The Spirit of Adventure 2.0

Bend Oregon After spending the past several weeks in the mostly rocky and arid regions of Idaho, Utah and western Colorado we arrived in Bend Oregon on 6/23. The lush beauty of the evergreen forests and the Deschutes River which runs right through the center of town were immediately apparent with Mt. Bachler in the distance. The city has done a tremendous job creating many hiking and biking opportunities along the river in Drake Park And if you get hungry on your urban hike you are never too far from a local brew pub or food truck The city of Bend has done a great job of keeping the old town feel of the downtown. The old historic buildings like the High School, Post Office, shops and Theater along the main street are well maintained  and still in use. Outside the city are many opportunities to hike in the more natural, volcanic environment of the area. You can hike through the large lava flows from the many area volcanos have created in this ar...

Idaho, more than great potatoes  (I know, I crack myself up sometimes...) So after leaving Utah we headed into Idaho, land of great potatoes, right?? But there is sooo much more to Idaho than that. We spent a total of 5 nights in Idaho at three different locations.  We found Idaho to be both beautiful and full of history. We spent two camped on a bluff above the Snake River at Massacre Rock State Park.   This place is called Massacre Rock because of an incident on August 9 and 10, 1862. S ettlers in five wagons traveling along the Oregon Trail clashed with the Shoshoni Indians here.  The fight involved four wagon trains and 10 immigrants died in the fighting. From our campsite we were able to hike along the Snake River following part of the Oregon Trail. While it may be difficult to see in this photo below, wagon wheel ruts are still visible running across the prairie along the fence line in this photo.  Amazing to thi...

New state, New Adventure Heading into Utah we spent a couple of nights at Jordenelle State Park which is  up in the mountains west of Provo Utah.  Very nice and very beautiful here and an easy 20 minute drive to check out Park City from here. Park City Utah sits up in the mountains east of Salt Lake City with a downtown area that reminded us very much of Breckenridge CO. Although it reminded us of Breckenridge and Summit County Colorado with it's old ski town feel, it is changing with some of the old buildings downtown giving way to new, larger condo complexes. Back in 2002 the Winter Olympics were called the Salt Lake City Games. In addition to SLC they were actually spread across many locations up in the mountains including Park City Utah. Many of those ski runs and jumps are today used to train future Olympic athletes. The bob sled runs are also here and still used for training as well From Park City it wa...

Our next stop as we made our way across Colorado westward was just down the road  in Silt, Colorado where we stayed at another Harvest Host which was an alpaca farm. They had 107 alpaca here including several new babies with their mothers For only being two weeks old both the babies we saw were huge but we have since learned that when born they are about 1/3 the size of the mother...yikes! These guys were recently sheared so their fleece may seem short They are actually very friendly and don't shy away from people We were lucky to be able to stay on such a beautiful rural setting. We just camped out in the hay field and we were right at home. For those of you who may be wondering how we can camp in the middle of a hay field without water or electric hook ups, we have the ability to carry 80 gallons of fresh water and with the holding tanks for grey water and black water we are able to easily dry camp like this for up to 5 days  w...