8/21/18 - La Pine, OR

Today we had to use a lot of time in the morning trying to find a campsite for the next few days.  Jim found us three nights in Sisters and one night in Redmond.  We saw the "Big Tree" - the largest Ponderosa Pine tree ever recorded.  It was within La Pine State Park.  After that we went to see the Lava Tube Cave in the Newberry National Volcanic Monument.  There wasn’t any parking there so we skipped it and drove to Paulina Lake and East Lake in the National Monument.  These lakes are in the caldera of the Newberry Volcano.  We took a small hike to Paulina Falls and a longer hike to the Big Obsidian Flow.  This was formed by a volcanic eruption 1,300 years ago.  The magma cooled without crystallizing and made obsidian, a type of volcanic glass.  We made a trip to the grocery store in La Pine and then went back to the Casita.  We stopped again at the Deschutes River overlook.