We survived the River and GA

Just  a few more photos from the High Desert Museum near Bend Oregon for all and Ben and Kelsey who are building a TINY House just in case they want to make "something" a little more primitive but larger (ie Cow Corals, Chicken Homes and Out Houses).
The High Desert Museum is still one of the best museums about Native American Life, their sacrifices and the high desert which covers much of Oregon and the NSW. We liked the little live Badger and Skunk, the Porcupine which reminded of the one that climbed up a tree by our popup at North South Lake in NY.  We also like the Bald Eagles, Owls and other Birds of Prey, all rescued and have a home for life because they have horrible disabilities due to cars hitting them and also people thinking a wild animal would make a good pet. 
But truthfully the River Otters and the N. American Bobcat took us to our hearts. both know how to play like our Eliza (the cat) and how to be LAZY.
You all should read the next blogg which I will publish in a few days as soon as I get some energy back from UU GA.  The blogg is called " Confessions of a UU Sinner" or something like that...Peace and Love Always Stefani

Dragon Boat and Banners over 500 congregations were represented at UU GA.  I absolutely loved the banner parade.

Pat in front of Elk Sculpture at High Desert Museum near Bend, Oregon

The outhouse Kelsey and Ben should think about putting outside in case one of them is occupying the inside compost toilet of their TINY HOUSE.

The best chicken coop I have ever seen, this one for French Fat Chickens

Pat in front of the barn in background and willow fence.

OK I loved this fence or coral.  It was hand made of willow, but the note said you could make one from any pliable first cut branches.  I thought about the Roses of Sharon, Red Stem Dogwoods, etc...in the NE US

A Sentimental Journey..19 years ago we were here at LaPine with our two Boys

yes I am still alive!

Happy Father's Day. 19 year ago when the boys were small and Pat decided to give up his job at Grumman to become a stay a home Dad, we hiked Newberry Volcano National Monument and saw slick black obsidian and learned how it was formed in volcanoes here in Oregon near Bend.  We went to the High Desert Museum where we read the news for the first time in at least a month and heard about the TWA 600 catastrophe and those that died near Smithpoint.  (For Thanksgiving after Thanksgiving we camped at Smithpoint and walked the Memorial.  I always said my form of a prayer.  We always walked the beach and National Seashore board- the board walk that is now gone because of Hurricane Sandy.  Looking for shells, digging deep holes in the beach sand to hunker down in to avoid the wind to tell stories of Pat’s and my youth.)

Toby and Ben sat around the fire at LaPine and sang with their Daddy as I cooked dinner.  Ben and Pat almost fell off the log they were sitting on as Toby sang “It’s a Big Country”.  He had earphones on and was singing as loud as he could with a Walkman, remember those? This was practice for when later he would sing like an angel in the honor’s choral group at WMHS.  Ben found out that rocks would explode like fire crackers in a fire, but he was the one to ask always hard questions during the trip about where we were and where we were going and why.  We always didn't know the why.  He also was the leader of making the most mischief like putting “Mousie” (Toby’s stuff animal) in the chicken boats (black plastic boats you bought grilled chicken in at the grocery store) and floating the boat down small creeks until Mousie almost disappeared. Mousie was also almost dropped into geysers as well. If I have time I will expand on those stories when Toby became a map maker and Ben a poet.

The following day after the sing around the fire and harrowing rock incident, we drove to Crater Lake, but didn’t stay more than a night because I needed the smell of salt water so we ended up at Cape Blanco on the Oregon coast and walked on the beach there until the fog rolled in and we almost lost sight of each other.  That night sleeping under the huge evergreens it sounded like a rainstorm as the fog dripped off the branches ---that summer was an experience that can never be replaced in my heart or my memories.

Tomorrow we will kayak the Deschutes here at LaPine.   I am so lucky.  Love me.

Pat checking out where we might get out of the rapids.

Pat in front of the 500 year old Big Ponderosa Pine, the biggest and oldest pine tree in Oregon.

The river seems calm but it is unusually high and fast according to the camp hosts. We will see. 

The Mountains of Central Oregon and Unplanned Adventures

So here is the beautiful pond at Bates campground between two National Forests along Hwy 26.  We saw an immature eagle and its mother flying over the pond and two new ducks, merganser and golden eye and this strange plant, I hope to id as soon as we have good internet.  Internet has been unpredictable here and there. 

We are finding unplanned adventures to be more fun than the planned ones.  We ended up today at the Kum Chung Wah Memorial and John Day National Fossil Beds on our way to the Newberry National Volcano area and High Desert Museum near Bend, Oregon.  We will see those areas before the end of the weekend, I hope.

The Kum Chung Wah Memorial was fascinating and told the story of two Chinese men who came here as part of the gold rush in Oregon and stayed in the tiny town of John Day until they died.  They became partners, one a traditional doctor of herbs and the other the gregarious Lung On who made over $900,000 while selling goods to both Chinese and Americans.  He had the first car dealership in John Day and became a Mason even though he was a Buddhist. He died in 1948.  Both left wives and children in China (US would not allow them to emigrate with their husbands) and never saw them again. During WWII the band on emigration lifted and a nephew of Dr. Ing Hay family came over.  He died in 1952 at the age of 89.  His great nephew is/was the President of American Medical Association.  Neat story.  The Chinese were hated and had to protect themselves from the bigotry at first in the area, but that changed with time, by the 1920s Dr. Hay had people coming from as far away as Utah to get his medicines and consult him. 

