Its Raining Quads!

 After a great week of relaxing and reorganizing at Ron's parents (thank you again!) we headed for eastern Oregon.  Turns out we are still on the winter side of spring and the Cascades had a fair amount of snow.  With hiking and backpacking out, we headed for lower elevations.  Our first stop was the Metolius River where we fed fish of various sizes at a fish hatchery.  It was really entertaining to throw food into the areas where there were no fish and watch them race.  There was a very lucky bald eagle perusing the lake for a tasty fish snack.  We also checked out the spring-fed headwaters of the Metolius. It was quite impressive! 



 We headed deeper into eastern Oregon and checked out the John Day Fossil Beds.  There were a lot of great short hikes with beautiful vistas.  They had a new visitors center that contained a lot of information on the local geology and displayed various fossils found in the area.  We spent the night along the south fork of the John Day River where we planned on doing an overnight backpack trip the following day.  The trail immediately crosses the river and follows a canyon.  As it turns out, being a very late spring, the river was quite swollen and, even though we have extensive stream crossing experience at this point, it proved to be too much for us. 



Redirecting our adventure once again, we headed to a reservoir on the Snake River along the Oregon/Idaho border.  Turns out being spring, they had let a bunch of water out of the reservoir and it didn't look appealing for a canoe trip.  It's a good thing that we are not terribly skilled at planning because we would not be able to stick to any plans at this point!  We decided to follow a small dirt road up a drainage and look for some camping.  High mountains and snow must be our native habitat because we once again ended up on top of a mountain at snowline.  It was one of our more scenic camps to date.  Hiking through the snow if flip flops, we discovered a couple sets of bear prints and possible wolf tracks.  This made me a bit nervous to be sleeping with our topper hatch open, especially since there are ~15 pounds of granola under us.  We watched a huge storm roll through the area that night with TONS of lightning. 



We headed to Boise to meet up with our friends Taylor and Amy.  They were not meeting us until the following day so we found some hiking and camping close to town.  We did a 7 mile hike that Ron told me was only 3 and then settled into the back of the truck to relax and do crosswords.  This area has a pretty extensive trail system where the trails are divided for different uses.  There were a lot of motorcycles and quads in the area.  As we were doing crosswords, we learned first hand how the gene pool can be self-limiting and that quads really are dangerous.  Who knew!?  A quad came ripping around the corner and, due to lack of common sense and ability, did approximately 4 cartwheels, coming to a rest upside down.  All this happened about 20 feet away from where we were sitting.  Ron ran over to find the dude unresponsive and I called 911.  After several minutes, the kid came to and told Ron he was 14.  He then proceeded to take off his helmet where he found a good handful of gravel shoved up there.  His dad showed up, was extremely concerned about the condition of the quad, and told us to cancel the paramedics.  Seeing that he was in good hands, we retreated back to our crosswords.  Needless to say, it was pretty exciting and we now feel in touch with the local culture. 

In an effort to find warm weather and no snow, we are heading to northeastern Utah to do some river trips and hiking.  The weather report shows cold and snow in the Utah area for the next week...