Between Sunriver and Bend, I have walked all of the Deschutes River Trail from Benham Falls to Dillon Falls and have wanted to go below Dillon Falls this year, but the recent Big Eddy prescribed burns have kept me away until this week.
The following photos are in the order I shot them, heading downstream to Meadow Day Use Area and then heading back to my truck at Dillon Falls. The walk was about five miles each way, plus another half a mile or so of scrambling to see things off trail.
I last visited Dillon Falls about this same time in 2022. That must have been a cooler year; the chokecherries and the balsamroots were still in bloom then. This year, they are past their prime.
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| Dillon Falls |
The area around the falls is fairly open and sunny. One characteristic group of plants in such open areas is the buckwheats, the
Eriogonum genus. Although there are up to 22 species in this part of Central Oregon, the two principal ones, both blooming around Dillon Falls, are the Sulphur-flower Buckwheat and the Rock Wild Buckwheat. I especially like these plants because their flower buds often start red then morph to orange and finally to yellow when fully open.
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| Sulfur-Flower Buckwheat, Eriogonum umbellatum |
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| Rock Wild Buckwheat, Not Fully Open, Eriogonum sphaerocephalum |
This being my first time below Dillon Falls, I wasn't sure what the river would be like. The views from the height of the falls looking downriver below do not suck. Just below the falls is a long, wide, calm section that seems quite peaceful, but even though it doesn't necessarily appear so, the current is moving fairly quickly. Then the river narrows as it heads into a mile-long stretch of rapids, some looking to be about Class III because the turns are tight more than the rapids are rough. Things slow up again just before Lava Island where in high water, the river splits around the island with a class V fall on the main river.
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| Tranquil Deschutes Below Dillon Falls |
I really find the dead or partially dead trunks of manzanitas sculptural and beautiful, in the same way that driftwood, bleached by the water and sun, transforms to something new even in death. Even more interesting at times is finding a manzanita that is partially dead so that the mahogany stems of the living part contrast with the gray, sun-bleached dead parts.
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| Sculptural Greenleaf Manzanita Trunk, Arctostaphylos patula |
A plant of special interest to me is Brown's Peony aka Western Peony, a quite simple but equally stunning version of the large, overbred garden peonies. This is a plant whose highly lobed blue-green foliage is easily overlooked, especially given that it has similar low growing habit and coloration to lupines. Moreover, the blooms which form in mid-May are hard to see because they are nodding, that is, bent over towards the ground such that you actually have to turn the stems upward to see the beautiful blooms.
In any event, these plants have fairly specific environmental habits and are not found everywhere. But they are locally common, meaning that if you find one, your chances of finding others are fairly high. In the area after you descend from Dillon Falls to the river level, I spied tens of plants at fairly widely spaced intervals.
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| Brown's Peony with Seed Pod, Paeonia brownii |
One of my candidates for plant of the month for June is the Diamond Clarkia which really starts blooming in earnest mid-month. I find the four typically fuchsia petals that form a diamond to be really unique and the most fascinating example of the genus that was named after explorer William Clark. I also like the way the plants form: the top is bent over towards the ground like the handle of a cane. This bent top unfurls and straightens as the plant ages and blooms from the bottom of the single spindly stem to the top. Typically in my daily walks about 7-8 miles further downstream, the Clarkias tend to appear as single plants or in small groups. I do not see masses of them together as I did along this section of river, looking to the casual observer like groups of short fireweeds.
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| Diamond Clarkia, Clarkia rhomboidea |
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| Western Stoneseed, Lithospermum ruderale, Named After Nut-Like Seeds |
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| Columbine Every Three Feet Along the River, Aquilegia formosa |
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| This Year's Crop of Western Serviceberries, Amelanchier alnifolia |
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| Western Swallowtail |
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| Rafts Putting in at Aspen Launch |
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| Ponderosa Pine Male and Female Cones, Pinus ponderosa |
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| Western Blue Flag/Rocky Mountain Iris Riverside, Iris missouriensis |
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| Beetle on a Drymocallis |
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| Cattails on a Slough |
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| Lemmon's Willow, Salix lemmonii, Blooming Riverside |
Past the Aspen boat launch, where I met a group of three guides readying a bunch of rafts, rafts that I would encounter on my return trip back up river, the river enters what is known at the Big Eddy, a roughly mile-long stretch of whitewater. It seems to me that no rapids in this stretch would make it to class III except that the river is really twisty and requires some care. The narrowness of the river probably accounts for the class III and III+ ratings.
We had nasty smoke for a few days about two to three weeks back, but the burns have done their job to reduce the fuel load and hopefully we're good in this section for another 5-7 years. The land managers in the Bend area are aggressively burning vulnerable and threatening tracts near town as part of a first in the nation test case on controlled burns or prescribed burns as they like to call them.
On my way back by the Big Eddy Day Use Area, I encountered the rafts I saw putting in at Aspen. On their way down to Lava Island, they had stopped to let their tweenage passengers run off some steam. This seems a bit late in the year for school children; rather, the kids are probably part of one of the many outdoor summer programs that expose the kids to many of the things that we parents love to do.
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| Evidence of Recent Big Eddy Prescribed Burn |
After the Lava Island takeout, where the rafts exit the river to avoid the class V Lava Island Falls, starts the beginning of a long sliver of lava called Lava Island that divides the river into two channels. The main channel containing the falls runs to the east and the high water channel runs to the west. The DRT parallels the high water channel.
