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LaPine State ParkJan 13, 2009
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The snow at Mt. Bachelor
Snow tubing tracks were melted.. ugh
The ski shop was awesome!!
The weather has warmed with the highs in the 50's. All the snow at our site has melted. We are hoping for more snow soon, but they are saying it might be another 10 days before a cold front comes through. We decided we will just go where the snow is. :-) We drove back to Mt. Bachelor to check out the snow tubing site there. They have a 10-acre area of groomed tube runs accessed by two specially designed lifts taking you to what they call the Snowblast Tubing Park. We were very disappointed to find a lot of the snow has melted and they had to close it temporarily. We will definitely go back later when we hear they have more snow.
After checking out Mt. Bachelor's awesome ski shop, we decide to visit the LaPine State Park. The LaPine State Park is only about 30 minutes from Bend. The park is home to Oregon's largest ponderosa pine. Nicknamed "Big Red," the tree is 162' tall, 28.9' around and may be in excess of 500 years old. We wanted to see Big Red, but they had parts of the park closed because of so much snow in the area. I took a picture of one of the huge trees with Jerry in front, just to show you the size of the huge trees all over the park. The Deschutes River runs all through the park and had snow all over the banks. It was a beautiful park and we wish more of it had been open for viewing.
We were so close to the town of LaPine we decided to drive on the extra few miles for a visit. On the way there we stopped at the Little Deschutes River and were amazed to see it was totally frozen. It was hard enough to walk on the ice. It was a beautiful site to see, being from Florida we still get very excited about frozen rivers. :-) We will be taking advantage of the warm weather and doing some household chores etc. etc. but we will be very happy to hear when more snow is on the way. More later from Bend.