Last Wilderness Trip Of The Season

Central Oregon's weather from mid-September to mid-October is usually the nicest of the year. Sure, the nights can get pretty cold, but the days are usually sunny and comfortable. That's why I like to do a lot of backpacking right about now (the lack of mosquitoes is also a big plus).

Unfortunately, the weather for the last month or so hasn't been the greatest. Just check out my posts from a couple weeks ago to see what kind of conditions we've been having in the high country lately.

But this last weekend's weather was great, so Danimal and I decided to take one final overnight trip into the the Central Oregon wilderness before the snows really start to fly. We ended up backpacking into an area full of smaller-sized lakes to see if we could catch a few trout while enjoying what will probably be one of the last decent weekends of the year.

Backpacking is so much easier when it isn't snowing or raining on you. I'm not saying that backpacking in bad weather is always unenjoyable -- it isn't -- but things like setting up camp or packing up to leave are much simpler when the skies are clear and sunny. It's also a lot easier to see the stars at night when it isn't snowing.

Fishing was a bit on the slow side, but we did tangle with a few cutthroat as well as one particularly tenacious brook trout that followed Dan's bait right up to shore and then leapt in an attempt to eat Dan's weight and swivel as Dan was pulling his rigging out of the water. I then flipped my spinner into the shallows a few feet from this fish, and he did a beeline right to my lure, hit it hard, and then put up a really aggressive close-to-shore fight. We released that fish, but kept two others for dinner and breakfast.

We did quite a bit of "off trail" backpacking this time, guided only by compass and our map (no GPS this trip). Some of the lakes we visited have no trails going into them, which can make them a bit difficult to find sometimes, but we managed. We saw a couple of deer hunters up there about five miles in, but nobody else.

Anyway, it is a great time of year to be roaming around in the high country, but also a sad time because the area wll be snow covered in a few weeks and inaccessible until the late Spring or early Summer. Oh well.