Realizing that we had a 4 day weekend and a desire to really “get away from it all”, Jason and I tossed the RTT on the truck and hit the road thursday after work with a final destination of milkshakes from the diner in Fields, Oregon.  What makes Fields so special? What’s the draw of a town in the middle of the barren Oregon desert? Nothing. Literally. There are no crowded campgrounds jam-packed with everyone’s yearly family outing in the giant RV that plugs into the grid and still has cable. No screaming children flailing about. No drunken morons setting their grill on fire. There’s no cell phone service, few paved roads, and aside from a few locals and people just passing through, no people. It’s paradise.

We camped in the rain in a national forest on the way out. Don’t remember which one because I was tired after working all day.  At one point I started thinking about axe murderers. Excellent plan while camping in the dark woods. Note to self: no scary movies before camping trips.  We woke up the next morning and continued on to Bend.  I love Bend, Oregon.  It’s a super neat town, and we will be going back eventually to explore it even further but since our final destination was still 4 hours outside Bend, we kept on truckin’! Most of the land on the road to Fields is owned by cattle ranchers.  One of the ranches is almost 500,000 acres and goes on for 30 minutes or more of highway driving. We found these horses grazing by the fence.

I want the red one but didn’t think she’d sit in the back of the truck. Dangit. Maybe next time. We finally pulled into the Fields Station exhausted from driving all day and really looking forward to the amazing milkshakes they make there.

Yes! Still as amazing as I remember.  I’m not sure if they’re so good because of the anticipation and driving through the desert to get to Fields or if they do actually make them with crack. Not sure and I don’t really care. I finished mine and was almost sick afterwards. Worth it! I also got a bacon cheeseburger.  I read on the internet that vacation calories don’t count. True story!

Our original plan was to camp in the old fruit orchard up the mountain from the Alvord hot springs, but according to the couple who run the Fields diner, the owners have started charging for the springs. Which is a downer, but I suppose it’s their land and they can do how they see fit with it! They then tell us about another hot springs about 25 miles away out of town that’s free. SOLD! So we crawl back in the truck and head out down a random gravel road with the directions of “turn left on the gravel road, and after you cross the bridge turn right, and after 4 telephone poles turn right again”.  I was understandably skeptical, but they were right!

These are apparently known as the Willow Hot Springs.  The campground was nice and had picnic tables, fire rings, and a pit toilet. Excellent.  There were 2 other people there, but I’m sure on a not holiday weekend you’d have the entire place to yourself.  After popping open the tent to dry out from last night’s rain-fest, jason and I headed up the butte right next to the campground.  There was another small hot spring on the other side and the ground was littered with obsidian shards and other remnants of a a really pissy volcano from back in the day.  We kept hiking to the top of another butte and ended up with a fantastic view.

After a long day of hiking in the desert and driving, the dip in the hot springs was an almost magical experience. I thought the temperature was perfect but it took Jason a while to get into the hotter side.  Pretty epic end to a fantastic day!

The next morning we crawled out of our cold tent and back into the hot springs to warm up. (excellent idea!) and then headed back towards Fields for coffee and breakfast.  Because without coffee I pretty much cease to be a human being.  and also they have pancakes. win/win.  BUT (duh duh duhhhhh!!!!!) we ended up with a pretty nasty flat tire about 4 miles away from the hot springs. Patched it and kept going, but it would be a giant pain in the ass the rest of the trip. Definitely couldn’t have picked a more beautiful spot to break down though.

Didnt get any breakfast photos because of the aforementioned lack of coffee and subsequent lack of decision making skills.  😉 From Fields we decided that the tire was holding air so headed out across the Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge.  Which is just an utterly gorgeous drive.  We even saw a few antelope.

We dropped down into Hart Lake.  There are just a bunch of small lakes surrounded by mountains that are slowly drying up.  Jason read on a sign that the lakes experience wet and dry cycles every 10 years.  I wonder if this is a wet one? Hope not.

There’s a small hike right off the road on the way down the mountain that we did just to get out of the truck.

The Indian Paintbrush was blooming so it was a surprisingly colorful hike!  Jason was surprised that I knew the name of a random desert flower.  (plants aren’t usually my deal)  I had a book about the legend of the indian paintbrush as a child. It was a nice story.

Our next destination was the free Sunstone mining site north of the town of Plush.  There are a few commercial mining operations in the area where you can pay to dig through the dirt that they pile up, but we went to the free area.  It was pretty picked over, but given that we didn’t know what we were looking for or how to dig for it, we did pretty well!

I ended up with a big bucket of smaller ones. Next time we go, I’m bringing a sifting tray and a shovel! We even ended up with one that had some color, called “Schiller”, in it.

