East Fort rock, OR
May 28-30
Friday
2 spaces left at the China Hat Campground! In retrospect, a campground full of barely supervised children with motorized vehicles may not be a good thing.
As we set up camp, it was sprinkling a little, raining a little and occasionally sunny. It stopped raining by the time we were ready to ride. My WR battery was dead. The charger read charged before I left the house. It started fine after changing the oil, but I did have doubts about the 4-year-old battery. I thought maybe I could get one more year out of it. Nope. Not the end of the world. That is what the spring shake down is all about. It’s a lot harder than kick starting the 200exc, and impossible on a hill…. I’ll just not stall it.
35 >30 and came to the South Cinder Cone Play Area where Steve blew up his bike last year. We had a good laugh. I dared Steve to go up it. He refused. We continued on 30. Seem like more thought was put into constructing this trail compared to most others (see Saturday). Many connected turns and some rocks. We took 90 to the South Ice Caves. Then 90>40>38 Steve says. 38 is super great, but I don’t remember doing it Friday.
I went to Bend for a battery Saturday evening. Poor Steve was subjected to kids on motorcycles and quads doing laps in the campground for hours. The worst was a kid on a really loud 4-stroke that didn’t know much about riding. He was simply thrilled to twist the throttle in the campground ad make that really loud noise. I caught the tail end of it, but thought, “what do you expect in an OHV campground?” I didn’t really understand Steve’s agitation.
Saturday
We woke up to and inch of snow on the ground. It was beautiful and warming up fast. Around 11am the midget shriners started up again. I started to get the idea of what Steve had experienced the day before. We decided to explore some of the recommended for motorcycle only trails. We warmed up by climbing East Butte. The climb is not too steep, but just goes on and on without many rocks on the trail. The temperature dropped about 15 degrees.
50 > 85 (black trail). Most of the trails in the EFR system seem to be geared toward Quads. The blue trails seemed to be mostly point and shoot quad trails, which are very boring for bikes. , Apparently quads can’t connect corners. We thought the blacks might be more interesting but the blacks seem to be ungroomed blues, still point and shoot but with lots of whoops. We finally hit the black and yellow portion of 85>81 which are not recommended for quads. We were hoping for some great single track, but it ended up being not so tight and whooped out. It got better at the end of 81, but not enough to make up for the whoops.
76>Ground Hog Rock Play Area- I imagined it to be big trials type rocks, but it was two big gravel piles, boohoo
74>46>72?
71 was great. All one mile of it. Turns and rocks.
We were low on gas and far from home so we headed back. Bloody point and shoot whoops.
The shriners were still at it back at camp and continued from 4:30 till after 9pm. Wow, seriously excessive.
I did get up in the middle of the night Saturday night and marveled at the super bright almost full moon, and utter silence.
Sunday
The midget shriners started around 10am.
We decided to do the black and yellow trail by the campsite first. Steve recalls doing this trail Friday. It must be so different backward that I don’t recall. This time I thought it was the best trail ever. It had rock climbs and loose rocks, sort of a balancing trials type of trail. We stopped and took video and photos.
We decided to get a room in town Sunday night because of the yahoos in the campground. When I thought the shriners couldn’t get more annoying, suddenly their number doubled while we were packing. The idiot on the 4-stroke joined in the cacophony for punctuation. 
Yeah, they were kicking up tons of dust. I couldn’t pack fast enough.
Monday
We toured Newberry Volcanic Monument. WOW!