Last day in Oregon! To play that is, I have almost 300 miles of Oregon to drive through tomorrow!
It was going to be another hot one so Dad and I decided to head out early to do a bike ride that was suggested to us by the Ranger at the Ranger Station yesterday. We drove up to Camp Sherman, which is a summer/"resort" community up along the Metolis River in the Deschutes National Forest. There are a few lodges, a few commercial campgrounds, some summer homes and a bunch of National Forest Service campgrounds, as well as a neat little store.
We parked at the Camp Sherman store and rode out bikes up Forest Service Road 14, unlike most Forest Service Roads this one was paved and made for a nice bike ride. It was rolling, which I like because it's not all up or down, but there was more downhill on the way out. We rode all the way out to Lower Bridge Campground and back - about 15.5 miles round trip. On the way back we avoided the big hill by taking another paved Forest Service Road that went down by the river.
After our ride we checked out the Camp Sherman Store! I was very impressed by the quality of products they carried, it was a lot like an organic grocery store! We also went to the head of the Metolis River, it appears to come right from under the mountain!
We came back to Sisters for lunch. We stopped at the campground and got Mom and changed out our gear - put the bikes away and got swimsuits and other things needed to relax by the lake for the afternoon. We had lunch at the Fir Street Market, a natural and organic grocery store/cafe in Sisters. The food was fabulous! I had a salad and it was all very fresh and crisp. After lunch we had to go back to BJs Ice Cream for some more Oregon Trail ice cream.
Sufficiently fed we headed back out US20 into the mountains to Suttle Lake. Suttle Lake is a huge lake with a resort, at least three campgrounds and a boat launch, but best as we could tell, no day use area for lounging and swimming. There were folks who had set up in the boat launch area but there was little shade. There was another lake up the road, Scout Lake so we headed up there. This lake turned out to be perfect! It was much smaller, but there was plenty of shade on the shoreline and there were lots of swimmers!
We stayed our claim under a tree and I quickly got in the water! I love swimming and my favorite place to swim is in a lake! Especially one like Scout Lake where there is no set swim area and you can just go wherever! There were a lot of people in the lake, many with floats and kayaks and stand up paddle boards. There were also a lot of dead trees floating in the water, which was fun because you could sit on them and I even "paddled" one around the lake for awhile, but it made it hard to really swim because of fear of running into something! I swam all the way across and back - the lake is bigger than it looks and floated around on a log for awhile! A family of ducks even swam over and shared my log for awhile! It was a wonderful spot to spend a very hot afternoon.
On our way out we discovered the Suttle Lake Day Use area, it was by the lodge and it wasn't nearly as nice as the Scout Lake Day Use area so it ended up working out the best.
We got back to Sisters around 5:30 and went to a neat Mexican resteraunt for dinner and then came back to the campground to run generators and clean up - I'd pulled out all kinds of stuff today and hadn't even cleaned up breakfast because we wanted to get going before it got hot.
Around 7:45 Dad and I set out on our bikes to go back to the Snow-Cap for blackberry shakes! It's only about a 1/2 mile from the campground but it was a nice ride, the sun was setting and it was getting cooler!
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