencing the divine this day.

One day we took a bike ride out of Sisters on Camp Polk and Indian Ford roads. We love this route because of incredible views of snow-capped peaks across a green meadow and pine forest. The views didn’t appear this year because of the clouds.

Thinking to avoid the showers that predominated along the Cascade Range, we headed east on highway 20 and ascended Pine Mountain to the observatory run by the University of Oregon. There were just a few patchy remnants of snow in the shady places. And the weather? Well, it changed from foggy/cloudy to rain to snow to sunny to thunder and lightning, more than once. It was really quite enjoyable.

Another area that we explored a bit to the east was the Ochoco Mountains. We ventured up Ochoco Creek and did some hiking and geocaching. One of the caches was near a very large Douglas Fir—at one time it was the largest known Douglas Fir in Oregon. It was quite a beautiful area—very green. I’m not sure what it would be like when it’s dry. We have also explored a bit in the mountains north of Ochoco Resevoir and highway 26, and it was a much drier area.

At one time I considered the geocache Our Blue Planet as necessary to complete the matrix of difficulty and terrain ratings on caches. I had solved the puzzle several months ago, and looked (unsuccessfully) for the first stage last October. This year I had prepared printouts of coordinates and hints, and left them home. So, we tried to find the stage 1 location from memory. I’m pretty sure we did, but the location was overrun this year with huge, red ants. We searched as best we could and came up empty. We tried again on a second day, approaching the area from a different direction, and couldn’t recognize the exact location we were looking for, but after checking lots of possibilities, stumbled upon the stage 1 container.

Heading off to stage 2 we searched for a long time, but came up empty. I logged a DNF, and promptly got very complete hints from the owner. So, we went back again, but even using the hints could not find stage 2 or stage 3. This is a difficulty 5 cache that lives up to its rating, at least for me.

On our last day, we had the warmest weather of the week so we rode our bikes out to the Crescent Moon Ranch near Terrebone. This ranch is noted for its large herd of alpacas (one of the largest in the U.S.). At least one, and perhaps a couple more, of the pregnant females were due to deliver that day. The owners are very friendly and patiently explain things—I suppose they do this over and over. The babies are called crias, and it would have been interesting to witness a birth, but we didn’t have that much time. Their boutique store has some very classy alpaca coats, sweaters, and so on, but we were afraid to price them.

Links
—Sisters 2011 photo gallery