On Wednesday, after visiting Smith Rock State Park, we stopped in Bend, Oregon for a Road Trip Maintenance Day (RTMD). I took the PurpleZ to a Jiffy Lube and supervised an oil change, mailed home a box of souvenirs, and washed the Z. Lyndi did the laundry, and repacked all our clothes.
On Thursday morning, we left Bend early and headed south. Our first stop was Lava Lands at the Newberry Volcanic National Monument. Lava Lands is run by the Department of Agriculture. We arrived at about 6:45 AM and found the roads gated and the Visitor Center closed. We had to look over the gates and wonder at what we would have seen:
Our experience has been that the National Parks that are run by the National Park Service (Department of the Interior) are always open to some extent.
Next, based on a suggestion from a man I met at the Jiffy Lube, we visited Sunriver Lodge. The lodge is in the community of Sunriver, Oregon. The lodge is a beautiful pine construction building built before World War II and used by the Army as a training post for soldiers destined to fight in extreme cold weather. Today the Lodge is privately owned, and it's beauty is still visible:
We continued south and turned onto the Volcanic Legacy Oregon Scenic Byway, heading for Crater Lake National Park. The road to the north entrance to the park runs straight as an arrow for most of the way to the park:
We drove up the side on the mountain and got our first look at Crater Lake:
Lyndi took a picture of me next to a stone that clearly shows the scrape marks left by the glaciers that covered the top of the mountain before a catastrophic eruption about 10,000 years:
to be continued....