trip to Bend
Sep. 27th, 2003 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eubThe weekend before last, Wim and Kylee and Kylee's mother Connie and Connie's brother Doug and I went on a geologically-inclined trip to Bend and thereabouts, in central Oregon, east of Eugene.
(Thursday evening: the lake full of stumps by Snoqualmie Pass is an eerie place. The water was low.)
Friday: Richardson's Recreational Ranch, north of Bend, is a U-Pick farm for rocks, 50 cents a pound. We left the Prius in the parking lot near the paved road, and went in to the rock beds in Doug's pickup, the young people in the back with the cooler and the crowbars clanking around. We were looking for geodes, which you hack out of the crumbly rock underlying the solid top layer, or you shovel out of the scree that other people have hacked out and not searched thoroughly. I didn't take pictures out in the rock-hacking beds, but when we came back in I did get the emus. They have a decided Dr. Seuss look to them; all they need is neck-ruffs.
Feet.
The ranch has a huge petrified log (not to mention a black rooster). I wonder where you dig up a thing like that. Note piles of stone in the background, pre-collected for those who don't care to hack out their own. They had a hunk of rose quartz the size of a capybara. Antlers too (product placement accidental).
I have twenty pounds of geodes in a Nottingham bluegrass seed sack. Does anyone have a diamond saw?
Afterwards, around sunset, we were heading south on 97 towards Bend and La Pine, and came by LavaRiver Cave, right off the highway. It's a lava tube, with heavy aftermarket engineering by the Forest Service -- stairs and railings leading down to the entrance, and continuing inside over the jumbled slabs near the entrance, and as far as we went, which was not far.
Outside the cave were pines.
We had Thai for dinner. It was pretty good. The dishes expecting fat rice noodles had narrower and thinner ones instead, but other than that. That night we were in Sonny's Motel.
Saturday: plans were first to walk around Fort Rock, then go to Derrick's Cave nearby. But first of all stop at a stand by the highway for discount clothes. I finally found two enantiomeric gloves that fit, motorcycle-type black leather gloves (with holes over the knuckles) leaving the fingertips out for operating a camera, since caves are cold.
Fort Rock1 is a maar and/or a tuff ring. I'm not clear on the terms' overlap and divergence.2 Anyway, it looks like this from a moving truck: an old volcanic crater ring, marked now by water, the lake in which it was an island in the Pliocene and Pleistocene.
1 We saw a sign for Hole In The Ground, also described on that page. Next time I want to go there.
2 Okay, see here: the bottom of a maar's crater is below ground level, whereas a tuff ring's is at or above it.
I clambered a little around the outside, saw irrigated circles and windows back through the wall. Wim and I went up the far side wall, looked over the parapet at that Pleistocene lakebed, and back at the crater bowl. Scrub and tufts of grass grew up there where they could. What is this honeycombing on the rocks? It looks constructed to
me.
Back down in the bowl we found people on a rock, followed by more people, and people who must have been being silly. Doug; Wim.
Evidently I am silly too.
Someone on the web took a good picture of the lichen.
Again we left the Prius on civilized pavement, in the Fort Rock parking lot, and piled in to the truck, where we put the finishing touches on our sunburns en route to Derrick's Cave. Some cleverly wore hats, avoiding the unhappy sunburned hair-part. Under these power lines we were looking at maps and road signs; Hole In The Ground is to your left here.
Feet.
Derrick's Cave runs in two directions, or did. One was fitted out as a fallout shelter. It petered out immediately, blocked by a recent shift of sand -- or almost blocked; a skinny person might have eeled through with some squirming. I am a skinny person, but I was insufficiently enthusiastic, and the party clearly wasn't all going that way.
The other opening had a sand floor, and a vaulted ceiling, with holes to the sky. It's still open for several thousand feet, as the bat flies, if bats flew straight. We did meet a bat, and it flew in circles. We didn't walk straight either, since the floor further in was a jumble of scoriac rubble, fallen slabs, and half-collapsed lava tubes within the tube. One you could crawl into, and poke your head out through a hole. Finally, the slabs piled up, and I scouted in as far as without scraping myself on the ceiling more than one or two times, until no space was left. We turned off our lights. On the way out we loitered, and sat.
