Lake County, Oregon, Day 1: Green Mountain Campground

No hiking here, just photos from the campground and lookout tower.  This BLM owned mountain has a rough but passable road up and literally over the top, to access a lookout tower.  Situated inside of the Four Craters Lava area, it's actually a more normal looking mountain, not a cinder cone.  There's a primitive campground (pit toilet and several close dirt and pumice tent sites where the ground is almost perfectly impervious to tent stakes) just on the side of the summit area.  Perfect for easy access sunset photos!

When I drove by earlier in the day, on the way to Crack in the Ground, I stopped in the campground to see if it would be crowded.  I was happily surprised (it was Memorial Day weekend, after all) that the campground was empty, so I planned on spending the night here.  When I arrived in the evening, it was still empty, and magically quiet.  After making my photos and tucking myself into bed (about 10 pm) I heard a really loud rumbling.  Three large diesel SUV's and their noisy contents kept me awake for several hours thereafter with engines running, radios on loud, beers clinking, and loud conversations.  Good grief.  When I got up at 5 am, I made sure to slam my trunk door and I also turned on my radio for good measure. Turnabout's fair play, as Mom always used to tell me and brother Doug, when we got into a tiff.

Here's the view from the summit, looking down into Christmas Valley:

As the sun went down, and I went about the business of setting up my tent, I took photos of the juniper woodlands from the tent pad:

Though the mountain is hardly alpine, the trees at the top are shaped by the wind into a little more contorted forms.  Also something interesting about the juniper is the lack of uniformity of shape from one individual to another.  They sometimes look rounded like deciduous trees, and other times look a little like more normal pine or fir trees.  Small ones look more like shrubs than trees.  They have no needles (their branches end in short leaves), and the females have hard "berries" (they're actually a weird form of cone) which are used to flavor gin.  Junipers also colonize rocky areas, where they face less competition from species that need more soil (mainly ponderosa, here).  Juniper numbers have increased over the last century.  They're more susceptible to eradication by fire (compared to Ponderosas and the native grasses of the region) and thus the fire suppression of modern range and forest managers has been a boon to the tree, at the expense of its competitors.  Central Oregon has the largest juniper forest in the world.  

I went up onto the fire lookout for the final sunset colors:

How do you like that purple-red cinder road?  The roads throughout the whole region are often barely passable in my car, but  beautiful to look at.  They're more red, during the day.  Here's another view looking down into the Valley:

I just realized that I've described the area I'm visiting as both Eastern Oregon and Central Oregon, which must be a little irrational sounding.  It's a pretty common way of speaking about the state, though.  The state is cut in two unequal parts by the Cascade Range.  One third of the state is West of the crest, and two thirds is East of the crest.  All that's East is often called Eastern Oregon.  Central Oregon is the middle third, in this context.

Thanks, and next up is Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge.