I first made a short loop around Reynolds Pond, which acts as a catchment basin for overflow from the Central Oregon Irrigation District’s canals. Apparently, there is good fishing for sunfish, bass, and bullhead here, but no one was around when I visited except a regatta of swans, a gaggle of geese, paddlings of mergansers, rafts of ring-necked ducks, and a cluster of red-winged blackbirds.
Then I began walking down the Carey Act Trail, actually a maintenance track that runs along a major branch canal of the Central Oregon Canal, which siphons its water from the Deschutes River at the south end of Bend. The Carey Act of 1894 was an incentive offered by Congress for western states to irrigate desert lands and allow private companies to operate irrigation “districts” for profit. Irrigation season hasn’t begun yet (water is taken from April through September), so the canal was bone dry, basically a two-foot deep ditch scraped down to the layer of black lava beneath. Through the junipers, there were glimpses of the mountains, Mt. Bachelor north to Mt. Jefferson all snowy under a clear blue sky.
I hopped across the canal, effectively the boundary of the wilderness here, when I spotted a sign at the junction of the Black Lava and Tumulus Trails. Following the Black Lava Trail into the wilderness, I soon encountered low lava domes and tumuli. The lava features have eroded little since the fissuring of 80,000 years ago, the wide cracks down the middle of most of the domes having occurred during the cooling process. This is a one-species forest, and at this time of year some of the junipers are absolutely blue with berries. The old-growth trees have a lovely reddish-brown hue: some are supposed to be over 1,000 years old. At one point, I passed an old corral in the lava, and at another, there was the rusted detritus of a stock camp. Cattle have not been run here since wilderness status was granted in 2009, but there are still perfectly preserved patties scattered about.
The Black Lava Trail becomes less distinct the farther south you go, and when I reached the junction with the Mazama Ash Trail, I hooked east on the next leg of the loop. There were no recent human tracks here, just the odd coyote, deer, or ground squirrel leaving its prints. There are a few cairns placed along this route to aid the desert traveler.
At the Tumulus Trail, I turned north again. This was probably the most obvious route, and the last few miles went by without a hitch, the profile of Powell Butte direly ahead with the low hump of Bear Creek Buttes on the eastern horizon. From 28 degrees in the early morning, temperatures had risen to 62 by the time I got back to the trailhead.
