Traveling Van with a Man

It’s been a great week exploring around Bend. There is a really nice river walk down by the Old Mill district. You can just see Mt Bachelor off in the distance in the last pic.

We got a much closer look at Mt Bachelor on the way up to Elk Lake this weekend. On the drive up we also saw the Sisters mountains and had a beautiful view of the Sisters from the shores of Elk Lake.

We did one more trip this weekend to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument a couple hours east. It was very cool to see the same sort of terrain from the painted dessert up here but with a ton more vegetation. The fossils here were new for us too: all mammals, reptiles and plants from around 65 million to 7 millions years ago. The painted layers are a geological record of the transition in this area from a wet, tropical climate with animals that looked like rhinos, tapirs and tigers to the grasslands today.

A great first week in Oregon!