Crater Lake to the Idaho Border (Almost)

Heading east, mostly, in this part of Oregon is different. There just aren’t a lot of roads. You can go 15 miles without running into an intersection. Not a single house to be seen. We’ve driven through a piney scrub, a marsh with wildlife viewing, and a couple of ranches. Almost no cars or intersections.

We stopped for gas at the thriving metropolis of Silver Lake. They have a restaurant and a one-room grocery store selling toys, clothes, pre-packaged deli meat and video rentals (among other things). And . . . a library! It wasn’t Monday, though, so the library was closed. We contributed $38 to the local economy and kept on moving.

We took a county road from there to Christmas Valley (Cell service! Two bars!) and then another 38 miles til a left turn put us on US Route 395 N. We took that 28 miles to Riley (not a town along the way), hung a right on Route 20 and stopped for a spell in Burns to provision up. On the way out of town, we swung by the visitor center and got a campsite and restaurant recommendation close to the Idaho border.

Bully Creek Campground is a grassy municipal park with some trees, located on the edge of a reservoir. Full electric and showers. $10 a night. Really warm tonight; the couple at R Big Burger American and Mexican Cuisine who shared their hot sauce with us said it might get as low as 55. We’re excited that we can sleep without the fly and maybe even open up all the windows on our tent and see some stars.

The reservoir in this area makes the land incredibly different from that on the way here. En route, there was a lot of sagebrush and Badlands-esque structures (often made of pumice). Very dry and little vegetation. Around here, though, the irrigation canals connecting the ranches allow for corn and even soybeans to be grown. Some places you look across the road from a farm and see sagebrush and scrub. People even water their lawns.