Oregon Cascades Travelog #18
Bend, OR - Fri, 4 Jul 2025, 10:45pm

We spent a lot of the day taking it easy in Bend today. Really too much of the day. I get it that sometimes the weather doesn't cooperate with outdoors adventure plans, or that we need to take an easy day when we're traveling, or both. The take-an-easy-day thing is a reality we've faced more frequently as we get older. I accept that. But as I gazed at the bright blue sky out the window of our hotel room— a blue sky that the weather forecast continued to insist did not exist, had not existing at all today, and would not exist until tomorrow— I grew frustrated that what started as "Sure, let's take it easy" had turned into frittering. Inertia. Languor.

Hawk was still feeling out of sorts. She made it clear that she was willing to hike but not in a headspace to plan things or make decisions. She knows I know what she likes and is willing and able to do, so she trusted me to do the planning. I reviewed the lists of hikes we'd collected for this trip, checking them against maps for what there was still time in the day to do. As the hour wound toward 3pm we'd already frittered away more than half the day. But surely there was something to do. Indeed, I came up with not one but two possible hiking itineraries. One was desert-y and the other waterfall-y. Knowing Hawk, I figured the one with the waterfalls would be better. And I felt more like seeing waterfalls, too.

We drove northeast from Bend over the crest of the Cascade Mountains to Willamette National Forest. First we visited Gooch Falls, then drove south to another trailhead for the two-fer of Sahalie Falls and Koosah Falls. Actually the latter was more like a three-fer or even four-fer, as the McKenzie River flowing over these big falls also cascaded over a few smaller falls in between them.

As with the past few days, I'm holding up on detailed blogs with photos to keep more on top of the chronology of the trip. I'll add links here when I'm ready to post those blogs.

You may notice that the driving route for this trip bears a lot of resemblance to our trip of two days ago, when we hiked Downing Creek Falls and Proxy Falls. Indeed we drove right past the turnoff for Downing Creek Falls on our way to Gooch Falls today, and the drive from there to Sahalie and Koosah overlapped part of our drive to Proxy Falls.

"Why didn't we combine these trips together better?" you might wonder. I wondered that, too. And I was frustrated about it. The simple answer is that we didn't plan well enough. We didn't adequately research the location of all the hikes on our various lists. On the other hand, even if we did research them better, there are the issues of time and energy. There aren't enough of either to do all the proximally located hikes in one day. So we made another trip back over the summit and hiked them today.

And you know what? These hikes were awesome. All my frustrations about doing the same drive again two days later melted away, completely disappeared, as I saw the surprisingly big Gooch Falls. And Sahalie and Koosah and all the little falls in between them made today an excellent day— even though we didn't leave the hotel until just after 3pm.

Of course, the morning wasn't wasted. Soaking in the hot tub was nice. And late this evening I went back out to the hot tub for another soak. Oh, and during this soak, at 10pm, there were fireworks— because it's July 4th! I relaxed in the hot water with hotel neighbors I'd just met, watching the fireworks show for 30 minutes.

Oregon Cascades Travelog #15
Bend, OR - Fri, 4 Jul 2025, 2:30pm

When we plan a trip around activities, which is most of our trips, we think in terms of maximizing the value of our time away from home and work. That means starting early and finishing late each day, and squeezing as much adventure as possible in between. That's our desire, anyway. Our plan. Sometimes plans fall apart when they meet with reality.

That happened a bit yesterday. Yesterday morning I was feeling a bit achy, so we shuffled our plans a bit. Instead of doing a big, aggressive hike on Thursday and some lighter-duty high desert stuff on Friday, we did the high desert stuff yesterday and saved the aggressive hike for today. The high desert stuff was fun so it's not like we were accepting second prize. We were just changing up the order of adventures.

What happened yesterday happened even moreso today. Today I slept in 'til after 9am when I'd planned to get up at 6:45. I just couldn't get up that early. It's because I had trouble getting to sleep last night and was awake until after 2am. And today Hawk was feeling unwell. Plus the weather was crummy. The sky was threatening rain until at least mid-morning, and the forecast called for clouds all day. We decided to put off the big, challenging hike another today.



Putting off the hike doesn't mean doing nothing, though. Hawk went shopping at a local rock shop while I puttered around the hotel room, eating a late breakfast of leftovers from the other night and taking it easy inside. When she got back we went out to the hot tub together. The rain the sky was threatening with not only hadn't materialized, but the sky started clearing up, too.



I already knew the hot tub would be enjoyable for a soak as I'd used two nights ago. But today we also tried the pool. It's surprisingly warm, I'd estimate at least 90° F (32° C). Hawk found the pool warm enough to be therapeutic and did walking laps back and forth. I preferred the even hotter water in the hot tub to ease my slightly sore muscles.

Hawk later joined me in the hot tub for a soak. After that we were both hungry for lunch. We found a Mexican cafe with casual service nearby and ate there.

Now we're back at our hotel room after lunch. It occurs to me that although the weather forecast is still calling for gloom all day, it's been wrong for the past 4 hours. The sky outside looks fairly nice even as the weather report says it's all cloudy.

I'm starting to think maybe we should try to salvage some adventure from this stay-local day. I mean, taking it easy is nice, but I can take it easy around the pool at home. While I have the opportunity to be here I should take advantage of it! The day's more than half over already, so that forecloses a lot of the possibilities. But there's got to be something we can do other than just sit around all day....

Oregon Cascades Travelog #11
Bend, OR - Wed, 2 Jul 2025, 9:30pm

Our Day 2 of this Oregon Cascades vacation has been a very full and fulfilling one. Yesterday was only a part day of vacation because it was also a work day (for me). But today we spent the whole day on leisure, leaving our hotel around 9am and not returning until after 9pm. In the middle we did 3 hikes, visited 6 waterfalls— or maybe more; I lost count— and drove 187 miles.

