My sister, Charlotte, visited this past weekend with her girlfriend, Lizzie. We had a big weekend hiking up Broken Top mountain near the Three Sisters and Bend, and also mountain biking the McKenzie River Trail.

Broken Top was really nice. The summit has a view of every single one of the major Oregon Cascade volcanoes (except Mount Mazama, unfortunately). The hike in was still very snowy this time of year, and we got a late start so it was a bit of a slog. We hiked in to Green Lakes on Friday night and camped, then summited  in the morning and made it back to Bend for dinner at the Crux Fermentation Project and out to a campsite on Newberry volcano to camp  with friends for the night.

Sunday we quickly visited the Newberry caldera and checked out the obsidian flow from the car, made a detour for my trekking poles which I left at the trail head the day before, and grabbed lunch at the Deschutes brew pub in Bend with some friends. We finally got on the trail by 3pm or so and made it most of the way down before dark. I bailed out half way to ride back up the road for the car while Charlotte and Lizzie continued on the trail. They made it about 2/3 of the way all together. I only had to ride ~3 miles on the road before my friend, Win, happened to drive past and I hitched a ride up to the top. It was a nice ride over all but unfortunate that we didn’t get to finish it.