Each year after irrigation season is done (October 15), the irrigation district curtails the flow of water at Wickiup Reservoir to start impounding water for the following summer. This decrease effectively cuts off flow to the western high water channel and strands thousands of fish. Many biologists and volunteers capture, census, and relocate these fish to the main river.
Key differentiators are the flower buds, the flowers, and the foliage. The Agoseris has small petal-like tabs at the base of the buds; the salsify buds are smooth. The Agoseris bloom looks more like an oversized dandelion; the salsify bloom, while yellow, looks not at all like a dandelion and more like a golden starburst. The Agoseris has a basal rosette of toothed leaves that look like the bills of sawfish. Salsifies have leek-like leaves that come off the central stalk; in fact, the common garden salsify's species is
porrifolius, meaning leek-leaved.
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| Spearleaf Agoseris, Agoseris retrorsa |
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| Yellow Salsify, Tragapogon dubious |
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| Wooly Groundsel, Packera cana, Has Opened This Week |
All along the river, I heard and saw hundreds and hundreds of Cedar Waxwings, one of our most common and beautiful song birds, but also one that people do not see all that often. I am most often successful in listening for their high lisping
tsee calls and then spotting them. Where you see one, there will likely be a dozen or more because they travel in small flocks. It is not unusual now to see them perched riverside and hawking bugs out of mid-air like the flycatchers, bluebirds, and swallows. Once the fruit has set later in the fall, you'll find them mobbing fruiting trees and shrubs.
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| Cedar Waxwing, Full Crest on Display |
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| Great Shot of the Red Wing Bar, a Detail not Often Seen |
After the end of Lava Island where the two channels come back together, the Meadow Day Use Area sits roughly another two-thirds of a mile along the trail. It was there that I sat on a log for a couple minutes, ate a banana and drank a pint of water before heading back in the direction in which I had come.
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| End of Lava Island, Two Channels Reuniting |
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| Patch of Invasive Yellow Iris, Iris pseudoacorus |
There are patches of invasive and problematic non-native yellow iris all up and down the river. I noticed a big patch at the point where the two channels of the Deschutes reunited at the downstream end of Lava Island. They spread easily (the seeds float downstream and floods wash rhizomes downstream) and while really beautiful, really should be destroyed where possible. Besides being poisonous to livestock, they take over ecosystems and force out native plants that provide forage for animals.
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| Our Most Common Campion, Douglas' Catchfly, Silene douglasii |
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| I Caught This Red-Winged Blackbird in Full Song |
I am not good at identifying penstemons. There are far too many of them, about 30 species in our area, for me to readily tell them all apart. The one in the photo below was sitting outside the Lava Island Rockshelter, a very small cave that once served as a temporary hunting camp for historical peoples. A 1981 excavation found 38 obsidian points and tools such as hide scrapers, the obsidian probably coming from nearby Paulina or perhaps even just across the river at Lava Butte. Obsidian is common all over this part of Oregon. Dating is speculative, but the points are likely old. The tiny shelter was in use for about 10,000 years up to the early 1800s according to one estimate and for about 7,000 years up to 1900 according to another.
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| Penstemon Outside Lava Island Rockshelter |
I am constantly surprised, as familiar as I am with the plants along this stretch of the Deschutes, to find a plant that I have not seen before. (There are many plants that I have seen before that I cannot name; the yellow ray flowers come to mind.) This one, hiding in the shade of a large basalt boulder is clearly a campion, but which, I had to look up. Our usual one is Douglas' shown in an earlier photo; this is Menzies'.
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| Menzies' Campion, Silene menziesii |
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| Tiny Juniper Hairstreak Butterfly on a Yarrow, Achillea millefolium |
In this 5-mile stretch of river, I saw 4-5 active osprey nests and several ospreys plying the air above the river offering their noisy calls to all who would hear them. The nest below was the most picturesque being built in the dead top of a still living Ponderosa Pine. This concentration of ospreys likely means that there are plenty of fish in the river to support them. And in fact, I saw fly fisherman landing both rainbows and browns on my stroll.
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| Osprey at a Nest |
A final thought: the Deschutes River Trail is not a single trail, but a collection of trails that wander along the river. In many places, there are options to go closer to the river and farther away from the river to visit or avoid certain places. When I do an out and back like this, I like to explore the different options on the way out and on the way back.
Just at the end of the canyon that contains Dillon Falls, you can take a fairly mild trail through the woods down to the river level or you can take a very steep trail immediately down to river level. On the way out, I didn't really pick up on the steep trail down; I assumed it was just a path to an overlook. Later, I saw where this trail rejoined the trail I was on and made a mental note to take that trail on the way back. I'm glad I did, for it was on this trail that I found the most glorious patch of lupines that I have seen this year. Sadly, with so many lupines in this area, I don't have the skill to tell which kind this patch contains, but I am happy to have seen them.
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| Quite the Lupine Display |
In completing this section of the DRT, I have walked from the east bank of the river near Benham Falls, crossing the river on the old railroad bridge, all the way to Meadow Camp. That leaves only the section from Meadow Camp into the southern outskirts of Bend still to walk, the section that goes behind Good Dog, Loge, Eagle Crest, and Mount Bachelor Village. I have walked a good bit of that part of the river on the east bank.
On the west bank, I believe most of that is private property, so at Good Dog, I think I'm going to have to walk a section of the Haul Trail into Mount Bachelor Village before descending back down to river level. I hope to walk all the way from Sunriver to Bend next week.
