Deschutes River Trail Mill A Loop 1.3 Miles

Today, we went for a walk along the Deschutes River. near the Old Mill District in Bend, Oregon. If you pull up the map, it's the yellow loop in the Old Mill District expanded section on the lower right side. It was a clear day, but it was pretty chilly and windy when we set out. We parked on the street near McKay Park. There was a porta potty, but no real bathrooms. The thing had a sign off sheet inside, and it looks like it only gets cleaned about every two weeks, so use with caution. There was toilet paper, but the hand sanitizer dispenser did not work.

The walk was 1.3 miles for us, but the map says 1.1 miles. It was mostly flat and partially paved. Where it wasn't paved, it was a little muddy and slippery. I ended up moving to a grassier section of the path because I was sliding. Moments later, my husband slid pretty good and almost went down. It turned into a rather impressive lunge position when he caught himself. We saw a few people along the trail, but it was pretty quiet. The side with the amphitheater was not marked very well. It was unclear that we needed to actually go through the amphitheater in order to continue on. If we had brought a map with us, it would have been easy to follow though.

Along the trail, there was a fishing pole casting course that was rather interesting. There were a bunch of metal rings laid out along the way. Some of them were raised up and some were in the water. At each section, it gave instructions on what you needed to do in order to complete that area and it also gave you the par. I'm not sure where it started though since the first one that we noticed was hole 5 I think. We saw a few others, but I'm not sure how many there are in total.

The walk itself was peaceful, but cold. The wind was in my face for most of the trip. The sun was at my back though, so my back was warm and my front was cold. We had fun though. We're going to go back and do the bigger loop maybe next weekend. This is the waterfall coming out from under the bridge that we walked over because my husband didn't think we could walk under the other bridge, but we learned that we could have. Another example of some bad path marking.

Below are my screen shots for the trip. I forgot to do a Nexercise thing, but I did use MapMyHike. I don't believe the calorie burn listed though. I'm not 100% confident in my BodyMedia device screenshot simply because the phone was acting up for the duration of the walk. It kept telling me that the BodyMedia device was not connected. The step count seems accurate enough for a 1.3 mile walk. The calorie burn seems consistent with 30 minutes of activity based on what I've gotten from my workout DVDs. The largest blue blob to the left is the walk. The next blob is our trip to the High Desert Museum, There is a small break where we stood for a few minutes and then the next blob is still the museum. The shorter blob that follows is walking around at Walmart shopping.