Tag: Crescent

RZR riding over the Independence Day holiday

We arrived in Crescent at the Big Pines RV Park. Nice place. It is older and obviously family run. The sites are spotless, nicely separated (for an RV park), and they have their own entrance to the UTV trails in the area! It was obvious who was here from the Central Oregon club, and we managed to connect with one of the group’s leaders easily. On the 4th, we went on a group ride to Ft. Rock and back. It was 115 miles (!!!) on mostly gravel roads ridden at pretty high speeds. We took a long lunch break at a bar and grill in town, and then a thunderstorm came in. We just put on ponchos to keep our legs dry and took off on a fast, more direct route to the campground. I only got a few pictures because my GoPro got knocked down and I didn’t notice it until we finished the trip! But here is the little bit I did get.

The first one shows what most of the roads were like – wide graded gravel with minimal bumps.

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And this is the result of passing too close to a tree! The GoPro stayed attached, but it decided to point straight up to the sky. Nice view of the clouds though LOL!

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While the club had nice people, it just isn’t our type of riding. We decided to head out on our own on Saturday. We ended up riding about 60 miles to the town of Odette and had lunch at Manley’s Restaurant. Very nice burgers! Here are some pictures along the way.

Nice roads to start with
Then got a bit narrower

And then we got to this:

BTW, I have no idea why this video is in a totally different format than the others! But take a look at just how narrow the trail got to be. Good thing we had a narrow rig!

One of the interesting sites we saw on the way back was this cinder mine. Many of the roads in the National Forest are improved using this red cinder. There were lots of volcanic escarpments and lava flows in the area.

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We took off for Sisters, OR this morning. I had reserved a 50’ site at Cold Springs Campground (USFS), but when Kevin took the truck over to check it out, we couldn’t have gotten in the site due to trees on the entrance. Sigh. We found a boondock site even closer to town though, so I am not too worried. It is going to be in the mid-90s the first part of the week, so having the ability to turn on the generator as much as we want for AC is not a bad trade off.

This afternoon I picked up my credentials for the classes I will be taking this week, and we had dinner at a Himalayan restaurant called High Camp Taphouse. The food was well flavored, but I was expecting a bit spicier. We didn’t regret the stop though.

Tomorrow morning I start classes. We will be here until the Monday after the quilt show. We plan on visiting Bend for some truck work and shopping, plus we will do some riding a few days.

In Oregon

My post-surgery exam showed everything was good, so we headed out of Iowa on Wednesday morning. First night we stayed at Lake Manawa State Park just inside the Iowa border with Nebraska. It is an old oxbow lake with a pretty new campground we have stayed in before. Moderately priced with widely separated sites, it was a good overnight stop. Thursday night we stayed in the Cabela’s campground in Sydney, NE. It is still too hot to think about going without air conditioning! But by Friday early afternoon we were in Wyoming at the USFS Vedauwoo Recreation Area. This is another favorite spot, and we spent two nights there. We even got the same campsite we had two years ago. Here’s a video showing our site.

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Here is a video from the RZR showing what the dispersed camping area is like. Note this is the weekend before the Independence Day holiday, so it was already getting crowded.

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There were lots of flowers, but almost all of my pictures came out blurry. Obviously I wasn’t holding still well enough. I did get a nice picture of wild roses and a cute little ground squirrel that posed for me.

Big rose bush
Isn’t he cute?

We drove through a number of areas that had been logged, and the resulting meadows were a riot of color. I wish my little iPhone could capture the colors better.

Meadows full of flowers

We crossed a little stream on one of our adventures, and the water looked lovely and refreshing. There was a small bridge designed for UTVs to cross, and we paused to take a nice look.

Fairly wet so far

Most of the times our maps don’t let us down, but this time they did! We had quite an adventure running out of trails that were posted open, and even losing one trail completely due to lack of use. Oh well, the RZR backs up pretty easily!

End of this trail

After two nights at Vedauwoo, we continued down I-80 to the Mirror Lake Highway (WY/UT 150) south of Evanston, WY. Thirty miles from the interstate we stayed at a large dispersed area where cross country skiers start their winter treks. It is known as the “Yurt” because the state puts up a big yurt here in snow season. We stayed two nights here too, meeting up with old friends from the RVForum.net who happened to be camping 30 miles away in a USFS campground. Steve made steaks and potatoes on the grill, and we had garlic bread and a Cesear salad to go with it. I made a nice peach cobbler for dessert, so we were all pretty stuffed.

We spent Tuesday night at the Elks Lodge in Mountain Home, ID. Nice people at the bar, and the camp area was very quiet. Wednesday we spent at the Fairgrounds in John Day, OR. We had reserved a site that was plenty long for us, but it was overhung with very low branches so we didn’t fit. Kevin found a camp host who got us moved to another site where the roof wouldn’t be rubbing branches. Starlink was pretty awful though due to the trees. Oh how spoiled we have become with fast internet (just about) everywhere!

Tonight we had landed for the holiday weekend at Big Pines RV Park just south of Crescent, OR. The Central Oregon SXS Club is having some group rides, and we are going to join them. It seems like they do more gravel roads than trails, but the country is pretty so we will survive. It is raining now, and a big thunderstorm is just barely passing us by (so far). It ought to help keep the dust down tomorrow!