News from Jules | 06.24.2024 | DRT or Bust: Part 2
Even by those who love nature.
Initially, when I discovered the 30-mile Deschutes River Trail (DRT) during my first hike post-ski accident in early May, it was just a wild idea for a “summer project.” After hiking two more sections with coworker friends from Mt. Bachelor and REI later that month, the DRT has become a beautiful way to learn the river and get to know the land, spend quality time with new friends, plus strengthen my weakened right leg this summer. And perhaps even more.
At this rate, I’ll be done by my birthday at the end of August.
So, six weeks ago when I saw a gorgeous pair of beaded earrings featuring a river, waterfall, moon, and stars in the home art studio at my REI manager’s retirement potluck, it felt like the perfect early birthday gift to wear along the way and to commemorate this summer’s journey.
A reminder from artist Lyndsey Scott: “You don’t have to know the way. The Way knows the way. You don’t have to plan the way. Trust the way, feel your way…the Way knows the way.”
With little planning each week beyond finding an open window in my work schedule, consulting the list of reference trails I compiled on Alltrails for a general sense of the route, and quickly cross-referencing Google Maps for exact trailheads, I simply set a time, meeting spot and anticipated mileage then started recruiting anybody and everybody to come along and see what’s next on the river.
After hiking the first few sections of the DRT, it was clear. This was not a place you visit once. This was a sacred place to come again and again.
But, how do we give homage?
My coworker/friend/neighbor and I were stoked to return to the favorite spot we discovered—and almost forgot to do—at the end of the last section where we left off. That Tuesday evening in early June, I stopped by her place just three blocks from my duplex first, then picked up another REI coworker who coincidentally lives just up the butte from us. I navigated by memory from our neighborhood to the roundabouts along Century Drive until we reached the turn-off on the left for the deeply potholed dirt forest service road.
“Just wait until you see these falls. It’ll take your breath away,” we hyped to our coworker friend.
He was the most recent transplant as of the new year, she arrived last November, and technically I’d been in Bend since last June after a few months in nearby Sisters, Ore. All three of us came here for the access to nature that is hard to fully experience as a tourist when there is only time for the most popular sections of the trail.
It’s hard to see the whole picture. Or in this case, the whole river.
On a boulder jutting out below the main falls, we stood in silence and watched the water rush through the canyon it seemed to be carving through the millennia—all day and all night, flowing constantly, but differently relative to the ever-changing wind, air temperature, river bed, and more.
About a mile into the hike, I noticed a missed call on my phone from another REI coworker and her dog who were trail-running nearby. I quickly texted a pin of our location before we continued hiking downstream. At the Aspen Day Use Area when we stopped to admire the still, dark blue water of the boat launch area and put on another layer of bug spray, they popped out of the woods.
From there, we hiked along in pairs for the next couple of miles, having longer conversations and thus learning all kinds of cool things about each other that we didn’t have time or opportunity for while working together.
After we arrived, stepped into the water to cool off our feet and admired Big Eddy, the name for small whirlpools swirling counter to the current, we turned around and headed back upstream. At the Aspen Day Use Area, our friend and dog ran off into the sunset and we cracked open some Miller Light beers before they warmed up. One of us went for a chilly dip in the river to cool off—not me!—before we finished the last mile or so back to the car.
On the drive back to our neighborhood around 8:45 p.m., we marveled at how light it still was—just a couple weeks before the summer solstice—and how much one can fit into these long summer days.
A week later, I decided to sneak in a few miles of the DRT on my own before working at REI. Once I stepped out of the car and smelled the cool, crisp early morning air, I remembered how much I love being outside while the world is still waking up.
After my tradition of taking selfies with the trailhead signs near the parking lot, I headed toward the water and immediately saw a bushy little island in the middle of the river. Was this Lava Island? It seemed awfully small to have a whole trailhead named after it, but I shrugged it off and set out on the trail—upstream for this stretch from the Lava Island Trailhead and back to the Big Eddy Trailhead.
Unlike most bright blue mornings here in the high desert, there were stunning shades of gray rolling in waves of altocumulus clouds across the whole sky, mirroring the ripples and rapids of the river below. The light reflected differently off the pines, the riverbank, the rocks, the wildflowers at each bend in the trail kept catching my eye so I stopped frequently to take photos.
Once I reached the Big Eddy rapids, I found a stump to sit, eat my favorite Cashew Cookie Lara Bar, and watch the river. I sat still but the water rushed by in a constant, dull roar.
I marveled how these dark, porous volcanic rocks had watched over this one bend in the river for thousands of years while droplets of spring-fed water, joined by rain, sleet, snow or hail passed by once, for a moment. How there was no past or future as these beings related, only the present.
A totally different scale of time, change, permanence and transformation.
The sun started to burn through the clouds, warming my face and reminding me that I on the other hand had to go to work in the very near future. I wondered: What if I called out sick and just sat here all day instead?
It was a tempting idea, but alas I am faithful to my commitments. I did linger, cutting it very close on the 15-minute drive from the trailhead to REI. Luckily, I was already wearing my “work clothes” and would have street cred by coming in fresh off the trail.
The following weekend, I once again drove from town along Century Drive to cover a few more miles between the Lava Island Trailhead and the Meadow Day Use Area on my own before work. By 8:30 a.m., the air was already in the mid-60°s Fahrenheit and the sky was its usual blue with a few streaks of white, whispy clouds.
I saw the same bushy little island at the start of the hike, but realized my mistake at the first of many informative interpretative signs along this downstream section of the trail. Lava Island was actually about a mile long. I would soon see piles of black igneous rock with bushes and trees growing out of the ashy soil like we’d seen across the river in the Newberry National Volcanic Monument further south between Benham and Dillon Falls.
According to the interpretative signs, when nearby Lava Butte erupted 6,200 years ago, the lava flowed across 6,000 acres and blocked sections of the Deschutes River, forming Lava Island and its falls. During the past half-million years, successive lava flows forced the river to relocate farther and farther to the west.
“Decades ago, prior to flow regulation through dams, the Deschutes River flow fluctuated very little due to its spring-fed origins, making it one of the most stable rivers in the county. The current flow regime, which results in lower winter flows and higher summer flows than normal, was intended to accommodate agricultural development in Central Oregon.”
I realized that the Aboriginal hunters on their seasonal hunting trips who camped in the rock shelters that I passed—as early as 7000 years ago and as recently as 200 years ago or around the time that the Lewis & Clark Expedition was “discovering” the Columbia River Gorge between Washington and Oregon—had a relationship with a very different river than the one I was experiencing.
Their river was powerful, wild and constant. Shifting and adapting to major volcanic activity over millennia, otherwise flowing uninhibited from the source.
Our river was developed, domesticated, and unpredictable after only a matter of decades. Our relationship with the river is primarily for recreation, property, or energy. It isn’t home, it’s a resource—for use, and misuse.
Even by those of us who love nature.
See DRT photos from Dillon Falls to Meadow Day-use Area on Instagram.
I was still thinking about this on the way back when I hiked across a narrow section of the trail going across the river, now dammed to create a pond.
On the other side, there was fork in the trail: to the left was private property owned by the Seventh Mountain Resort—including 21 lodging buildings with more than 200 condominiums—and to the right was public property owned and managed by the Forest Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Isn’t that ironic?
This three-mile stretch of the DRT sure gave me a lot to ponder as I returned to my car and headed to work.
May you look closer this week.
Love,
Jules
Read all posts in the “DRT or Bust” series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 & Part 8