Kelly and Abbie were down in California, so the boys went away to play for the weekend. I had picked this book up from Costco earlier in the year and figured this would be a good opportunity to pick out a weekend adventure trip.
Our destination was the Gearhart Wilderness area. See this map below of Oregon - its in the extreme south central/eastern part of the state.
On Friday we drove after work south and stopped and camped at a campground just off the 97 just North of Chiloquin.
Saturday we got onto the route - basically a circumnavigation of Gearhart mountain on fire roads. This was true eastern Oregon back country driving. Very few people (even though we were in the heart of tourist season). The driving was beautiful and being a little higher in elevation made for perfect warm days (not hot) and cool nights. One of the neat spots we hit Saturday morning was an old fire tower still standing and accessible but no longer in operation for what looked like many years.
After the fire tower we continued on to our next stop Campbell lake where we cooled off, had some lunch and tried fishing. (no luck).
For our evening camp spot Saturday we have a few options but we ultimately chose a campsite called Sandhill Campground. We had it to ourselves - not a soul besides our group for the afternoon and evening and not even a car drove by. It had the Sprague river bubbling through the campsite giving us our own private river beach. A magical place. (I have heard it gets busy in the fall for hunting season).
The campground also had water accessible by an old fashioned hand pump. Boys had never seen a working hand-pump so Noah decided he wanted to get his water that way.
