On a Sunday

Sometimes I get restless.  I get tired of staring at my little house with all of the monumental tasks that I should be doing, and instead I decide to take the dogs and go exploring. Often I have no specific location in mind, just a vague "I think I'll go north" attitude. I end up interesting places, the girls get to run and run and run, I get to sit in the sun, and I usually take pictures of obscure things.  I also dance with disaster, as I don't have a map and the roads I choose can be tenuous at best.  Luckily enough for me, I spent numerous weekends as a kid with my parents in the Oregon desert and woods, and that has given me a decent sense of direction, if not distance. Additionally, somewhere along the line I learned the following lessons: put it in four wheel drive before you need to, you can always turn around and go back out the way you came in, pack snacks. One of these days my indestructible explorer attitude may bite me on the butt, but today only reaffirmed that my dogs and I can get into and out of some interesting places unscathed (scratches on the pickup notwithstanding.)

Today's destination ended up being the top of the rim above Hagelstein Park and beyond. The view was great, buzzards were in attendance, rocks were picked up, sticks were thrown.

Then we got bored and decided to try a different road back.  I had vague notions that the road would dump me out somewhere towards the Swan Lake area, maybe Chiloquin, maybe Beatty...I wasn't too worried, because I had gas, snacks, and the dogs. Life was good. A sunny spot near a creek provided a few hours of reading and soaking up the solitude while the girls romped and got me, my book, and the blanket muddy. Then we drove on...to find this:

I was dismayed at the thought of having to turn around before I was ready. The tree was far too heavy for me to lift out of the road. Someone had sawed it into two sections, but still, I was puny.  Then I remembered that I have a tow strap in the pickup! Hooray! Log-skidding began!

Log number one proved no problem for the trusty old Ford, no matter what my friends and relatives say about its ilk being found on roadsides dead and despite the fact that it has actually caught fire at one time.  We drove on! We found log number two.  It also succumbed to my towing skills. I forgot to take a picture of it until I had yarded it down the road out of the way, but you really can see the drag marks if you look hard enough.

With two logs under my belt, I had a cocky lumberjack attitude and I drove on, thinking nothing could stop me (at least nothing under 6,000 pounds) and that the girls and I would find our way on this road without backtracking. Even a very large mudhole did not stop us.  No picture of this one, since I was going so fast and yelling "Don't get stuck! Don't get stuck! Don't get stuck!" that I didn't think to stop to photodocument the feat. A bit further on, I took another interesting offshoot that abruptly proved itself to be a logging spur road and anything less than a D-8 Cat would not make it further. The girls needed a stretch, though, so we piled out and they found an old ball presumably left by a logger with some whimsy. Just prior to the first toss for an impromptu game of fetch, however, three rapid gunshots rang out in the hills above us.  My survival skill-set also includes avoidance of being on shooting ranges, so we piled into the pickup and hastily beat a retreat. Long story short, we came back the way we went in, passed three pickups of guys with guns, got to spend some quality time outside, probably have carried home 8 ticks, and survived to tell the tale.  Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.