Wednesday, July 1, 2009

6 21 BEND

We went to the Newberry park and saw the visitor’s center. Nothing very exciting there. We had to get a time for cinder cone road, due to limited parking. This view from the top of the cinder cone, shows a good view of some of the lava flows. Also you can look into the crater.
Nice views from the top. This are the three sisters.
This shows the three sisters and Broken Top mountain

Next we went to Lava River Cave. 1 mile in and a mile out. Even tho they had steps over the difficult rock fall areas at the beginning of the cave, there was no lighting and people either used lanterns or flashlights. There were lots of people there, so there was almost always sounds of voices and some light. The ceiling got low in spots, but at the end, it got lower and lower…. We decided not to go thru about 100 feet of stooping before the end. Other people had. As we were standing, there we heard voices. They were shouting, but we couldn’t make out the words. We shouted to them, but they didn’t respond. We were concerned that they were calling for help, so we did go on. It turned out that there was a continuation of the cave that had an even lower ceiling than what we had just passed thru. A young man was waiting for his friends and was calling to them. That was what we heard. There was no problem. Everyone was OK. So we eventually went back out.
When hot lava or gases go thru an existing lava tube (a tube made by very liquid lava flowing away from a vent, which cools faster on the outside while the inside continues to flow to an outlet at the end, leaving a tube) it remelts the outside layer. This is a picture of the remelt. It is smooth and shiny and shows how it dripped.

Remember Fort Rock? Well, that is it in the distance. It really stands out in the distance.


Wild flowers in the pine forest. Being early summer/late spring the wild flowers are great



And last today, on to Benham waterfall, which was really a rapid, not a falls. We saw a western scarlet tanager on the bridge on the way to the rapid and nice flowers on log jam









flowers in the log jam



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful bird. Your weather looks better than ours. We have had RAIN AND RAIN. Laurene