In the 1860s the area was also being explored for fossils as well as gold.  A young minister by the name of Thomas Condon discoveries of mammalian fossils from 45 million years ago spurred more scientific investigations and new methods of dating fossils.  The John Day National Fossil Beds are considered one of the best in the world and cover 100s of square miles of central Oregon. This was the perfect end of our fossil explorations after seeing Dinosaur National Monument. We missed one other National Fossil Monument in Idaho due to a miscalculation of which road to take.  Maps are not always accurate and sometimes we get turned around.  The Lady on the GPS has gotten us lost also on this trip twice.  But she saved us twice as well. I am thinking the next time we plan these long trips I need to get detailed maps, but where???
PS John Day was a fur trapper and hunter for the Astoria Expedition (yes, John Jacob Astor who funded the expeditions).  He has a river, town and the fossil beds named after him.  His claim to fame was being stripped naked and robbed by Native Americans somewhere up on the Oregon trail near the Columbia River. he went mad at some point.

A’ A’ Going to the Moon and beyond is a Lonely Journey along the Oregon Trail

 A’A’ is Hawaiian for “hard on the feet” and what they called the rock areas you will see in the photos below, so are they called at the Craters of the  Moon.

2000 years ago near Central Idaho volcanoes sculptured the landscape and it does look like what you would imagine the Moon to look like, but there is so much more life in the high desert than you can imagine.  I am not a photographer so you will see the wildflowers only.  The 223 species of birds and the small mammals like the pika are too fast, but not as fast as Pronghorn Antelope which are the second fastest land mammals on Earth (Why when all their known predators are slower than them?  Keep reading. ) Prairie dogs we have found like to run across the front of the RV as we rumble past: their villages are along these lonely roads.  But so far so good we have only hit insects as we have traveled west, not that their lives aren’t important but I keep hoping it is one of the invasive ones destroying the forests that hit our windshield.  Amazingly every wildflower at the Craters of the Moon I photographed with my phone had a species of iridescent bees buzzing around it.  

The lava rose from many fissures in the Great Rift along the Snake River making small volcanoes known as spatter cones, lava tubes that make caves that now are homes to bats and cinder cones.  A stark strange landscape. 

Why Go West? We have been following part of the Oregon Trail this summer like last year we followed part of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Long before the movement west the Oregon Trail was part of Native American trails  Fort Kearney in Nebraska was built in 1848 to protect the pioneers and we crossed the North and South Platte Rivers like the pioneers. They were looking for supplies of wood, water and grass to feed their horses and oxen. When they reached Scotts Bluff 1/3 of their 2000 mile route had been completed, but the hardest miles remained.  Between 1840 and 1869 500,000 went west to fulfill their dreams to leave the economic depressions of 1837 and 1841 which devastated farmers and fur traders/trappers.  Visions of Oregon with towering trees and lush valleys, rich soils beckoned. We left the trail for a short time on our visit to Dinosaur, but came back near the Moon where there is the Goodale Cutoff, which compared to the rest of Idaho route had places with rivers and valleys of farms.  The cows in the previous blogg blocked the road along the cutoff. The cutoff was a successful way to avoid the Native Americans who were uprising along the Snake River.

Idaho must have tested the spirit of the pioneers. At Three Island Crossing River campground it was 96 degrees when we arrived at 4 in the afternoon.  The Interpretative Center verified that the first 10 years of relationships between the European-Americans emigrants-pioneers and Native Americans was cooperative.  The Conestoga wagons had been replaced by smaller prairie schooners, but without the Native Americans helping the Euro-Americans even the smaller wagons wouldn’t have made it cross the swift Snake River using the three islands in the middle.  The Native Americans provided meat and fish to the emigrants in trade for cloth and other items. But when gold was found in California the numbers of travelers increased and you know the story of the slaughtered bison, the Indigenous peoples lands were trampled by livestock and the campas fields (a main food source which looks like daffodil bulbs) destroyed.  By 1880, the Native Americans were crushed, the US government herded them like animals to reservations which could not spiritually or physically sustain them.  The final “evil” was taking their children away to schools far away from their culture and their mothers. Across the US now we-Euro-Americans are trying to heal wounds by recognizing the past and coming together with the Native Americans to make amends, but there is still much to do. THERE IS HOPE.  As we left the trail again passing over Ontario Oregon to lonely Hwy 26 again we couldn’t imagine how the pioneers felt when they came to such barren lands from the barren lands of Idaho.  They were expecting paradise and found life just as harsh in the Eastern part of Oregon, but there trip was almost over.  We will return to the Oregon Trail two more times; at Oregon City near where we will camp before our week at the General Assembly of Unitarian Universalists in Portland. Oregon City was the goal and the end of the trail. And on the way home trip. 

Spatter Cones

Prairie schooner at  Three Island Crossing

We are standing on top of a cinder cone at the Craters of the Moon.  If you look closely you might see the Proud Mary at the bottom.  These volcanoes blow about every 2000 years.  Pat was real happy it didn't happen while we were hiking.