Champoeg State Park, A Beauty on the Outskirts of Portland

We've just completed a wonderful four night stay at a new-to-us park: Champoeg State Park.  Like so many Oregon State Parks, Champoeg is beautiful, well run and has lots of things to do. I wish we could extend our stay, but when Hans made our reservations way back in March he could only get four weeknights in a row; this park is popular with good reason. Details on the park are at the end of this post.

Our first day we needed to run an errand in the south end of Portland, only about 30 miles away, so we planned a couple of fun stops en route. First a nice loop hike at Tryon Creek State Park near Lake Oswego.

Hans chose to blend in on this day...see him?

Like so many hikes in NW Oregon this one was in a forest...perfect for a hot summer day.

Our next stop was the lovely Elk Rock Garden at Bishops Close. The garden was originally created by the Kerr family in the early 1900's and given to the Episcopal Church in 1957 with the stipulation that it be open to the public.

The property is perched on the cliff above the Willamette River, just visible through the trees on the right.

Moss covered stones line the paths with peek-a-boo views of the river below.

Daytime stars.

Another day we drove a loop through the beautiful country surrounding Champoeg. Dozens of wineries are accessible from just about any road in the Willamette Valley, agricultural fields give way to forested hilltops, and charming small towns pop up every few miles.

Just a few miles outside of McMinnville is Miller Woods, a conservation area owned by Yamhill Soil and Water Conservation District. We hiked a pretty 3.5 mile loop with a little bit of everything: wildlife, meadows, forest and a pond.

Great Horned Owl.

Small creeks flowed through lush forest.

Sun shafts in deep forest.

I happened to look up as we lunched under this beautiful old oak tree and fell in love with the view!

Later, on a walk in McMinnville, this frog was reminiscent of the one I'd just seen at Miller Pond.

 Campground Review

Champoeg State Park lives up to its excellent reviews. Roads and sites are paved. Each site has a picnic table and fire ring. Most sites have excellent separation as well as privacy bushes between the sites. There are eight full hookup sites, over 67 water/electric sites, plus tent sites and cabins and yurts. There are many very large/long sites, especially in Loop B.

The park is located along the Willamette River and boasts several miles of hiking and biking trails, river access, disc golf course, a unique playground, and a visitor center dedicated to the history of the area.  Lady Hill Winery right across the street from the park has some lovely wines as well!

Champoeg is an important part of Oregon's history.

We had back in, full hookup site #B25.
We had thick bushes between us and our neighbors on both sides...excellent privacy.
Also decent afternoon shade in our patio area.

Right behind our site was a path to the central restroom and this beautiful open field
with views to the forested hills beyond the park.

A long pull through site directly across from us.

You can boat in to this park and dock your boat for up to 72 hours.
There are camp sites for boaters at the top of the ramp.
Note the small sign near the top of the second post...that was the high water line during the February 1996 flood!
There was an even higher flood in 1861!!!
Fortunately the park lies a good 30 feet or more above the current water line.

Paved bike path through a meadow. Most of the trails are through forest.

We really enjoyed the disc golf course.
Though there are plenty of trees, there is very little undergrowth in which to lose discs!
Make sure you take a photo of the course layout at the start kiosk, it can be difficult to locate the next tee sometimes.

Baby acorn woodpecker...

...getting fed!

We'd definitely stay at Champoeg State Park again.

Sweetwater Summit Regional Park

On our return to San Diego we decided to spend a week at a new-to-us campground in San Diego's southern region: Sweetwater Summit Regional Park. Perched on a bluff with views to the Pacific Ocean on the West and the beautiful hills of Bonita to the South, we had a very nice stay at this park.

Sweetwater Summit has about 100 camp sites. About half are huge full hookup sites, some long enough to hold any size rig plus multiple vehicles. The other half of the campground has water/electric sites and many of these sites include horse corrals. All sites have excellent separation.

There are 16 miles of trails (horses welcome), a playground, splash park (summer only), nice community building with an incredible view of Sweetwater Reservoir. Fishing is available on the weekends, public golf courses are very close by. Verizon signal is excellent.

