Get Bent

At peak pandemic stir-craziness, our friend group decided it was time for a road trip. Since California was experimenting with COVID policies, we couldn’t get an Airbnb in California as California residents (of course, if you were coming in from out of state, that was not an issue 😒). By the time we actually planned this trip, that was no longer the rule, but the seed of going up to Oregon was planted and we couldn’t get it out of people’s heads.

I wasn’t super excited to drive up 10 hours for no good reason, but it ended up being a really fun trip. We worked from there a few days, and some of us took a couple of days off to hike and relax. Oddly, I have no photos of the house we were staying at. Most of the set are nature shots.

Although I have spent a lot of time in snow, I had never gone hiking in the snow. It was a lot more fun than I expected it’d be. We picked the Tumalo Falls trail somewhat at random, but was just right.

Any idea what kind of bird this is?

As you can tell, I enjoyed playing with snow textures.

Ceci est un pipe

Frozen falls.

This dude was stoned out of his mind juggling at the top of the mountain. Seemed fun.

For our next hike, we headed to Suttle Lake. The lake wasn’t frozen over, but the snow created a strange texture on top of it near the shore. It reminded me of the salt lakes at Carrizo Plain.

There was a cabin with a “Women’s” sign at the door, an old broken piano, and this.

Roughly a minute after I took this photo a snow storm rolled in and we couldn’t see this mountain at all. In fact, we could barely see the other shore.

Zach

Hannah

Backing out of our garage was tough.

The hike up Pilot Butte was totally different. The snow had melted, and it felt like a different universe even though we were just a few miles away.

Bend is really flat.

The crew. Not sure what was going on with Hannah.

Doing research for places with good outdoor set ups, I found a brewery called Crux Fermentation Project and after picking up two six packs from them at a grocery store decided we should go try it out. There was a lot of space, and things felt pretty normal. Here you see two Zachs in their natural environment.

There were fire pits. Also pups.

And trash.

We went to this coffee shop a couple of times. They had really good stuff. I bought a sweatshirt, and a mug, and a bag of Honduras light roasted beans that carried me through the week.

Downtown Bend was pretty empty, but it’s an interesting town.

Dudley’s is both a bookstore and a cafe. They had a nice selection. I wish we’d had more time to wander and idly look at books.

And that was Bend.

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