Monday, July 15, 2019

July 15 – Fort Rock State Park

After looking at the pictures today I am kicking myself for not realizing sooner that my camera lens was dying. It has taken probably close to 200,000 shots so I guess it is not terrible that the focus motor is having trouble. I thought that I had a workaround but today, after switching to an older lens that I have, I see how out of focus the current lens was.  The old lens has perfect focus every time. It doesn’t have near the zoom of the current one but I can just crop the images to get what I want.

Yesterday was our first sick day in a very long time while out in the RV. Jennie suddenly got a bad cold and was in no mood to do anything so we stayed home. She still felt pretty lousy today so I went out myself. Normally I would wait until she was better but we only have two more days here and unfortunately the CRV has developed a problem and I have to take it in to the Honda dealer tomorrow.

I really wanted to see this place so off I went, about an hour’s drive south.

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Fort Rock is the remains of a volcanic crater out in the middle of a vast flat plain.

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One end is open for easy access.

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Here is the Google Earth view.

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And here are the paths that I took.

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I did a counter clockwise loop around the inside of the crater, with some side trips to some interesting spots. There is a trail that goes around the outside but I only did a small portion of it.

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The trail first goes up to that small plateau at the very left of the picture above. Later in the day I got a shot of some people up there.

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Looking out over the plain.

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And back at the start of the crater wall.

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The wide view

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The photosphere.

Heading in along the wall, looking back.

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I took a lot of photospheres today.

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Since Jennie wasn’t with me, I tried to get other people in the picture to give a sense of scale  but there were only about 10 others here today.

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There were some interesting outcrops in the crater, at the end of the horseshoe.

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Another photosphere.

I climbed up there as well, for a shot of this other one.

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The photosphere.

The other side of it had much more character.

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Looking back.

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There is another small rocky ridge to climb.

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It had a maze like surface.

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At the end of the horseshoe the was a short easy side trail to climb up to the rim, that is lower here.

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I had lunch where I took this photosphere. Another photosphere from a bit higher up.

One of the very circular farms that you always see from airplanes.

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Heading back down to  continue around the loop.

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There are two more side trail to the rim but they were much steeper.

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I think this was the path.

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Another group was heading up.

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Up I go.

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There is so much more detail in the flowers when the lens actually focuses properly.

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I took the one on the right first. It led to this small notch.

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A photosphere.

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Then across a traverse and up to the left much larger viewpoint.

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The photosphere.

I walked over to this outcrop, on the right below, that gave a nice high overview of the crater.

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And the photosphere.

Heading back down to continue around to the other end of the horseshoe.

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Apparently that group that was ahead of me was not content to just go to the viewpoint but went all the way to the end along the top.

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If you match the picture below you can find him in the one above.

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Going around the end.

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The other side was really carved out, I guess by the wind? The birds just loved all the little hidey holes.

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I briefly thought about continuing around the outside trail but decided that I had had enough.

Heading back along the opening towards the car.

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Driving home I took the dirt road that took me passed the far side that I had started to walk around.

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A very cool place and I am sorry that Jennie missed it. She would have really enjoyed all the rocky features.

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