Deschutes Float - La Pine to Big River

The headwaters of the Deschutes River is up in the Cascade Lakes that we were paddling earlier in the day. One can argue (and apparently one does) as to where the actual headwaters are, whether in the Lava tubes leaving Sparks lake, the runoff from Hosmer, or the well defined river leaving Little Lava, but all of that dumps into the wickiup reservoir and then comes spilling down the hill toward the big rapids just above Bend. From Wickiup to Sunriver, the Deschutes is mainly flat and winding with a few areas blocked with deadfall and such, but no real rapids (well, mostly).

We are meeting with our kayak group at the boat launch at LaPine State Park for a float/paddle the 10 miles are so down to the launch at Big River campground. This is the last day of 4 days of Kayak Portland Meetup summer fun in the Bend area. We did a couple of the lakes up the high Cascades and we did a little fun paddle through Bend on the Deschutes there. There are around 20 people on the trip and they are staying all over the area. A few are in LaPine campground (as are we) and some are primitive camping up in the hills. Some others have hotels or rent-a-house in Bend. So all of these people need to meet at LaPine boat launch and then we have to organize some sort of shuttle to get the cars down to where the boats will be at the end of the day. My partner says that she doesn’t like to be involved in the organization of the shuttle because it is stressful and everybody has an opinion. She was right. The problem was that everyone else's opinion was wrong. OK, that is half a joke.

The trick is this….. what is your real end goal? Is it to get ALL of the cars down to end point? If so then you need at least one car that is going to carry all of the drivers back up to the starting point. To do that, you have to wait for all of the cars to arrive. Then you have that one driver who brought everyone back up to the top, his car is now at the top so someone is going to have to bring him to it at the end of the paddle. So everyone else will be loading their boats and heading to the group after paddle party and that person is going to be driving back to the bottom to pick up their boats. A more equitable method might be to take just the number of cars you need to carry the drivers and leave them at the bottom. This has the other advantage that you don’t need to wait for everyone to get the shuttle set up. You can spend an awful lot of time waiting around for a shuttle to run if it takes 20 minute to get between put-in and take-out.

The best thing is to have a few extra drivers who are not going on the paddle, but that trick seldom works. I think that along the Willamette river on the other side of the Cascades there are shuttle companies that will take you do your drop in and then pick you up however much later. I must look into that some.

But we finally convince everyone to stop talking and get working and get all 20 boats into the river and start floating down. And what a beautiful float. The water is chilly but not freezing and the banks are lined with majestic Ponderosa and scraggly little lodge pole. There are some water fowl sharing the river with us. Some mallard but mostly merganser duck. We see a group of deer.

The land is pretty flat here and the river wanders back and forth at it’s leisure. There are many places where it is a little difficult to tell which way the river is going. This is caused by the many partial or complete  oxbows that have formed in the river. In many sections there are groups of large well kept houses crowding the river. Some are up at the top of tall (50 foot) bluffs. Some are down in the flood plane of the river. Many have elaborate protections against erosion in the form of concrete or stone river banks. One place we saw half of an old log cabin hanging out over the river. The other half was long gone. In many places you could see where trees growing on the shore had been undercut and had fallen into the river (or would soon). A good reminders that rivers are changing things and  the place where the main current is today could change in any one big flood season. Of course, the reservoir at Wickiup does a lot to control the changes in the river, I wonder if it does enough? That is probably bad thinking on my part, there must be parts of this ecosystem that depend on the changing of the river and the flooding and the dam limits those changes perhaps to some ill effect.

A number of people float down these sections of the river in tubes or rafts. You can see evidence of this in the things that they lost. We saw some shirts, some shoes, an entire backpack (that we just couldn’t quite get to). Imagine floating down the river with you valuables in you backpack and you slightly drunk best friend from college flips you over. Your wallet and cars keys disappear into the water (you really should have put some flotation in there, Dude). Of course, the joke is also on your friend since it was you car that you parked at the bottom take-out and now you are both walking back to the top.

No rapids or other water excitement on this section of the trip unless you make it for yourself. Like when I reached over to grab a rock in the shallows that I thought might be an agate. I reached to far and flipped my kayak. It was shallow so I sort of held myself up on my paddle until my Partner could paddle over the lend me her bow to right myself. Sort of embarrassing. I also hurt my shoulder. 

And on we float. The take-out at Big River is easy to find because it is just after “The Second Bridge” from LaPine. So if you can count to 2, you can find it. Also, it is better if you don’t have the big car that can carry the most drivers, then you won’t be the guy whose car is at the top whilst everyone loads up and goes off for the farewell party.