Meeting People is Easy...The people of Oregon, it seems, are largely awesome.
Look, there's one there! First concrete evidence I saw of this was when I wandered down into the small town of Redmond from my base of operations. I stopped off at a tiny coffee shop no bigger than an English garage and sat in the corner drinking a black coffee. An old man who looked somewhat like Santa Claus sat in the opposite corner, and he was chatting with the pretty lass behind the counter about his attempts to become a baker. He is charged with magic baking skills, apparently, and occasionally sells his wares at the farmer's market. I got chatting with him and it turned out that he also was one of the select elite Father Christmas's that grace the department stores and schools around Central Oregon. He told me about the close attention to beard-detail he has to perform, as kids want an exact shape and look to Santa's face-foliage and become mistrustful if it doesn't live up to the chocolate box spec. Memories expunged he left. Another local turned up. I was enjoying the coffee so used the ultimate conversational gambit for an Oregonian - one that handily is the same for an Englishman - the weather.
We chatted for half an hour. Then the owner walked in, with his moustache and happy eyes, and joined in the conversation. We talked about Volcanic activity, the weather in the Mid-West, other British exiles dotted around Central Oregon, hiking trails, the local beer, local history, coffee and Halloween. Two hours later I had an invite to a BBQ from the local (Brad by name) and the coffee shop owner (Dick) offered to drive me to any trail head I liked the look of and give me a lift back, if I got to the coffee shop by ten each morning for his drive into Bend. We then exchanged numbers and email addresses.
I, a fey pompous Englishman, was accepted by the manly-man baseball cap wearing John Ratzenbergers of the community of Oregon. I felt proud.
Nine thirty the following morning I swung round the coffee shop. I had a map of the Deschutes River Trail sketched out from the Bend City website and a compass, thermals, a torch and bottles of water. I also carried my camera tripod and an extra lens. "You kitted out for the cold?" he asked. "Because, y'know, the weather here can turn on a dime." I felt proud I had foreseen this possibility. Less proud later as the sun beat down and I sweated under the ludicrous load I had imposed on myself, but still...
"This map doesn't cover all the trail. And I'm not sure how long it is - and the internet is playing up. I was thinking of dropping you off at Eagle Crest. We best head down to the library and see what they got on it."
So he drove me down to Redmond library and we went through the two shelves of Oregon guidebooks. Not one of them with a map. Eventually we found a road map and found that the walk from Eagle Crest was sixteen to eighteen miles. A wee bit extreme. We cut it down to eight miles by electing the Tumalo State Park campground as a trail head. He drove me the half hour to the campground in his mighty four wheel drive tank and with some fatherly advice - "Make lots of noise and keep a sharp look out because there are still cougars to be found out there. Stay away from hollows because rattlesnakes are touchy critters." - and an instruction to text him updates left me to begin my adventure...
Tumalo State Park is a little campground area along the Eastern side of Deschutes River, great for trout fishing. Along the West bank of the river faded, sandy coloured rock rises up. A little further downstream the campsite ends and the valley floor abruptly narrows at the point where a Frank Lloyd Wright style house resides. Here the rocky sides begin piling up on both banks and the valley floor thins so that the steep slopes ride all the way down to the narrow but fast-flowing river itself. For a half mile the trail is frequented by dog walkers and fishermen, but then the visible path becomes increasingly difficult to discern. We are far from the marked trails of the National Trust here. Undaunted, I pushed on ahead. For the next three hours of scrabbling, I was to see not one living soul. At first, everything went swimmingly. My jaw was in a fixed state of unhinged as the light filtered through the pines and down on to the low trees and bushes that still blazed bright crowns of leaves fire-orange and yellow. The birds were singing and the river was babbling and the only obstruction to peace was in the form of my occasional bellowing, whistling and loud quotations as I sought to deter potential bears and cougars.
I sounded like a mental.
The trail faded and now I was scrambling over fallen trees and slowly rising up the slope in an attempt to pick a way round the river boulders. Eventually they became so numerous that any walkable path was comprehensively buried under hundreds of tons of basalt lava. I scrambled up the side to the ridge a hundred feet above. It was a great plain dotted with clusters of trees and a wood beyond. I followed the ridge along until the boulders below lessened, and I scrambled back down to the valley floor. This was pretty hairy stuff. The soil crumbled under foot like moist cake and rocks and stones clattered down to the river below. I tried to stick to clambering over boulders when I could, and frequently I had to lower myself four or five feet down off crags and onto ledges, trying to slowly work a safe path down.
The valley floor. Here it began to open out once again. Confidently I strode forward, regaining time. Now early afternoon the going was getting surprisingly hot. Turns out you can have barbecue weather in November in Central Oregon. I walked on for half an hour and then found, to my dismay, this:
I had an option, retrace my steps back and up on to the ridge, hoping to find a road, head back to the campsite, or forge ahead. With my feet on this great Oregon trail and with the example of Lewis & Clark burning in my mind, I decided that if two investigative reporters for Metropolis's biggest daily scorned trespass signs in the pursuit of a good story, then so should I. I stepped breezily past the sign and plunged further down the canyon, hoping that a proper walker's public-access trail would become apparent again.
It didn't. In fact, now once again the valley was thinning and another mountainous mound of boulders hampered my way. I rose to the top of them and down the other side and found... a barbed wire fence. I couldn't tell if it spanned the entire width of the gulch, but by now I was growing a little tired about the teasing nature of this valley floor and resolved to try and get out and onto some sort of ridge trail before I got into trouble. The presence of cougar dung and paw prints wasn't exactly reassuring either. It took half an hour to scramble up the rocks, and I frequently had to jump gaps - my eyes ever watchful for hibernating rattlers. Eventually I reached the top. A grassy plain intersected by wire fences everywhere. I followed one along away from the valley ridge for ten minutes before I heard a roaring sound. Traffic! Civilisation!
Alas, no. Another ridge and another river. This one wasn't on my map. What the hell? I looked around, clueless as to where I was. Thoughts of Christopher McCandless danced through my mind - primarily about how I'd been idiotically unprepared without a decent trail map. But then, casting around I found a quad bike trail and grimly set to follow it. Eventually, winding this way and that, I saw telegraph poles. I followed them and they took me to a tarmac track. Working along that I saw the roof of a house in the distance. And... deer! Lots of them. They stared at me from a distance and then went bounding through the scrub, across the plain and away into the trees and over the craggy outcroppings of rock. They were so beautiful, I forgot to even use my camera.
And then, finally! I was out of the worryingly well-maintained fields, past a gate and on a lane. Turning around I saw private property signs with the usual angry red warnings of lawyers and violence, and I piped up an innocent jaunty whistle and worked my way down the lane.
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