I’m sure it’s not worth anything, but it sure is pretty! Here is a link to one of the local mines with some photos of nicer rocks than I found:

Spectrum Mine

So what’s the most fun thing you can think of after digging for rocks in the desert sun all morning? more rocks of course! 😉 The main point of this trip (besides the milkshakes, because those are a given!) was to go to a place I’d found online called the Glass Buttes.  A series of really pretty looking buttes off Hwy 20 made entirely out of various types and colors of obsidian. I had my rock pick and was ready to go! Unfortunately by this point our tire has started leaking air again and after a few dead ends on gravel roads we decided that we really should get back on the pavement and find a town and fill the thing back up with air.  An hour or so later (not real sure on the time.  I think I fell asleep in the truck again) we rolled into Riley, OR.  We hadn’t been through here before, but this is a super cute and tiny little town with a small market, 2 gas pumps, and enough archery equipment to kill every antelope on Hart Mountain.  Run by a few very nice people who let us fill up our tire from the garage.  We’ll have to stop by again next time we pass through.

The weather got worse the closer we got to the buttes.

I’d almost forgotten what it looks like to see an entire sky filled with angry looking storm clouds since my current home is surrounded by tall, lush evergreen forests.  Wasn’t raining yet, so we very delicately piloted our trusty Silverado up the gravel (and shards of glass…) road to find a campsite.  After a dinner of delicious chicken fajitas, we popped open the tent and went to sleep.

…or tried to.  It rained all night long and for some reason it was unusually loud.  It was also raining when we got up in the morning but stopped just in time to make chocolate chip pancakes and take some beauty shots of the truck.

We’ve had our Cascadia roof top tent for a while now.  I really love it.  I sleep better when I’m up off the ground and this thing is so easy to set up and put away.  So glad we got this over a large, heavy camper.   Highly recommend. Now all we need is an awning over the tailgate so we can make breakfast in the rain! …and a way to take a shower…

Somehow didn’t get any pictures of the obsidian I dug up for hours on end with my wonderful patient Jason shoveling my discarded rocks out of the way for me. There is a fairly shitty and vague hand drawn map of the glass butte digging sites available online.  I have a few different spots I want to try next time. I ended up with a lot of brown and black obsidian. No idea what I’ll do with it. Maybe make the most badass fire pit ever? We finally got to do some real wheeling in the silverado.  Ok, well maybe to Jason the ex-jeeper it was pretty lame, but I made him put it in 4LO anyway.

No, we didn’t go up that. 😉 but as you can tell, the weather doesn’t look good.  We had to go hunker down in the truck a few times and wait for the rain to stop. I probably would have drown in my little pit a happy little rockhound if jason hadn’t have drug me out of there. I suppose I owe him my life yet again.

I finally had enough blisters on my hands that I was ready to move on to something else.  Also, we were out of mountain dew. Camping is hard. So given the fairly useless state of the tires, we decided to slowly start heading back.  Wasn’t worth the risk of getting another flat with no way to fix it.  Ended up swapping the spare out in the Fred Meyer parking lot in Bend, OR.  A fairly stark and uninspiring contrast to the beauty and isolation of the desert we just left.  I admit I was a bit shellshocked by all the people we had to weave around in the grocery store.  I want to go back to Fields.

We decided that it’d be best to just plan on hiking somewhere near Mt. Rainier on the way home and just get a little further north today before stopping. So we drove up to the Columbia River Gorge where we ran into the Stonehenge at Maryhill.  I remember reading about it, but it never occurred to me that I was near it until we drove  by.  It’s actually a war memorial and I’m ashamed to say that we only looked at the stonehenge replica and not the actual memorial.  on Memorial Day weekend of all things. I’m a horrible American. but the stonehenge was a neat stop.

At this point we were both exhausted from digging in the dirt, running from thunderstorms, changing tires, and sitting in the truck and were more than ready for a place to camp.  Alas we were at the columbia river on memorial day weekend and there was no way in hell we were getting a camping space anywhere.  So we bummed a shower at the campground.  Which may have been the best $1 and 6 minutes I have ever spent in my life. Ever. I take back all those times I said that $1 for 4 whole gumballs was a good deal, because this has it beat hands down!

So there were no campgrounds available and no free camping.  We drove through the Yakama Indian Reservation which is an all-out gorgeous drive.  Got some tacos in Yakima.  By the time we got to HWY 12 it was dark, we were exhausted, and it was getting very cold and rainy.  So we just sucked it up and drove the 3 hours home to sleep in our own bed.

The next day we bought new wheels and tires for the truck so this situation doesn’t happen again.  Worrying about the tire really limited our exploration and cut our trip shorter than we would have liked.  We have a full set of oversized Goodyear Wrangler MT/R tires with kevlar sidewalls sitting in the garage waiting to be mounted.  Also found a 12V tire pump in Bend.  So this trip was also a bit of a learning experience in that we need more tools in the truck at all times.  On a side note, I’d really like to learn how to make my own arrowheads out of the obsidian that I gathered. So stay tuned.  It’ll either be awesome, or I’ll cut my fingers off.