If you walk along the aboveground lava tube ridge (it's like a prodigiously huge mole tunnel), there's another cave entrance, sandy-floored and almost head-high. I didn't have my light then. I wonder where it goes.
On the way back it was sunset. Bright, and the roadside weeds were like LEDs in one of those oscillating-wand mid-air message displays. If you hold up scary claw hands by your head, when your shadow suddenly falls on a nearby sagebrush it jumps out to grab you in a pleasingly alarming manner.
Feet. Socks.
This night we slept in Doug's garage. His housemate has a large jug of H-Klenz II solution for removing blood and rust from instruments, and he has a crane of moderate size. He has a cat, Screech, too.
Sunday: mostly travel home. We stopped on the way in the town of Fossil (which isn't all that on-the-way), and on the way to Fossil at a national monument or small park enclave or some such administrative designation for a palisade of complexly-weathered cliffs.
The rock shapes look a bit like Easter Island, don't they? And raise badlands towers.
Across the highway, and all along the way, the hills were raked with roughly horizontal rows. Formed by some interaction between an established plant and new ones?
In Fossil, you find the high school (a fellow in the wood shop stepped out and lent us a decent rock hammer), and go to the hillside behind the playing field, and dig out shale, shale or some more or less transversely-cleaving material anyway. In it are fossil prints of leaves, lanceolate and fir-needly. We soon got tired in the sun, and got lunch in the Fossil Cafe.
Wind farms by the road! Wind farms!
We saw Mount Adams, and several other mountains. We stood on a mountain identifier which told us so, a raised circle inset with brass arrows.
By the Columbia River crossing is a concrete replica of Stonehenge, raised as a memorial of the First World War. Behind it was a tree bearing green ovals, something mostly like pecans in them. From here Mt. Adams was under some curious clouds.
We got back not too late, had dinner delivered, and moved steel furniture.
(Thursday evening: the lake full of stumps by Snoqualmie Pass is an eerie place. The water was low.)
Friday: Richardson's Recreational Ranch, north of Bend, is a U-Pick farm for rocks, 50 cents a pound. We left the Prius in the parking lot near the paved road, and went in to the rock beds in Doug's pickup, the young people in the back with the cooler and the crowbars clanking around. We were looking for geodes, which you hack out of the crumbly rock underlying the solid top layer, or you shovel out of the scree that other people have hacked out and not searched thoroughly. I didn't take pictures out in the rock-hacking beds, but when we came back in I did get the emus. They have a decided Dr. Seuss look to them; all they need is neck-ruffs.
Feet.
The ranch has a huge petrified log (not to mention a black rooster). I wonder where you dig up a thing like that. Note piles of stone in the background, pre-collected for those who don't care to hack out their own. They had a hunk of rose quartz the size of a capybara. Antlers too (product placement accidental).
I have twenty pounds of geodes in a Nottingham bluegrass seed sack. Does anyone have a diamond saw?
Afterwards, around sunset, we were heading south on 97 towards Bend and La Pine, and came by LavaRiver Cave, right off the highway. It's a lava tube, with heavy aftermarket engineering by the Forest Service -- stairs and railings leading down to the entrance, and continuing inside over the jumbled slabs near the entrance, and as far as we went, which was not far.
Outside the cave were pines.
We had Thai for dinner. It was pretty good. The dishes expecting fat rice noodles had narrower and thinner ones instead, but other than that. That night we were in Sonny's Motel.
Saturday: plans were first to walk around Fort Rock, then go to Derrick's Cave nearby. But first of all stop at a stand by the highway for discount clothes. I finally found two enantiomeric gloves that fit, motorcycle-type black leather gloves (with holes over the knuckles) leaving the fingertips out for operating a camera, since caves are cold.
Fort Rock1 is a maar and/or a tuff ring. I'm not clear on the terms' overlap and divergence.2 Anyway, it looks like this from a moving truck: an old volcanic crater ring, marked now by water, the lake in which it was an island in the Pliocene and Pleistocene.
