Paula digging Thunder Eggs at the Richardson Ranch
On Friday of the Crater Lake trip, we drove out into the desert outside of Madras to visit the famous Richardson’s Recreation Ranch, which is a worldwide destination for rockhounding. While we’re not hard-core rockhounds or anything, we have been known to pick up the occasional cool rocks when we find them. On this day, however, our quarry were Thundereggs!
On the Thursday of our Crater Lake expedition, Paula and I headed north from Bend toward our next campground at Lake Simtustus. Along the way, we passed Lake Billy Chinook, which looks a lot like Lake Simtustus from this height with the deep canyon walls.
On Wednesday (7/8/2009) of our Crater Lake adventure, we left Bend in the early morning and headed up to Smith Rock, a massive rock formation, probably an old butte that was carved away by the water, in the middle of the Crooked River Canyon, outside the small town of Terrebonne.
TeamTuxedoBurrito was well represented at the Washougal Nationals, even though Tuxedo didn’t actually show up himself. Paula and I had the all-access pass to get in and watch the race from the Motosport.com trailer. It was a great race day, the Motosport.com race team did very well in the 250 class, with both PJ doing well and Cunningham kickng ass, and earning TTB a ton of points. Hahn went down in the 450′s, which bummed out the Motosport.com folks, but it was still a good race. At the end of the day, TTB had broken in to the top 10 points in the division.
We ran into our arch-nemesis, Rob964, (Team Monster Skellington, aka Team Tiny Little Dog–seriously, you should see the size of that dog!) on top of the Motosport.com Trailer. TTB managed to barely cling to our overall lead, but Skellington got more points this round, again!
Paula and I got to watch the race from the track, which is much more exciting than watching it on TV, I might add! Jarrod42 snapped this picture. He did a great job getting the Motosport.com trailer and water, coozy and tattoo giveaway event organized, and it was a big hit with the Motocross fans, too!
Read on for more pics and videos from the event!
On the next day, we traveled from our campsite at East Lake north on the way to Bend. We were anxious to see the Lava Cast Forest, out in the remote middle of the Newberry Lava Fields, and what amazing mysteries that it held.