Do you all know how glorious it is to be completely out of touch with everything for 2 weeks? No TV, Cell phone, or Internet to be bothered by/with. Well, we were fortunate to experience just that.
We left Salem on June 23 and stayed two nights at the Crook County RV Park in Prineville, where we completely cleaned the inside of the coach and emptied the holding tanks (black, gray, and fresh). Once all was clean, we filled up with 100 gallons of fresh water for our long "dry" campout. Also during those first two days, we drove the Jeep down to the Crooked River BLM Sites and found 2 nice camps to stay at over the 4th of July holiday; one large site for us and a smaller one for our friends trailer. In order to hold the sites, we pitched a tent on each one of them and paid for a couple nights to give us time to move the motorhome down there.
On Wednesday, June 25, we moved the coach down to our camp site along the Crooked River (15 miles south of Prineville) and got settled in for our 11 night stay. Since we weren’t sure if a better, bigger site would open up before our BFFs (Best Friends Forever) Rod & Lynda arrived (June 27) we only paid for their smaller site through Friday. That way we had a site for them to park their trailer when they came, but if a larger site would open up, it would also give them the opportunity to switch to it and allow room for another couple, who were due in on July 2, to park their trailer in the same site. As it turned out, that is just what happened. A huge site opened up, Rod & Lynda took it, and when Daryl and Kathy showed up, they pulled in right behind Rod & Lynda’s trailer. Once Daryl and Kathy got settled, they quickly got in our “lazy” camping mode.
This is a picture of the two trailers with Rod just relaxing.
Here is a picture of our coach with the tall mesa in the background.
We camp in a canyon just a few miles below the Bowman Dam and the Prineville Reservoir. It is a great rafting spot because the water flows pretty rapidly in some places and still has lots of calm places. Most of the river is quite shallow and full of fly fishermen (great Trout area). Where the water is swift, it can be tricky because of large boulders that we must work our way around. A few years ago, I found myself in the water after our raft “hit” one of those boulders...that was not fun! This year, we had no problems...just lots of fun. Sorry, no pictures of the rafting because I forgot the camera.
The walls of the canyon near where we camp are about 750 feet high and at times the canyon can get very windy and most always very hot. We experienced some cool to very warm nights with most of the days in the 90s. We had thunder/lightning on a couple evenings, but what rain we got was more a mist which just raised the humidity. With the many trees around camp, we managed to stay cool and comfortable.
There are many hiking trails in the canyon and some that take you to the rim and other neat spots. Once you get up on the rim, there are many OHV (off highway vehicle) roads to play on. All of us managed to partake of many activities and also just sit and enjoy the sun and water. By the way, the water is from snow melt and is very cold.
The first picture is of Rod & Lynda relaxing after a long hike up to Chimney Rock.
The next ones are views of the river from Chimney Rock.
These are shots of the river from our camp.
One morning we got up and I looked out the coach window and thought I saw Rod’s dog (JD) outside, but after looking closer, I saw it was a small buck (deer). He was just casually feeding on some greenery just off the road beside our coach. The windows on our coach are dark tinted, so he couldn’t see us, but we sure could see him. Naturally, the main camera was in the Jeep, the second one had dead batteries, so I only had my cell phone camera to work with. The pictures aren’t great, but you get an idea of what he looked like.
Notice the little guy is in velvet (antlers really fuzzy) and is just a small spike.
He didn’t stick around long because he sensed us as we were taking pictures from the inside and outside the coach.
We were having so much fun that I really forgot to take many pictures. Maybe next time I will get more.
As usual, all good things must come to an end, so we ended up coming home on July 7.
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