Bend there, done that

While my sinuses are not equipped to live there full time, I do love the high desert. Even in California, I often found myself torn if offered the choice between a day at the ocean or the desert. It's no different in Oregon, where beauty resides on both sides of the Cascades.

We spent the day in Bend last week and enjoyed the gorgeous fall colors. I think my favorite thing about Oregon is the autumn season. It starts in late August and is still going strong at the end of October. And despite getting a lot less rainfall than we in the Willamette Valley do, Bend still has plenty of colorful autumn trees!

The Three Sisters as seen from the east.

Black Butte, made famous by Bend's own Deschutes Brewery's Black Butte Porter

And just some lovely fall color in the park near Mirror Pond

Requiem for a forest

 Last week we decided we needed a mental health day and drove to Bend for the day. I'll post some photos we took in Bend in a few days, but I wanted to first post some photos of the areas we drove through which were burned by the Beachie Creek Fire from last month (the one which had us on evacuation notice). It has been described as a "once-in-a-century" fire, burning about 200,000 acres. As we drove through, we saw tree stumps and areas of forest still smoldering, even after four inches of rain and six weeks of time. 

I'm glad I got to see this beautiful forest before it burned, because my guess is that it's going to be many years before it looks even close to what it did before, if ever. I heard a news report the other night that said a fire like this takes the forest it burns about 150 years to recover. So I won't be seeing it, obviously.

The strangest thing was the way the fire checkerboarded across the landscape -- taking this house, this tree, and sparing that one, so randomly. At the higher elevations near the peak of the Cascade range, the destruction was much more complete -- not a fern, a pine cone or a tree remaining.

Here are a few shots of the destruction:

You can see the destruction, all the way to the top of the mountains.

Here you see more of a checkerboard pattern, with some trees left alive.

Still smoldering, six weeks later.

Miles and miles of it. So sad.