Adventures at Cove Palisades - Kayaking

 Cove Palisades State Park Camping and Kayaking

When you are driving on the main highway from Portland to Bend, you come down from Mount Hood and leave the forests and enter onto a vast flat rocky high desert. This dry region is covered in ancient flows of lava hundreds of feet thick and millions of years old. The top few feet may have some dirt and scrub pines and such, but the basalt flow lava rocks run deep. This deep rock isn’t something you would notice except for the few large rivers that cut across the high desert. The Deschutes, the Crooked, the Metolius, to name a few, have flowed across this desert for millenia and have cut deep narrow canyons through the relatively soft basalt lava flows. This means you are driving along with flat lands all around you; white topped mountains in the distance. Up ahead of you is something that looks like a bridge. You cross it and it is a bridge and you can see hundreds of feet down some canyon. The sign on the bridge says Crooked river, but you sure don’t see any river from the car, the canyon is just too deep.  Cove Palisades State park straddles two of those river canyons, The Crooked River and The Deschutes. The camping and recreation areas are halfway down the canyons on little plateaus, some of which used to be irrigated farm land. 

I have seen the signs pointing to Billy Chinook lake and The Cove Palisades state park, but I never realized it was so close to the main road (and Madras) or so different from the surround landscape. 

Across the canyon from our campsite

Mt Jefferson

Our little Scamp haven

My paddling club, OOPS (Oregon Ocean Paddling Society) is having one of their big summer events at this park. There are 40 or so of us and we have a bunch of campsites in F loop of the state park. It is a newer loop with very nice centrally located bathrooms and showers. Each shower/bathroom building also has a big sink setup for people to wash dishes. Every campsite in the F loop has power and water, but there are no sewer hookups available (there is a dump station, however). F loop is up high , say halfway up to the plateau and many afternoons around 2:00 or so the winds start to pick up and can really be howling by sundown. The first night we were here we made the mistake of leaving our sunshade extended from the Scamp and around midnight we thought it was going to tear itself right off of the side of the camper and so we had to go out and crank it shut. All of that noise from the wind in these big wooshing gusts; shaking the camper. Our puppy was not happy. She was scared and on constant alert. When you are not even a year old everything you do is still the first time. 

Because of this wind that often blows up in the afternoon, it is sort of important to get off the water by 2:00 or so. This means that the paddles are all morning paddles, some of them very early morning paddles. 

The OOPS club is a very organized and rules bound club. Their mission is to have high adventure in a safe and fun way. To this end, they have very organized paddle trips that have specific destination plans and a specific trip organizer who has the job of planning the trips and checking that the conditions are safe. For more advanced trips that means checking on tides, winds, weather, and temperatures. For paddling on this lake, it mainly means checking on the wind forecast. The wind forecasts up in the desert are not very exact so it also means planning for the wind and having bailout locations if things get dicey.  Though all of this planning and safety may seem a tad over the top for some paddles, it is practicing the safety in calm situations that makes them work when bad things happen.

We had two days of paddling with 3 or 4 different paddles each day. The paddles may go to the same location but they may leave at different times and have different leaders and leadership styles. The trip I went on Friday was a lovely paddle. It left from the day use area just down the canyon from our campground. I thought when I looked out from behind my campsite that I was sort of looking out to where the lake (Billy Chinook) is. I was right, but I didn’t realize that there is a shear cliff wall out there dropping down a few hundred feet to the lake. So you first have to follow the road along the cliff down that several hundred feet to where these is a boat launch, parking lot, and day use swimming beach.  We launched from the beach. There were 5 of us in this trip, all experienced paddlers. We went were starting on a part of the Lake Billy Chinook that is in the original canyon of the Crooked River.  The Crooked river is famous for a couple of things. First, it is the river that runs by Smith Rock, which is a lovely hiking area full of wonderful stone walls that are very popular to rock climbers. There are always a bunch there climbing when ever I visit. Second, the Crooked River Rim Rock area is where Tom McCall, the Governor of Oregon who sort of saved the Oregon State Parks, Public Beach, and Willamette river from ecologic destruction, was raised. That was a very long run-on sentence and I sort of forgot where I was going there. Glad you are still with me.

Crooked on Left. Deschutes on Right. "The Island" in middle

Anyway, We start off paddling “down stream” in this lake. The waters of the lake are very deep and they just a quarter of a mile from the launch the canyon walls are sheer on both banks all the way down to (and below) the water. This means you can paddle right up to the canyon wall and admire the basalt. Basalt has this tendency to form huge octagonal columns as it cools and there are many displays of this geology on the canyon wall. I hope they show up in some of the photos. 

About a mile down the lake/river is the historic confluence of the Deschutes river and the Crooked. Hard to tell what is going on in the lake unless you have a map (which we did) but we cross the lake at a narrow point and then head up the arm of the lake that is the historic Deschutes river canyon. More great rocks and extremely difficult places to get out and pee.  There was actually a floating bathroom in one little cove for the use of boaters. The platform was around 2 foot off the water, however, which is very hard to access from a kayak. A couple of our more skilled paddlers did show off by using the facilties. I pretended to be too interested in viewing the rocks. 

Around the corner a bit we came to the lower Deschutes day use area. Another nice boat launch and swimming area and a good example of a place we could have bailed if the weather got too bad. We would have had to call some club members for car help and that would have been embarrassing, but probably better than drowning or getting beached on the few rocks up against some cliff wall and then waiting all night for the wind to die down enough to allow a rescue. But instead of all that, we had no wind, almost no motor boats, and a very nice lunch on the beach. 

wha are these strange rocks in rocks?

On the paddle back I was admiring the deep water next to the canyon walls and thinking what a lovely place this would be for some rescue practice. Except, of course, that if something went wrong you wouldn’t be able to just walk out of the water. Perhaps the look was deceptive.

The club had 4 other paddle trips running at the same time. 3 of them left from the same place as my trip did. Then they would paddle different distances. One trip (the ones that did the longest mileage that day) paddled further downstream to the historic confluence of the Metolius river.  Then they paddled up to a place called Jasper Canyon, which sounds sort of cool. 

Another group launched and paddled on the Simtustus lake, which is the next dammed lake down from Billy Chinook. At that point the 3 rivers have combined and you just have one canyon. What I hear is that the canyon has very few places it is safe to get out and it isn’t legal to exit on the West shore of the lake because it is all tribal lands. 

See, now I have to go back on more trips just to go to all of these places. What fun.

<Coming Soon!! Guest Blog from Paige about paddling up the Deschutes>

We also did a few hikes around the region. But that is another entry.

Rory the Wonder Dog. (Oh, and "The Island")