The Waiting Game

The story of the day is still the weather, at least as far as we're concerned. There's a long line of storms and moisture out in the Pacific, driven by a strong jet-stream, aimed right at the Northwest. The accompanying satellite image shows what we're dealing with.

It looks like we'll get a break in the action on Monday... at least that's the hope. If not Monday then Tuesday. We don't need much of a hole as we're just going south about 100 miles to our next camp. We want to visit Crater Lake National Park... that too was a hope... but if this weather pattern persists we may just keep driving south until we find sun and a little warmth. We're also being pinched by the impending seasonal closure of some Oregon State Park Campgrounds. Oregon east of the Cascades experiences a real winter and it makes no sense to keep campgrounds open for the trickle of people like us.

But we're making the best of it. Yesterday afternoon the clouds thinned and the sun actually came out for a few hours... and we took advantage of the break to enjoy a long walk around the park. We're in a pine forest, mostly Ponderosa and Lodgepole Pines, some of them hundreds of years old. They're truly magnificent things to be around... two hundred feet high and many feet around. In the photo above I'm trying to get an idea of the circumference of this Ponderosa... estimated about 13 feet. That reddish-orange bark is a characteristic of the Ponderosa.

If we can catch a break in the rain this afternoon we'd like to visit the 500 year old "Big Tree" here in Lapine State Park. It's the largest Ponderosa Pine in Oregon.

Watching the rain...
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