Earlier this month my partner and I were in the thick of preparing for our annual summer adventure. We were fixed on a road trip in our ancient Japanese van (Vancent) that’d take us from Portland, OR out to Whitefish, Montana. We planned to start with three days of bikepacking through the outer edges of Glacier National Park. Afterward, we’d booked camp sites in the park we’d pass the days hiking the best trails of Glacier before heading back home. I’ve never been to Glacier National Park or even Montana and this felt like a perfect introduction.

But then it started raining. And we started worrying. Both of us have adventured in the rain before. In fact, I don’t think I actually saw Mt. Blanc during our entire trip around it, covered in clouds and falling rain as it was. But then it got worse. Bad enough to close sections of the park and put my glacial dreams to pasture. Left with only a few days before our intended start we pivoted into planning mode. Our goal? Drive somewhere that would be warm, dry and have plenty to do outside.

The same storm that drowned Whitefish was done drowning our dreams. It had submerged much of the western US and Canada in dense and oppressive rain. We bandied around options to each other nervously in passing. As I brushed my teeth, “Vancouver Island?” Wet. While she makes coffee, “Idaho hot springs bike tour?” Drenched. Moments after turning of the bedside table lamp, “The Oregon coast?” As usual, drippin'.

My partner, Meaghan, pulled is together for us in the end. The Oregon outback. Acts of vacational genius aren’t out of the ordinary for her. Her adventure resume spans continents, shepherding groups of excited friends who didn’t read the Google Doc to remote peaks and sublime dinners.

Meag likes planning adventures where you see it all. Her desire not to miss a thing fills a weeks off with hikes, dinners, and long drives to remote spots on the advice of a two year old reddit thread.

I like haiku. It feels more like finding than writing. Turning words over in search of one that slots in perfectly within the syllabic gaps. The result, is just a few lines, but ones I would not have found without the pressure of the constraints.

This trip, which is otherwise quite unlike short form Japanese poetry, was also the result of constraints: freak weather drowning out the western US, an elderly van only capable of trudging up hills at 30 miles, and an incredibly narrow planning window threatened by the ominous approach of a national holiday whose debauchery draws thousands into nature.

The plan required the weight of meaty hands to massage it. It had to be manhandled. An itinerary forced to fit around the sharp angles and into the stifling corners of forces beyond our control. All the while it’s seams, breakfast menus & packing lists, strained. Threatening to give way into defeat. Until, at last, a plan plopped out. A good one.

Part I: The Inland Sea RV Park

Summer Lake is an alkali puddle about two hours south of Bend. It is part of the high desert of central Oregon. At high water the lake runs 15 miles long and 5 wide with an average depth of barely a foot. At its southern end sits our first stop, a handful of buildings and RVs dropped haphazard on the receding edge of the basin. Summer Lake Hot Springs started out in the 50s as a locals hang. Just an RV park sporting a rough board structure they called the bathhouse providing cover for a single natural hot spring fed pool.

In the 80s a college student from Eugene took a liking to the springs and the remote landscape. For years he made frequent visits until luck lined up and gave him the opportunity to buy it in 1997. He started a long and ongoing journey, transforming the place into a spiritual and healing focused destination, with an RV park.

Today it has 10 cabins (using eco-friendly materials like pumicecrete whose air bubbles provide pockets of insulation to smooth out the extreme swings in temperature common to the desert region) and the bathhouse has sprouted 3 more outdoor spring fed pools. Mingling in the silica rich waters you’ll find Burners fresh from the playa (who get two weeks blocked off each year bookending the festival) and the same middle aged RV locals who’ve been pitching tent and slepping fifth wheels out here to the springs for decades.

We spent our time here gently floating away the hours, the hottest parts of the day spent in the cooler covered pool of the bathhouse and the evenings whiled away in the outdoor tubs watching the stars.

Just twenty miles up the road from the hot springs you can find the Summer Lake Wildlife Area. It’s a 30 square mile plot of wetlands that’s a vital habitat for a whole heck of a lot of migratory birds. There’s a long gravel loop that stretches much of the park. A perfect choice for a midday meandering car crawl. Savor the AC while you lazily gander at waterfowl that’d make an elderly birder foam at the mouth. (For the thrifty, it sports a pretty nice free campground with enough open sites for you and all your friends.)

Part II: The Fastest Land Animal in North America

We left Summer Lake heading south, passing through the town of Paisley. There isn’t much in the town but nearby you can find the
Paisley Caves that contain remnants of the oldest definitively-dated human presence in North America, dating back to 14,000 BC. Back then Paisley and much of the rest of the land of Lake County it sits in were underwater. The dusty and wide empty basins of today were once filled with the waters of the retreating glaciers.  

Back then Summer Lake was part of Lake Chewaucan, a body that spanned almost 450 square miles and had depths of up to 375 feet. Driving out of the basin I tried to imagine myself at the bottom of such a deep lake in such a dry place, my eyes tracing the ridges around us searching out any mark I could find that might tell me where the water stopped. We weren’t long for Paisley, just a quick top up on diesel before we set out for the next stop. 

If you’re like me you’re often surprised by how the puzzle piece states of the west fit together. As a swamp yankee of Connecticut I’d nod along when you told me that Nevada, Oregon and California all fit together neatly but as soon as you’d left I’d have to pull out my laptop and trace my finger along the lines in Google Maps to be sure.

