After leaving Bend, Jason and I worked our way south.  Eastern Oregon has some remote areas and gas isn’t always available in every town, so in our effort to make sure we had all of our tanks full before crossing into the wilds, we ended up going even further south than we thought we would.  That put us into position to head up into the Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge.  We’ve camped here once before on our motorcycles and had the clearest skies I’ve ever seen!  We had also originally wanted to camp at the hot springs, but due to an excessive amount of bugs we passed it up.  This time, though, we decided to go for it!  What a fantastic decision that was!  The campground is nicely spaced out with spots along a little creek lined with aspen trees turning yellow. (also nice pit toilets! huzzah!).  The campsite we chose was at the end of the road away from anyone else. Perfect!

We made some dinner and piled into the tent for bed.  However… we haven’t camped in a while and may have forgotten some things… like *always* put your trash away.  I woke up around 3 in the morning to some kind of critter rooting around outside the tent.  I tried to ignore it, but it was pretty persistent.  So I crawl out of the sleeping bag and crack open the zipper only to discover that the critter in question is a SKUNK and it’s wanting inside my tub of coffee supplies! (shit…) So.. now I have a conundrum! I don’t want a critter to steal our food and stuff but I also really really really really do NOT want to mess with a skunk.  I made noises at it and tried to shoo it away. It was having none of it and really didn’t seem to care that I was there.  Awesome.  I also realize at this point that it’s not actually trying to get my precious coffee grounds (I was tired ok!?) it had just torn open our trash container and was destroying the package our bratwursts came in and also ate our avocado peels.  So what now? At this point I just want this thing GONE so… I decided I would throw something small at it.  But what you ask?! Well.. nothing of value and the only thing I had handy was my bag of bathroom stuff so I settled on throwing my razor and a small bottle of tylenol. What an intrepid adventurer I am for sure.  It did the trick though, and the skunk got bored of being pestered in its quest for garbage and sauntered off.  After that it was a battle between my adrenaline and relief that I didn’t get skunked.  Eventually I did manage to go back to sleep! We woke up the next morning to nothing else amiss in the night and I made myself a pot of victory coffee after picking up the garbage the skunk had strewn around the campsite from our negligence.

I mentioned above that this is the hot springs campground.  This isn’t a lie, there ARE hot springs!  There are 2 small pools out in a field that require a little walk to get to and then there’s a stone walled pool that is more official.  Since we still wake up stupid early (time zones!) we were up at dawn and made our way to the hot pool to loosen our muscles from not sleeping very well the night before. It was EXCELLENT! In hindsight we should have stayed here another night…

The only bad aspect to these amazing springs is that you do eventually have to get out of them and it’s getting cold in the desert now! Yikes!

I carved out some time to wander around the campground and take pictures of the gorgeous aspen trees and a small herd of deer that walked behind our campsite!