As usual, our plan kind of ended after Bend and Fuzztail Butte. We needed to go south towards Nevada and ended up choosing the more western route through Lakeview instead of East through the Hart Mountain and Sheldon Antelope Refuges. This route is also, as a bonus, part of the official Oregon outback scenic byway. As you can imagine, it was a pretty nice drive! The road parallels a huge bluff on one side and on the other side is a huge marsh that eventually turns into a lakebed with hot springs at the end. We even saw a huge herd of antelope!
We stopped at Chandler State Wayside to make some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. This was a pretty nice little park! There was a big bluebird in the tree above our table that Jason and I both took turns shooting until it flew away.
Since we were headed to Lakeview, we were both searching around for interesting things to do while we were there. Jason found out that there is a legit geyser! However, all of the information about it is pretty old. I’m not sure it’s still active at all, but there’s a giant resort type thing filled with people and RV’s at the site. That pretty much killed any desire we had to check it out at all. We kind of gave up on Lakeview and decided to call it quits early and go find some sort of camp site. I was reading through my rockhound book and found a spot that might have cool rocks on the way to a likely area for camping. That made the decision pretty easy. We left Lakeview and headed out to Drews Reservoir, where I realized that the book that I have on rocks is 10 years old now and may not be accurate anymore because there’s jack shit there. We kept driving and ended up driving over Buckaroo Pass at 5,935′. The road really wasn’t that bad at all and on the other side of the pass we found a killer campsite that overlooked Dog Lake.
Jason and I were super excited to make dinner, sit in our new camping chairs, and relax, however upon opening the door to the camper we realized that the water tank had leaked again and the camper was flooded with a few inches of sloshing water. Great. So we spent a few hours removing all of the wet crap from the camper and bailing it out. Luckily, Jason’s bag of clothes was up on the raised floor instead of down in the water.
Once we got that all figured out, we finally got our dinner and had some time to relax. The area was actually really cool. Apparently there was a forest fire at some point and the hills were lined with burned trees.
Given that the floor, water tank, tank liner, floor mat, etc were all strewn about the campsite, we decided to just toss all of it back into the truck and head back to Lakeview to reprovision and just get breakfast instead of dealing with cooking in the camper. I got a breakfast burrito that lasted me the rest of the day and some pretty good coffee! We had to find the grocery store to get some drinks and gallons of water since our water tank and, therefore, faucet were no longer operational. However, we did have one casualty: we forgot about our lovely fake grass door mat and left it at our campsite. Hopefully someone else will camp there and take it. We had driven too far already to go back and pick it up!