Today all Peggy’s relatives over in a rental in Sunriver had extended deliberations about what they were going to do but Peg’s sister finally got freed up after noon and we went over to pick her up for a spin up into Newberry Crater. It is a National Monument that consists of an enormous caldera from an extinct volcano. It seemed like there was a lot of lava, basalt and obsidian around here.

All the way down in the Monument’s southeast corner is Mount Paulina (actually a big pointy edge of the the caldera), Paulina Lake and East Lake. Near the south edge of East Lake, we crossed a bridge over the control gate for the lake outflow where trout or Kokanee were furiously breeding in the calm eddy above the heavy steel gate. We also stopped off at an enormous ridge of obsidian, appropriately called The Big Obsidian Flow. This was a poor place to hike off the trail unless one wants to suffer serious and substantial lacerations if they trip or stray into the shards.

We also visited another corner of the Monument, Lava Butte. It is an almost perfect cone of bizarrely shaped chunks of lava cinder that blew out of the cone for thousands of years. There is a spiral road from the park entrance booth at the base that circles upward around the Butte in a long decreasing radius curve to the left, going around one-and-a-half times before arriving at a tiny parking lot atop the big, black pile. The parking lot at the top is some 500′ higher than the parking lot at the bottom. At the top of the Butte, there is a conical hole where the lava contracted back down into the underworld. The top is relatively free of trees and the views from the Butte are outstanding. The docent pointed out all the mountains and volcanoes in a big stretch of the Cascades, from Mount Adams, 150 miles away in Washington all the way down to Mount Mazama, home to Crater Lake in southern Oregon. It is definitely worth the $5 to get in, although we got in for free by using our federal geezer pass.

We took a few pictures. To see ’em, click the link. https://photos.app.goo.gl/oawm8Tmvyy9kCdeK6