News from Jules | 08.12.2024 | DRT or Bust: Part 4

Was this river still wild?

As the Deschutes River Trail (DRT) arrives in Bend, Ore. the trail abruptly changes from soil to pavement becoming a promenade for dogwalkers, strollers, and those tourist quadracycles winding through the town’s shopping and industrial districts, neighborhoods, and parks.

Since I moved to the duplex in April, I have been riding my bike a mile and a half alongside the river to work at REI several days a week. So, instead of hiking this section of the DRT, a few friends and I decided to float the river for a different point of view.

Early that Tuesday morning, the three neighbor friends from REI who’ve been trekking the DRT with me came over to my place and we piled our drybags and inner tubes into another adventure buddy’s CRV for the quick drive over to Riverbend Park where there’s conveniently an electric pump by the boat launch.

A very popular pastime nowadays, our early July timing was perfect—right before crowds fill up the river from Fourth of July weekend through Labor Day weekend. On that day it was just a few folks heading downstream in tubes, and a few paddling upstream in kayaks or on standup paddleboards.

As we waded into the cold water and started floating back through time, I was in tour guide mode sharing all of the fascinating history I’d been learning.

The Reed Market bridge is where the river starts to snake in a giant “S” where pioneers settled on both sides of the river and formed the central part of old Bend, originally called Farewell Bend. On a map, the bridge is a threshold of where the town ended in the 19th century and how it has sprawled ever since.

Where the winding, dotted line of the trail becomes a solid, straight-ish line on Google Maps.

When the town was incorporated as just Bend in 1905, it was home to some 500 people. Back then, the river was already being dammed for hydropower, thus converting a central section of the free-flowing river into a reliably still, 18-inch deep pond.

In the next decade, two events changed the direction of Bend for the next half-century, according to the Deschutes Historical Society. The railroad's arrival in 1911 followed by two large lumber mills created an explosion in Bend’s population and increased the number of residents to more than 5,000 people by 1920. 

And it hasn’t stopped growing since.

According to an article in the Bend Source, a small weekly newspaper, the town faced a drastic shift from an industrial town to a recreational one after the shutdown of the Brooks-Scanlon Mill in 1983 due to dwindling lumber sources. The article interviewed Bob Woodward, described as “a former Bend mayor, journalist, and mountain bike godfather,” who recalled the climate of Bend pre-Deschutes Brewery as “the calm before the storm.”

“Little did we know that around the bend (so to speak), the booming '90s would bring a massive influx of ‘newcomers’ to this sleepy Central Oregon town,” Woodward said.

When Woodward moved to Bend in 1978, the same year the private Mt. Bachelor Village Resort was built—which we hiked through in the previous DRT section—the local population was about 20,000 people—or 53,349 including the entire metropolitan statistical area (MSA). As of 2023, Bend’s population is estimated to be around 105,000 people—and more than 200,000 MSA evidenced by the urban sprawl toward Tumalo in the north and Sunriver to the south.

Part of the “booming ‘90s” was the development of an outdoor shopping mall built on 270 acres of private river and land starting in 1998 and called the Old Mill District, with its flagship store, REI, housed in the historic Mill B with its iconic three smoke stacks as of 2005.

According to the Oregon Regional Economic Analysis Project, the Bend metropolitan statistical area’s population has increased by a net gain of around 500 percent from 1969 to 2022. That’s 5x the overall growth rate in Oregon during the same timeframe.

Coming from Portland, California, and Wisconsin, my friends and I are part of this population explosion even though technically we’ve all moved here since 2022 so haven’t been counted in recent statistics.

How is this kind of growth sustainable?

There was a lot to consider as the slow current drifted us past our work, by the parks, under the bridges, through the man-made rapids, past the fancy riverside houses, and into Mirror Pond where we exited at the Paegent Park boat launch for the two-block walk back to my duplex.

See DRT photos from Farewell Bend Park to Sawyer Park on Instagram.

Just a couple of weeks later in mid-July, wildfire season had officially started and the Air Quality Index (AQI) changed by the hour as I’d sadly anticipated. Hence planning ahead so there were only a few DRT sections left to complete before my birthday at the end of August.

After being postponed twice, there was an okay air day of 75 AQI and a high of 80°F, so we started extra early that Saturday morning to beat the heat. Heavy clouds hung low overhead on an unusually grey morning.

Instead of driving to a trailhead, this time I walked right out my door and met my neighbor—who also happens to be my Physical Therapist—at the nearby rotary for the two-block walk over to Paegent Park where we met one of my climbing buddies and her puppy, who also had hiked the Loge to Farewell Bend Park section with me already.

We set out across the 100-year-old wooden bridge over Mirror Pond to the second of many parks here in the heart of Bend and followed the paved path downstream along the river while navigating the landmines of goose poop.

As we sipped our coffees and chatted, it once again felt less like a hike and more like a leisurely “nature walk. ”

The path led to a new metal grating that allowed us to travel above the water for a quarter-mile section. At one point, we stopped in confusion at the pitter-patter noise on the water beneath us. Sure enough, there was actual rain grazing our cheeks and creating ripples across the still water.

Rain was easy to take for granted in soggy Portland, but this was one of the few times I’d seen it rain in the year-and-a-half since I’d been living in the high desert. It didn’t dampen our spirits but lift them.

What a blessing! we rejoiced.

The soft rain continued for the next hour as our conversation meandered from recent travels to family to my friends’ respective weddings this and next fall, while we kept exploring the path through Pioneer Park, past the dam near Portland Street and as far along that side of the river as we could bushwhack before backtracking to walk across the bridge at the First Street rapids.

From there we followed the dirt biking path, crossed Mt. Washington Drive, hiked through the golf course and finally arrived at Sawyer Park before turning around and retracing our steps. The further from town we were the more trees and native species grew, but there were still huge riverside homes and condominiums in every direction we looked.

As I watched the water from the sky merge with the water in the river that morning, I kept wondering about the questions that had been nagging at me since I first started learning about the local history: Was this river still wild? Or was it domesticated now?

This adaptation of a river from a wild or natural state to life in close association with humans.

And why did we need to dominate this habitat in the first place? Why can’t we cohabitate with the river like those who lived here long before the land was incorporated, the railroad arrived, the mills were built, the shopping mall was developed, the homes became vacation rentals, and the orange inner tubes outnumbered the ducks?

And, why did we ever want to tame such a beautiful, resilient, stable living being in the first place?

With only two more sections to hike before reaching the end of the trail at Tumalo State Park, these were the unanswered wonderings constantly swirling like eddies in my heart.

May you wonder outside the lines this week.

Love,

Jules