Category: Nature

Posted on

Chasing Rain Clouds

A high desert spring day offered an assortment of cloudscapes, wildlife sightings, and a view of Fort Rock. The drive out Highway 31 towards Summer Lake is a tour through a variety of habitats, pine forest to lava beds and back.

This week’s escape from the house was a loop east on 31, out into the high desert and then back toward Bend and through a Ponderosa and lodge pole forest just south of Pine Mt. Observatory.

Partly cloudy forecast means something a bit different on the high desert steppes around Fort Rock. Here you can see the small storm cells moving over ridges. You’re greeted with bursts of sun amid the light rainfall.

The pocked face on the southside of Fort Rock didn’t offer up much raptor viewing. Song birds and ravens were in abundance, as was the occasional herd of migrating mule deer and antelope.

Not until we got near Highway 20 and were headed back to Bend did we encounter humans. As we headed home, trucks and their OHV loaded trailers headed to the network of paths crisscrossing the area.  By the time their engine noise filled the forest we were long gone.

Posted on

A Bit of Distance

 

How are you doing with the quarantine? Yeah, us too.

Even though we’ve embraced the social distance concept, there is a limit to how much you can ‘stay at home.’ We aren’t gallivanting across the countryside … but we have found a number of places nearby that allow for zero contact with other people and include a nice walk.

Surprisingly, there are few people at the Sunriver Nature Center during the week, so it has become a great morning destination when the neighborhood walk starts to get a bit stale.

As we’ve mentioned in these blog posts, there are a huge variety of walking trails and most are paved. The nature center sits near the Deschutes River and away from most of the resort’s development.

There is a pond with lots of water fowl, lined with benches to sit and soak in the spring sun. We have enjoyed this space alot and it seems like we’ll be able to continue to do so … for now.

Posted on

Scouting a cold blue ribbon

The Deschutes River north of Maupin was, for years, a go to fishing spot. There are BLM camp sites along the river from the bridge on Highway 197 to Mack’s Canyon.

When we moved to Central Oregon it was with a thought that we’d spend time on the lower Deschutes.

However, we’ve since discovered the Crooked, Fall and Upper Deschutes and haven’t been to Maupin in over a year.

This year, as we were planning camping excursions. I noticed there is an extension of the BLM land South of Maupin.

In all those years we never even looked that way!

This week we decided to take a day trip back to the old fishing spots and checkout this new area.

The scouting trip was interesting.

That stretch of the river flows through a much tighter canyon and while there are some nice stetches of water, for the most part steep banks and narrow roads make this a much less inviting area.

We headed North, downriver, to our favorite parking spot … Oak Springs. We enjoyed a picnic lunch before heading back to home.

Lower Deschutes is on the camping list, but we’ll be back to old haunts rather than any of these newly scouted sites.

Posted on

Staying away on the Crooked

The weather has been so nice we took advantage and put the new Euro rod through its paces.

We are back on the Crooked River … fishing … training Tip in the ways of the river …

and generally practicing our own form of social distancing.

This time I evaluated the new rod and in the process caught a couple. The biggest problem encountered is the cobble rock bottom that makes wading difficult and precarious.

At the Crooked we generally don’t cover a lot of river.  Instead we pick a spot and work up and down from there (maybe a quarter of a mile at most). While the river’s bottom is rock and moss, the bank is really easy to traverse.

As the weather keeps getting better, this will be a regular destination for us. It feels great to hear the river rush by and take the time to breathe in the good and exhale the bad.

Posted on

Tight-line Dead Drift

For a few years now we’ve been dabbling with the ‘Euro-nymphing’ flyfishing technique. About this time last year we got some formal instruction from Mary Ann Dozer. Then this week we finally broke down and purchased a dedicated euro-nymph rod.

I found an Orvis ten foot three weight that cost less than two hundred dollars. It arrived this week, so we took it out for a test cast on the Crooked River.

Euro, or tight line nymphing uses a two fly rig with weighted wet flies or split shot. As the name implies this is fished with the line kept taut through the arch of the drift.

The day was warm, for mid-February, and sunny. We hooked up to several fish and caught a couple of decent ones. There is an old adage which says, “a bad day fishing is better than a good day at work.”

Well … this was a GREAT day on the river.