Our site, #84, was at the end of the row with fantastic views...though almost any site at this park, especially in the full hookup section, will have expansive views. Though our site overlooked highway 125 about a quarter mile away, the highway is a toll road so it is not heavily used, thus it was reasonably quiet especially at night.

The full hookup sites are spread across a hillside offering good separation and fantastic views.

Our site #84.
We had tons of space for extra vehicles on both ends of the trailer.

View of our site from the other direction.
Many sites have better separation than this.

Our patio.
The partial hookup sites with horse corrals are in the trees in the distance.

View of the hills of Bonita from our front door.

The Sweetwater River Trail passes through the campground so we walked several sections of it during our stay. Though the river is no longer much of a "river" thanks to human manipulation over the past 100+ years, the corridor it passed through is a pretty swath of east San Diego County.

We walked the Sweetwater River Trail one morning, into the hills east of the campground.

Looking back at Sweeetwater Reservoir from the Sweetwater River Trail.
The campground is located out of sight at the top left of the reservoir.

The best part of our stay was meeting up with Jessica a former roommate of Hans' from many years ago. Jessica lives nearby and we were able to meet up with her a couple of days later for a bike ride.

Otay Lakes is a pair of reservoirs located just a few miles south east of Sweetwater Summit. Known for its use by the adjacent Olympic Training Center, the reservoirs also offer fishing, picnicking and some sweet, easy trails for hiking or mountain biking. We met Jessica at the Graffiti Dam and biked trails along both the upper and lower Otay Reservoirs.

Wonderful, mostly smooth single track trails make for a fun Sunday morning ride.
Otay Reservoirs are located on the edge of the developed area of San Diego's south county.

Grassy hills give way to scrappy eucalyptus trees along the reservoirs edge.

The trail has a couple of tight spots right through the eucalyptus.

Back at our starting point at Graffiti Dam we had to ride up a short paved hill
to access the trails around Upper Otay Reservoir.

Graffiti Dam.

Trails beyond the Upper Reservoir lead into wide meadows whose hillsides are topped with multi million dollar mansions.
The white dots in this and the next photo are protection for native seedlings.
This entire valley is undergoing habitat restoration.

Hans approaches Upper Otay Reservoir.

Though this area can be quite warm in the summer, a spring bike ride is absolutely gorgeous!

We walked along the Sweetwater River Trail west of the campground a couple of times. There's plenty of variety along this trail: a couple of public golf courses, a few horse corrals, riparian sections, and urban areas. It's a great place for urban walking that feels kind of like country.

Spring bloom at its peak along Sweeetwater River Trail.

Some glorious brush stroke clouds overhead.

We enjoyed our stay at Sweetwater Summit Regional Park and will likely stay here again on our annual San Diego stopover...it's good to have some variety in a place we visit often!

Next up: Back to our sweet driveway site in Poway, CA as we continue to assist our parents through some medical issues.

Adventures in Anza Borrego: Whale Peak and Mud Caves

Our next adventure from our base camp at Agua Caliente Regional Park was a hike to the highest peak in the area. At 5,349 feet Whale Peak offers a tempting respite from the desert heat below. Jerry Schad's excellent book Afoot and Afield in San Diego County offers two approaches to this peak, a 13 mile loop from the desert floor and a 4 mile out-and-back from 4,000 feet.

Hans and I had hiked this peak once before. In 2006 we had an epic 16 mile day on the trail with two of my buddies, Kathryn and Celine. On that day we chose the long West route and, due to the lack of defined trails on this peak lost our way, adding several miles to an already long day.

This time, having a 4WD truck, we decided to do the shorter North approach even though the access road sounded a little gnarly...would we be able to get past The Squeeze??? But, fortuitously, in the pool the evening before we talked to a couple of locals who told us that when we come to the second high point on Pinion Mountain Rd. we should park on the spur road to the right and walk up the ravine where we would find a good trail to the peak. This starting point is located before The Squeeze.

This turned out to be excellent advice. The road was a bit hairy for our big truck, quite narrow and sandy in places. We ended up with a moderately strenuous 5 mile out-and-back hike on a mostly obvious trail. I say mostly because any route to Whale Peak includes finding your way through rocky sections marked with cairns that can be difficult to follow at times. Also, when I saw a photo of The Squeeze later I knew our truck would not have made it through...which would have added four miles to the hike!