We left our room at the Days Inn in Bend around 9am. Yeah, we slept in a bit today. I swatted the snooze button until almost 7:30 then took my time getting ready after that. A curious thing is that when we were loading our car just before 9 we saw what late risers we were. The hotel parking lot, which was full last night, was now 75% empty, and half the remaining cars had doors and trunks open with people buzzing around them, loading bikes, coolers, etc. I'll add that to my notes about the Days Inn brand: this one, at least, is popular with the outdoors activity demographic. Unlike, say, the tweaker and drug dealer demographic.

Our first hike of the day was Tumalo Falls, not far outside of Bend to the west. I'll save my notes about the trek and pics of the waterfall for when I write a full blog about it. For now it's added to my backlog so I don't fall further behind in writing about this trip. Long story short, though, Tumalo was amazing. The main falls was almost 100' tall, and there were additional waterfalls higher up on the trail.

After hiking Tumalo it was lunchtime. Being not far from Bend was a plus because we could drive back into town to eat some real food instead of protein bars and water from our trail rations. We found a frou-frou burger place on the west side of town. Hawk got a custom burger made to her specifications with avocado, while I enjoyed a lamb burger with feta cheese and tzatziki sauce.

Fueled up for the next several hours we headed northwest on US 20 over the Santiam pass. Our destination was Downing Creek Falls. The trail description I found on a blog written by a local gal said it was hard to find. She did not lie. We overshot the unmarked dirt road twice. Then, once on it, it was a narrow two-track with no signs of where to go. Between her blog and notes on AllTrails.com we found the right place and enjoyed a stunning falls all to ourselves.

After Downing Creek we headed south back toward the pass and then down into the canyon of the headwaters of the McKenzie River. We then turn back east and headed back uphill toward the McKenzie Pass. Along the way we stopped to hike Proxy Falls. Proxy Falls has both an upper and lower falls on a loop trail. The lower falls is the bigger of the two but is hard to see from the trail. We made up for that by scrambling down a hill, off trail, then walking on logs across a creek, then wet-footing it out into the creek at the bottom of the falls to gaze up at it. Wow. I hope the photos I'll share soon turn out as amazing as the falls did in person.

As we finished hiking at Proxy Falls it was already getting late— almost 6:30pm. We thought we'd just drive up over the McKenzie Pass and down to Bend for dinner. Or maybe stop 20 minutes early in the small town of Sisters. But when we got to the top of the pass the views forced us to stop. Atop the pass, the winding little state highway traverses a lava field. There's nothing but lava rock visible in any direction— except for the tall volcanic peaks in the distance on all sides! And, at the top of the pass, there's an observatory... that's made out of volcanic rock. We couldn't resist stopping and seeing that in the golden light of the setting sun.

Somehow the stark beauty of the McKenzie Pass sated our appetites just long enough to drive back down into Bend. We picked out a Mexican restaurant for dinner and enjoyed plates of enchiladas there. Afterward we ran a few errands: buying groceries for the next day and filling the car with gas. We're back late this evening, but we're planning to get out early tomorrow for a big hike.

Oregon Cascades Travelog #5
Bend, OR - Tue, 1 Jul 2025, 10pm

We faced in choice in how to travel for this trip: whether to fly or drive. As you can tell from what I've written so far, we drove. But it wasn't simple choice. Both flying and driving had both pluses and minuses.

The biggest issues were in the time-money tradeoff:

• Flying would've meant less time in transit overall, even with flying to PDX and then having to drive 3 hours to Bend. By flying, we would've left home about the same time on Monday afternoon and then gotten to Bend around midnight— the same time we got to Klamath Falls driving. And from Klamath Falls it was another 2.5 hours of driving today to get to Bend. Flying would've held a similar time savings on the way home.


• It's worth pointing out also that time in the car is "windshield" time— meaning I'm actively engaged in the act of driving. I can't relax with a beer or scroll on my phone, like I can at the airport and aboard a flight.


• OTOH, flying would've been more expensive. The flight outbound I was able to get on points for a reasonable rate, but the flight home was a cash purchase— a "hard" cost. The rental car was also a hard cost. These two cash-out-of-pocket costs were nearly $1,000. The outbound flight cost something too, but I got it on points, of which I have a bazillion (okay, approximately 650,000) on Southwest Airlines, so it's a soft cost. Likewise there's a cost for wear and tear on our car— but it's also a soft cost, as the car is 14 years old with 129,000 miles. It's not depreciating anymore, so the soft cost is just the cost of keeping it running.

There were also convenience factors, all of which argued in favor of driving:

• Driving is our car, so there are no surprises at the rental lot. In particular, a rental could be more or less comfortable than our own car. Hawk especially prefers comfort parameters she knows vs. the crap-shoot of renting.


• Driving gives us more latitude to change plans if we feel like it, including visiting things elsewhere in Oregon or in California on the way home Sunday— which we already plan to do.


• Driving our own car means we have known, solid 4x4 capabilities. Some of the hikes we're considering require driving on forest roads to get to them.


• Last but not least, driving our own car means we can pack whatever the hell we want. It doesn't have to fit neatly into a small number of suitcases. Among other things we wouldn't take while flying, we packed an insulated bag with cold drink and cheese. That plus crackers and dried sausage makes good breakfasts for me.

So far I'd say driving has been a slight win. Yes, only slight, because despite the significant number of pluses that favor driving over flying, that first one—saving hours of time— is a big one favoring flying.