1 We saw a sign for Hole In The Ground, also described on that page. Next time I want to go there.
2 Okay, see here: the bottom of a maar's crater is below ground level, whereas a tuff ring's is at or above it.
I clambered a little around the outside, saw irrigated circles and windows back through the wall. Wim and I went up the far side wall, looked over the parapet at that Pleistocene lakebed, and back at the crater bowl. Scrub and tufts of grass grew up there where they could. What is this honeycombing on the rocks? It looks constructed to
me.
Back down in the bowl we found people on a rock, followed by more people, and people who must have been being silly. Doug; Wim.
Evidently I am silly too.
Someone on the web took a good picture of the lichen.
Again we left the Prius on civilized pavement, in the Fort Rock parking lot, and piled in to the truck, where we put the finishing touches on our sunburns en route to Derrick's Cave. Some cleverly wore hats, avoiding the unhappy sunburned hair-part. Under these power lines we were looking at maps and road signs; Hole In The Ground is to your left here.
Feet.
Derrick's Cave runs in two directions, or did. One was fitted out as a fallout shelter. It petered out immediately, blocked by a recent shift of sand -- or almost blocked; a skinny person might have eeled through with some squirming. I am a skinny person, but I was insufficiently enthusiastic, and the party clearly wasn't all going that way.
The other opening had a sand floor, and a vaulted ceiling, with holes to the sky. It's still open for several thousand feet, as the bat flies, if bats flew straight. We did meet a bat, and it flew in circles. We didn't walk straight either, since the floor further in was a jumble of scoriac rubble, fallen slabs, and half-collapsed lava tubes within the tube. One you could crawl into, and poke your head out through a hole. Finally, the slabs piled up, and I scouted in as far as without scraping myself on the ceiling more than one or two times, until no space was left. We turned off our lights. On the way out we loitered, and sat.
If you walk along the aboveground lava tube ridge (it's like a prodigiously huge mole tunnel), there's another cave entrance, sandy-floored and almost head-high. I didn't have my light then. I wonder where it goes.
On the way back it was sunset. Bright, and the roadside weeds were like LEDs in one of those oscillating-wand mid-air message displays. If you hold up scary claw hands by your head, when your shadow suddenly falls on a nearby sagebrush it jumps out to grab you in a pleasingly alarming manner.
Feet. Socks.
This night we slept in Doug's garage. His housemate has a large jug of H-Klenz II solution for removing blood and rust from instruments, and he has a crane of moderate size. He has a cat, Screech, too.
Sunday: mostly travel home. We stopped on the way in the town of Fossil (which isn't all that on-the-way), and on the way to Fossil at a national monument or small park enclave or some such administrative designation for a palisade of complexly-weathered cliffs.
The rock shapes look a bit like Easter Island, don't they? And raise badlands towers.
Across the highway, and all along the way, the hills were raked with roughly horizontal rows. Formed by some interaction between an established plant and new ones?
In Fossil, you find the high school (a fellow in the wood shop stepped out and lent us a decent rock hammer), and go to the hillside behind the playing field, and dig out shale, shale or some more or less transversely-cleaving material anyway. In it are fossil prints of leaves, lanceolate and fir-needly. We soon got tired in the sun, and got lunch in the Fossil Cafe.
Wind farms by the road! Wind farms!
We saw Mount Adams, and several other mountains. We stood on a mountain identifier which told us so, a raised circle inset with brass arrows.
By the Columbia River crossing is a concrete replica of Stonehenge, raised as a memorial of the First World War. Behind it was a tree bearing green ovals, something mostly like pecans in them. From here Mt. Adams was under some curious clouds.
We got back not too late, had dinner delivered, and moved steel furniture.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-29 12:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-06 09:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-07 11:56 pm (UTC)My brother suggested a tile saw -- not a tile cutter of the score-and-snap kind like I thought he was saying, but a diamond circular saw. They seem to be 5" or so, though, so only a couple of inches of cut depth, so I dunno.
Vanilla and butterscotch, mm, I should have sniffed the pines.