We could see Whale Peak from our camp site.
It is the highest point on the left in the distance.

We parked on this little spur road off of Pinion Mountain Rd
opposite a hillside with interesting rocks protruding from the side.

The trail started with a steep rock scramble up a ravine.

Hans, Martin and Chelsea are hanging out on the peak with the valley including our campground in the background.
I even found our entry on the trail register from our 2006 hike!

The next day we explored an area known as the Mud Caves. Less than 10 miles from Agua Caliente Regional Park via decent roads through sand washes, the Mud Caves are located in Arroyo Tapiado and are created by wind and rain erosion of this ancient lake bed.

There are 22 known caves and 9 slots. Some of the caves are hundreds of feet deep and have huge rooms inside. We chose to avoid the caves due to concern over their safety, especially since there has been a fair amount of rain in the desert this year and we saw plenty of signs of sliding mud in the surrounding mud hills. The slot canyons were fun to explore though!

Approaching the mud hills of Arroyo Tapiado.

We walked up three separate canyons and encountered cool arches like this in each one!

The morning shade was welcome as we walked into each slot canyon.

Not many plants were able to take root in this bleak terrain, but amazingly we had spring flowers!

Multiple arches.

After leaving Arroyo Tapiado we made a loop drive on the back roads, coming out through Canyon Sin Nombre.
This beautiful area required 4WD to get through. It's hard to see Hans but he is in front of the truck scouting the route.

Our last morning at Agua Caliente we hiked the Moonlight Canyon trail again...we really enjoyed the variety of short trails available at this county park!

Our second Three-Lined Boa sighting in as many weeks!

All over Anza Borrego the beavertail cacti are just on the verge of an explosion of pink!

Looking down on the campground from Moonlight Trail with the Whale Peak range in the distance.

Campground Review

Agua Caliente Regional Park is about 100 miles east of San Diego in the Anza Borrego desert. It's got 140 campsites, many with full or partial hook ups. There are a few miles of trails at the park, but many miles of exploration is readily available in the surrounding desert.

The park is only open from Labor Day weekend to Memorial Day and it is very popular due to the geothermally heated pools onsite. The three pools range from 83 to 102 degrees and the warmest pool is indoors and adults only. This park can be extremely crowded on the weekends.

Due to the popularity of this park reservations are recommended on the weekends, midweek there were plenty of sites available. We happened to stay here during spring break and the park was 99% full over the weekend and about 25 - 30% full on weekdays.

When we made our original reservations for February we had the enormous site #104, but when we changed our reservations due to family health issues we had fewer sites to choose from and site #99 was pretty tight with barely enough room for our truck and trailer and a tiny sitting area behind the rig. Most sites are pretty close together and some are rather unlevel.

Despite the close sites and weekend crowds, we loved our stay here! Fortunately we only had neighbors over the weekend. The views are spectacular, the pools are nice during the week, the trails are lovely, the wildlife watching was excellent, and the exploring in the surrounding desert is spectacular...oh, and we happened to be here during a good spring bloom!

Verizon signal was nonexistent, except for a few hours each afternoon with our booster.

We had site #99 and you can see that site 100 is close, just a couple of feet up from us.
Also, site 99 had very little space behind it for a sitting area...but the views were good.
Our door side got blasted by the afternoon sun.

Looking at our site from the other direction.

Shuffleboard and horse shoes.

The indoor pool is the hottest at 102 degrees...adults only.
9:30 - 5pm daily, 6pm - 9pm on Friday and Saturday.

There are two outdoor pools and both are all ages.
This is the coolest pool at 83 degrees. The other outdoor pool is about 96 degrees.

One of our favorite sites #96. It sits at the end of the row with nice views and pretty plants.

Site 98 is very narrow just like our site to the left.

Another favorite site is #104. It's at the top of the hill with commanding views, only one neighbor and it's a really big site.

There are several cabins for rent.

Seen from the pool!

Hooded orioles like ocotillo flowers.

Rosie loved this park!
Here she is basking in the sun without a care in the world!

Next up: we move on to Anza Borrego State Park.