Sisters
Today, we climbed out of the valley around Detroit Lake, crossed Santiam Pass, and moved into our new campsite at the Bend/Sisters Garden RV Resort just south of Sisters, Oregon. The grounds of the campground are gorgeous. It's like a park with all the amenities. Our campsite looks out over a large lawn area with a small lake visible through the trees. We're only 5 miles from Sisters and only 16 miles from Bend, so it's a great location for us. And it's a gorgeous day.
Sunset Near Sparks Lake
The last time we were in this area 8 years ago, much of the Cascade Lakes area was under snow. Sparks Lake and the meadows around Mt. Bachelor were completely buried in snow. I wanted to see what the conditions were like this year, so we drove to the Sparks Lake area for moonrise at sunset. The viewpoint to shoot the moonn rising over Mt. Bachelor looked out across a huge meadow with Mt. Bachelor in the background. The moon was supposed to rise right over a ridge on the side of Mt. Bachelor from the viewpoint, so everything looked great. We had some extra time to kill, so we checked out some other viewpoints and shot reflections in an interesting stream that meandered across the meadow.
As show time neared, we returned to the viewpoint in the meadow. Light clouds filled the sky, and our moonrise shot wasn't looking too likely when a bright beam of moonlight shone from a small notch on Mt. Bachelor. We got a few quick shots with the wide-angle lenses we had been using before grabbing our longest lenses. By the time we were set up, the opportunity was gone. The first light over the ridge was just below the clouds and the moon was sharp. Within a minute, the clouds created a veil around the moon, and it looked like a fuzzy balloon.
As we walked back to Ruby, a pink cloud arched across the sky in the afterglow of sunset. It looked like a pink rainbow.
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