Getting Lost in The Dalles

Enough with the rain already!

In the interest of getting the daily required dose of vitamin D, one can either move into the tanning salon, or get in the car and go east. I chose the latter and headed for The Dalles. Anything east of the cascades would do. They don't call it a desert for nothing. Plus, this area seemed to have enough miles of potentially interesting trails for me to make a day of it.

First was The Dalles Mountain Trail. Hmmm...was it really a trail? If you can call a hillside/pasture with no clearly marked trail in sight, a trail, then I was in the right place. There were occasionally some small orange and pink flags in the ground that sort of seemed to mark a trail, but these were sporadic, and if you looked around they sometimes went in several directions. It reminded me of those books I read as a kid, where on each page you make a choice and that choice directs you to some other page, and eventually you die, or at least have to start over. We didn't have to start over, but we did have to backtrack several times. At least we knew we were going in the vertical direction, regardless of any "official" trail. We finally got up to about 2000' where we sat down, had a snack, and decided to turn around. It was SO steep at this point, Zoe kept looking at me as if to ask "what the hell are we doing up here in the middle of nowhere?" Right. Not the greatest "trail" I've ever hiked, but I must say, wandering through a hillside pasture following a bubbling creek lined with huge oak trees and having the sun shining down upon me was pretty damn cool.

Next was a very short hike around and about Horsethief Butte. This is a pretty interesting geological area since the great floods of the last ice age carved this out. The butte is made up of a bunch of lava flows which are clearly visible and fun to climb on! The guide book said this was a 2 mile out/back trail, but when we got back to the car in only 25 minutes, well, I must have missed something somewhere. Lost again? Who knows. We at least had fun bouldering our way up and over this massive structure.

Lastly, and after a brief stop at McDonalds *GASP!* to refuel, we went a few miles further east to the Deschutes River Rec Area. We planned on doing a loop hike but got lost (again??) and ended up hiking a few miles out/back along the river. This was actually very cool. The river was teeming with all kinds of birds (swifts, mallards, blue herons, etc.) and there was so much diversity on the trail with clover filled meadows, sandy beaches, basalt lava cliffs (including an arch) and tons of wildflowers. Unfortunately I forgot my camera on this hike so I will have to go back sometime and do it again.

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Total distance approx. 13 miles
Total time 5 hrs 15 min.
Total elevation gain 2000'