In the winter and early spring, La Pine State Park Campground only has the south loop open for camping, both north and middle loops are closed most likely due to snow and lack of people camping early in the year. We arrived on a Friday and almost every campsite was booked so thankfully we made our reservations in advance. One of the main attractions of the campground is that the Deschutes river is just a short walk from camp.
Oregon is also going through a drought and the river is exceptionally low right now. Not really much to do at the campground but there is a rec center, horseshoe pits, and an open area in the middle with three frisbee golf baskets. There is also an awesome dog exercise area about a half mile drive from the south loop.
Day 1 Vs. Day 3!
The campsites have full hookups however in the winter and early spring they do not turn on the water so they have a fill station set up at campsite 26 for you to fill your water tanks.
Nearby towns are La Pine, Sunriver and Bend – we spent some time in all three. Bend is the largest of the three with a grid like downtown full of shopping, coffee shops, restaurants and of course breweries. We spent most of our time at Bend Brewing Company not just because the beers were good but because it was super cold outside and they had heated concrete seating with heat lamps above which was perfect for us wimpy Californians who don’t love the cold.
La Pine is one of those if you blink you will miss it towns. Not much to it but they have all the necessities like gas, groceries, restaurants and a dispensary (it is Oregon after all….) We had our fair share of time in this town getting gas, grocery shopping at Grocery Outlet and Rays, doing laundry and we had a good ole American breakfast at The Harvest Depot which came highly recommended by a guy doing his laundry at the laundromat.
Sunriver is, as our friends from Bend call it, a resort town, and indeed it is. This is where we purchased Olive from, so we had to return for a visit. It was the second day we had snow so we decided to head into Sunriver to visit the lodge and to thaw out for a while. Driving through you can see why it is a resort town; rental homes, tennis courts, the lodge etc. Not a lot of vacationers there in the cold and snow but we hear it is pretty lively in the summer.
One thing we were not expecting on this trip was snow, but clearly Mother Nature had other plans for us. With a new snow storm coming each night it extended our stay, so we ended up having to cancel our next stop and waited for better conditions before we hit the road. As much as we were not prepared for this weather, it was still pretty cool waking up to a blanket of snow each morning. We also learned that no matter how much planning we did ahead of time, we always needed to be ready for the unexpected. (We literally have a Google sheet that has our route planned out through September). This initial hiccup has already been a great test of both patience and flexibility. Fortunately there is nowhere we absolutely have to be, so if we need to pivot at any time, it really isn’t that much of a disruption. Would we like to stick to the mapped out plan, sure, but expecting it to go perfectly would be unrealistic. My philosophy is that it is much easier to cancel plans than to make them on the fly and no matter what happens, it is all part of the adventure and we are both excited to see how it unfolds over the coming months.