Today we’d be putting that to the test. Meag knew of road we could park on and if we walked in a pretty straight line from there we could find a stone left by a guy back in the 1800s marking the place where he reckoned all three states came together. There isn’t a lot of traffic to the tristate point (the ole 4 corners steals the show, I guess) and there wasn’t a path to follow, just the green line of Alltrails and a lot of scrub to walk through. As we walked, Meaghan remarked that it was just like being on the Oregon Trail. I couldn’t help but contest petulantly that those folks had a trail. It was in the name.

About 2 miles out and over a barbed wire fence topped with a worrisomely old wood ladder you’ll be rewarded with a rock with the state flags, worn and torn, standing watch over it. We stood around it, trying our best to fit into all three states at once. Then, contrarian millennials that we are, we took out our phones to trace what Google had to say. Just a couple yards off we performed the same ritual on the place Google Maps had deemed correct, trying to imagine those lines as real. As we tottered back over the fence and towards Vancent, we caught sight of a lonely post. A survey marker from June that year, with the three states names scratched in. One more place to try again.

Our stop that night hooked us north and then east to the Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge. Hart Mountain sits snug in a long north-south trail of shallow lakes, looking over a tiny handful of communities like Plush, whose 39 residents say their town was named from a mispronunciation of “flush” during a game of cards. I’d never heard of Hart Mountain but Meaghan’s fingers turned over Google Maps and drew it out, little dowsing rods to anywhere with free camping and a hot spring. The refuge was created back in 1936, a collaboration between hunters and naturalists who saw the writing on the wall for the local population of American Antelope and had the wherewithal to do something about it.

At the plateau that surrounds the peak you’ll find a wide sea of grassland, a high desert environment that is rapidly disappearing in America. It doesn’t take a gamesman to spot the antelope that stroll lazily through it, chomping away at the tall grasses. Supposedly the fastest land animal in North America they don’t have any hurry about them up here.

Vancent, tired from the long climb up to 6k feet, is happy to chug along slowly as we take them in on our meandering journey to our campsite. Hart Mountain’s Hot Springs Campground is another gem of central Oregon nature. Wide sites and plentiful pit toilets with long reams of locked toilet paper. For nothing, you can spend 14 days straight out here and enjoy the view but it seems most of us were up there for the hot spring.

A ranger said that the current bath was carved out with a heck of a lot of dynamite. I don’t know if I believe him but I like it so I’ve been telling everyone it’s the truth. It is an awfully deep pool though. The last step off the ladder is a leap of faith where my toes touch the sandy bottom and my head slips under the water. A rough stone wall about chest height surrounds the tub. It can easily sit 10 adults shoulder to shoulder. If there’s too many folks jockeying for space (not likely out this far) or someone’s decided to play music on their speaker (sadly much more likely), you can walk a little ways away and enjoy either of the two ‘primitive’ springs. They’re shallow pools, no more than a foot deep, that run hotter than I’d like.

The refuge is chock full of pronghorn, a deer-like animal that is also known as the American Antelope. During the hot parts of the day we take lazy drives down the refuge’s gravel roads to gawk at them. The antelope are prone to lazily scratching their heads against bushes and eyeing us cautiously while they much on the grasses around them. Meaghan and I trade my binoculars back and forth to scan the distant cliffs for mountain goats without success.

Part III: How To Canoe Hundreds of Miles When You’re 70

Hart Mountain to Portland is a long haul and we decided against doing the whole drive in one day. Before we left it was my job to find somewhere worth stopping.

I’d like to say I went about my planning with the same meticulous skill as Meaghan, but the reality wasn’t pretty. I cast wide and gormless searches across Airbnbs and thumbed clumsily through empty squares of Google Maps looking for anything, but only came up with sticker shock and mounting anxiety.

It was only by accident that I landed on something special. The HipCamp listing showed a small lake somewhere south of Bend with a single open space on July 3rd in a ger, which I only then learned was the name for a traditional Mongolian yurt.

David, our host, ended up with the two gers on his land by accident. About 10 years back, in his early 70s, the former 501st airborne vet set out to Mongolia with his dog Stormy and the determination to paddle his way to over to and around Lake Baikal. He didn’t finish the whole trip, but he did end up with first pick in a shipping container full of these beautiful yurts. David is built different.

One of the best parts of staying in the yurt is that David stocks it with his own prolific writings including his journals that tell the story of that trip. If you want to know more, the best way to do that is sitting at the lake flipping through his binders yourself. Preferably with a cold beer.

David’s yurt sit within a small private plot (once a mining claim) in the Newberry Volcanic National Monument right on the shore of East Lake. Nearby you can find a place that is as otherworldly as it’s name is literal the Big Obsidian Flow. The flow is pretty large, composed of roughly one square mile of pumice and volcanic glass. A short trail loops through human sized boulders of obsidian and sea of grey pumice that is at odds with the serene pines and lakes surrounding it. It feels like another world was teleported in and dropped unceremoniously in the woods for us to gawk at.

Going Home

It’s always sad to pack up the van for the last time on a trip. Lugging the now featherlight crates whose frantic packing in the weeks before had caused so much stress now filled me with that familiar melancholy. A return to the routine. All the nagging demands that being alive requires. Vacuums that need vacuuming. So very many cups left out in such odd places that needed fretful guiding to a dishwasher that somehow always needed emptying.

As we drive back through long and empty stretches of high desert I imagine what it was like to walk through these places before there were roads. I wonder about the last time someone stopped beneath a particular nice tree to sit for shade. I think about when our next trip will be.