Sonnenaufgang an den Painted Hills & Dinner unter Kettensägen

Monday 2.7.

I wake up at 5 am because the people above us are already getting up. I don't dare to fall asleep again and keep an eye on the beginning daylight. We are already sitting in the car at 6:45 am to go to the Painted Hills. Along the roadside, black-tailed deer stand, the weather is nice, and we are alone on the road. On the trail that we are now walking, we come very close to the red-colored hills.

The material turns out to be loose tuff rock, which hangs together like small puzzle pieces and - as soon as you touch it - starts slipping. Therefore, you shouldn't actually touch it. Entering is not allowed anyway, with such fragile surfaces.

The morning light is not as beautiful as last night and we drive a little further to the Red Butte Trail, which goes around a red-yellow cone. All of this is 33 million years old.

Red Butte

A third trail is the Leaf Fossil Trail. They found a lot of petrified leaves here because this whole area used to be a tropical forest, but that was over 30 million years ago. Today, in the defined area of this Leaf Fossil Trail, you can find some prehistoric-looking "fossils".

Back in downtown Mitchell, we take some photos in this quirky place, which is a mixture of ghost town and survival struggle. The "gas station" opposite our accommodation is an open-air gas station with two antique refueling pumps, and the guy who runs it is actually never present. In his main job, he sells decorative rock slabs that he polishes. Yes, it is certainly easier to organize here than fuel.

The visitor office, about 30m down the road, offers a strange decoration from the outside and inside and a collection of things that you usually find in a flea market. The woman who runs the little shop is mowing the lawn behind the house, and I leave the office again. I was probably the first visitor in 30 years, so why should anyone go into the store...? Next to her "junk tourist office," someone named Schnee has set up a kind of crafting workshop. Once again, we wonder how people make a living here. Do they sell their junk to each other?

In our hotel, we get a coffee from the countertop, along with muffins and bananas that are included in the breakfast. We sit in the sun for a short while and then head west. At Lake Ochoco, we want to take a break, and we reach the lake around 11:00 am.

We unpack our chairs, food, books, and water and sit by the lakeshore at a campground. But after 2 pm, we continue driving and have great views of the snow-capped peaks of Mount Bachelor, Broken Top, Three Sisters, and Mount Jefferson. About 200 miles away, Mount Hood is recognizable to the naked eye in this clear weather. For the first time in over two weeks, we are driving today with the air conditioning turned on!

We reach Sisters at 3:30 pm, a widely described as cute and original artist village at an altitude of 1000m in the Cascade Mountains. We are not really enthusiastic here either about the description in the Lonely Planet. What do they always write or what do they understand as 'original'?

Sisters

Flags being waved to cross the pedestrian pathway. This is a regulation here!

Very touristy and the "old" houses are mostly new and filled with all sorts of things that tourists might need or could buy. Instead of checking into a Best Western here for $149 + tax, we drive for another hour to a village called Detroit. The helpful woman at the tourist office in Sisters found a motel or lodge online in Detroit and saw that practically all categories are available.

Our journey to Detroit goes through a very damaged forest. Some parts are simply dead, some parts are burned down. The motel in Detroit is very nice, and we decide to take the cheaper room, which still costs $122 including tax. Since the next town is over an hour's drive away, we stay here and find Detroit more exciting than Mitchell yesterday, even though Detroit is only slightly larger. But maybe about 100 more people live here, and we are in the middle of the forest.

After packing everything to distribute all our purchases on suitcases and bags and to get an overview of possible additional shopping quantities, we drive down to Detroit Lake. The restaurant at the end of a large, well-frequented campground is closed.

There are many motorboats on the lake in a marina. So we go back to the hotel, which is about 600m away and thus at the other end of Detroit. We end up at "Camp 17", a pub that takes getting used to, with equally challenging service, who hardly has any teeth and is therefore barely understandable.

We sit under chainsaws and other strange decorative items, eat a pretty good burger, but soon retreat from this terrible atmosphere to our room.

Travel distance: 170 miles