Enjoy Some Winter Views of Oregon

When many people think of Oregon, this is the sort of view they think of. This picture is taken from the shore and it is facing almost due north. Although maps don't show it well, the Oregon Coast is very irregular and not at all a straight line. Because of this, you can see land many miles in the distance. The mountains you see are part of the coastal mountain range.

The fairly large black spots you can see in the ocean are channel buoys. It is inadvisable for boats to travel any closer than those buoys because of rocks and so forth. On this side of the buoys, they could easily run aground. 

This area is superb for crabbing and fishing for shrimp, though there are many other fish that are caught here, too. 

If a person traveled east through Bly on the previous road, they would eventually come to Lakeview.  This is looking north from Highway 395 and this is one of the largest towns in southeast Oregon. It has a whopping population of around 2,300 people.

This is the county seat of the largest county in Oregon; Lake County. It is in the Oregon High Desert, and at an elevation of 4,766 feet, it is the highest 'city' in the state.  One of the 'claims to fame' that this town has is that it has an active geyser. Oregon has a number of hot springs, but only this one geyser.

Depending on which direction a person travels from here, they can either move north through eastern Oregon, they can go east into Idaho, or they can go southeast into Nevada. Of course, they can also go back the way they came.

Another thing that people often think of when they think of Oregon is that it is a rainy place. In some parts of Oregon, that can be true. However, Oregon also gets a lot of snow and most of the part of Oregon on the east side of the Cascade mountains is a desert, known as the Oregon High Desert.

This picture shows how much snow is on the ground on Bly Mountain. This actually is part of the Oregon High Desert and most of the year, the area is dry and hot. In the winter, it is cold and snowy. These conditions are ideal for pines and firs that can be seen in the image. Still, it gets less than 10 inches of precipitation per year, so it is a desert.

The highway is a major east-west highway in Southern Oregon, even though the camera is actually facing north in this stretch of the highway. This spot is about 10 miles from the town of Bly but is facing away from the town.

If a person travels west on Highway 140, away from Bly and Lakeview, they first go through Klamath Falls, then they eventually go by Lake of the Woods. This is the highway that goes by the lake, but not only is there not much to see this time of year, but the lake isn't shown in the image. Still, this lake is a popular swimming, boating, and fishing location in the summer. 

In the wintertime, they hold dogsled races on the lake, which freezes over with thick ice.

Lake of the woods is actually located in the Cascade Mountains and by the time a person reaches this point, they are out of the Oregon High Desert. 

About 25 miles or so north of Lakeview, a person comes to a sleepy little town called Paisley. This is a farming and ranching community that is actually smaller than the tiny town I live in. The population is around 250. I've always enjoyed this little town and the people in it.

My mother and father both went to school in this town and my father spent a little time breaking horses for one of the ranchers here when he was a young man.

I'm fairly well acquainted with Paisley, too. Through most of my youth and into my adulthood, we used to take camping trips to Campbell Lake, Deadhorse Lake, or the Chewaucan River. All of these can be reached by turning to the left just up the road a little way. 

We generally didn't come through Paisley when we went on our every-other-week camping trips, but if we ran out of necessary supplies, this is where we could come to pick up those supplies. 

The road that goes up by those camping sites continues on and eventually comes out just east of Bly, Oregon and that was how we got to the campsites, through Bly.

This isn't a town that you are likely to see in an Oregon travel brochure, but it has a lot of charm and character.

This is the Spring Creek Grade, north of Klamath Falls about 45 miles. The creek for which this is named is behind the camera about a half-mile and it is more of a small river than it is a creek. The river is delightfully cold all year long and I can't begin to estimate the number of rainbow trout and brook trout I've caught out of that river in my lifetime.

Beyond the trees on the right flows the Williamson River. Spring Creek is a tributary that flows into the Williamson less than a mile from where this camera is situated.

Just out of view because of the fog, there is a turn on this road and the upgrade begins, rising about 1,000 feet in about 5 miles of highway. This is all prime deer country, with just enough black bears and cougars to make things interesting.

This picture is actually a couple of miles outside of the town of Chemult, about 20 miles from where the last picture was taken. Chemult is also smaller than the town I live in and there isn't a lot there except one store, a motel, and a service station. It is a logging town, though there are no mills there. Notice that while this is quite a bit higher than the last image, there isn't much snow. Sometimes this is a tremendously snowy area and other times, there is just a little snow, as you see it now.

The distance from this spot or from Lake of the Woods to Lakeview is about 130 miles, pretty much east-west across the state. The first picture of the ocean is just a little more distance from this picture, northwest of this location. Believe it or not, this picture is actually in south-central Oregon. I haven't even shared any pictures from the west side of the Cascades in this set, except for the one ocean picture.

Now you can see why I said that it would take more than one article to share all the pictures from Oregon and I really didn't capture all that many.