Volcanic Central Oregon

It's always interesting to visit central Oregon...it's a diverse land of cities, rivers, mountains, and desert, with unlimited recreational opportunities. You can live it up in a brewpub, or find peace in the wilderness. The climate is sunny with warm days and crisp nights...quite invigorating. Here's a picture of the central Cascades. From left to right (S to N) the peaks are South Sister, Broken Top, Middle Sister, and North Sister. They are rising above a 6000 year old lava flow that was generated from the volcanic cone known as Lava Butte. This flow changed the course of the Deschutes River, creating some scenic waterfalls that I visited last year.

I drove up to the top of Lava Butte and visited the fire lookout station. The bloke manning the lookout was not busy...no fires today...and was happy to brief visitors on his operation. He showed us his fire spotting scope. It's mounted on an old reliable Osborn Fire Finder with a topo map of the observing area on top of the fire finder; after he determines the azimuth and scope angle of a smoke, he plugs the data into a computer that generates the exact position of the fire on another topo map on the computer screen. The fire trucks in the area are now all equipped with GPS, so by looking at the position of the fire on the computer's topo map the spotter can direct the fire trucks on the most efficient route to the fire.

Sometimes he has problems due to the increasing population in the area...it seems that on busy weekends he observes a lot of smoke from the area of Sunriver to the south...virtually all of it from backyard barbecues!