Prineville Reservoir State Park

Friday, June 7

Since Kaden was obviously having a pretty miserable time I decided that he needed to decide whether to continue or not. As soon as he was up and out of his tent I asked him if he wanted to continue riding another day to Prineville where we would take a recovery day and get him a different saddle, or if he wanted a taxi ride there for an early motel check-in and us figuring out how to get him home after Dante and I caught up.  He immediately said that he wanted to keep going.

One thing that factored into his decision was that we were going to transition from dirt to much smoother paved roads just 16 miles into the day.

Along with the paved road we started getting some trees back. One of the seasonal creeks that our gpx map said not to rely on was flowing and our first relatively long stop was to collect and filter some water from it.  From Fort Rock to the Prineville reservoir is 70 miles without any reliable water sources and we were into conservation mode at this point, so this was a nice find. 

Since the embankment was somewhat steep and rocky for me I had Dante go down to collect the water.  He set off a rattlesnake on the way down and he handled it fine.  I couldn't see it from where I was but he said it was about 5 feet away from him.

Shortly after the water stop we had a steep 900 foot climb up to the reservoir.

Prineville reservoir is a state park. The area is really stunning and should probably be a national park. 

Break at the first of about six campgrounds, where we had lunch and drank a lot more water:

Random additional pictures taken along the way:

We checked into an Econolodge in downtown Prineville for two nights of rest. Luckily the bike shop I had called ahead of time to buy a new saddle for Kaden was just across the street and I picked it up right away since they were going to be closed for the weekend.