The last installment of the trip report for the Thanksgiving trip to Death Valley is the video. This was a great trip, and the video captures several moments not captured in the previous part 1 and part 2 posts. Enjoy! (and subscribe to our channel!) https://youtu.be/Qm73iRxZzI0
Labor day had come and gone. Summer fishing adventures in the high Cascades are winding down and we are moving on to our list of fall destinations. Counting the possible destinations and the number of weekends available until Thanksgiving rolls around, it seems the numbers don’t quite match up. But, we’ll get out to see what we can see and maybe have a list left over for next year. The first stop turned out to be a trip to the high country of the Malheur National Forest, and the headwaters of the Malheur river.
This is familiar country to me but I haven’t visited in a long time. I used to hunt deer and elk here regularly but with how difficult it is to draw a tag now in Oregon and how lousy the hunting is I’ve concentrated more on fishing the last several years. It was good to be back and see the country again. With the days getting shorter we arrived in the dark on Friday night. First up on Saturday was a hike in the Strawberries to High Lake.
Back in February and March the snowpack in the southeast part of Oregon was great and it was looking like our plans for floating the Owyhee River in mid-May were going to hit the intersection of good flows and good weather just right. Then the flows started dropping, the snowpack ran out, and by the first week of May the trip was in question. Right up until the morning we were set to drive to the launch we were still determined to go. We were packed and ready, with just one work day to get through and we’d be river bound. Then the phone rang. The rest of the party changed plans due to borderline low flows. So here we were, days off planned, supplies packed. What’s the backup plan? We didn’t want to waste our big block of time off. We pointed north and headed to British Columbia for a 5 day road trip. Within a day we were on a ferry on the first leg of the Sunshine Coast.
