Friday, June 30, 2017

On this trip we stayed two nights each at three different motels, which is usually pretty nice.  You can get up in the morning after the first night, not have to worry about packing up your stuff, and have a "tourist day". 

For future reference, however, on this leg of the trip staying at Oakdale twice required some unnecessary "backtrack" driving.  We should have stayed just one nite at Oakdale, and the second nite at Bend, OR.  

Anyway, on Friday morning we continued southeast along Hwy 58, over the Cascade mountain range, which runs the whole length of OR from north to south.  There were super views to the south along this road, here's one of them:  Diamond Peak.

  
There is tons of camping, hiking and lakes along this stretch of road:  Hwy 58 between I-5 and Hwy 97.

We then took Hwy 97 south to 138, which took us back west towards the Crater Lake area.  Crater Lake is simply awesome; I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

A must-see at Crater Lake is a viewpoint that is cut in the cliff below the rim area of the lodges, etc.  There are very steep steps down to it.  Here's a pic looking down from that point.

After an awesome morning in the park, we headed north again.  I needed to take of a personal need in the woods, so we pulled off the road on the way out.  This spot turned out to be a good viewpoint of Diamond Peak, from the south.

On the way back towards our motel at Oakdale, we stopped at Odell lake, which is one of many huge lakes in the area.