Early last week I decided that I needed to go SCUBA diving. Originally, I was scheduled to go out and do some research dive training in Washington. That fell through at the last minute. Instead I ended up riding in a 1978 VW Bus to Central Oregon for some unexpected boat diving on Lake Billy Chinook.
Alina, one of the Divemaster Candidates in the recreational SCUBA program I’m involved with, needed two more dives to start working on the pool deck. The obvious solution to my diving dilemma was to jump in her VW and take off for some diving. We piled all of my gear in the back of her bus and took off for Eugene to pick up some rental gear for her.
Dive gear acquired, we looked at each other and realized that we didn’t really know where we were going to jump in the water. The tide had already been missed by an hour. We settled the debate by heading for Traibridge Reservoir up the McKenzie River Highway.
Winding our way up the mountain road we encountered deeper and deeper drifts of snow piled along the shoulder. Red cinder gravel was strewn about, obscuring the yellow and white lines. Oncoming traffic would periodically blind us with their brights. People were too scared of skidding off the road to remove their hands from the wheel. The sun had set earlier along the road while we sat in a traffic jam caused by a rollover accident.
The road down to Trailbridge is harrowing even in the best of summer conditions. A sheen of hardpack ice and loose cinder gravel made it downright exciting to get down to the bridge and power house. Four feet of snow blanketed everything promising Trailbridge to be a chilly dive.
Normally, I dive in the river channel next to the highway at the reservoir. It’s a good site with a lot of stuff to see. However, due to snowplowing, the parking lot was completely inaccessible. Had we parked on the road and hiked down, we would have had a 1000 foot scramble down the snow and through the trees to hit the water. During the day and with crampons, it might have been doable but in the dark and with full SCUBA gear on we decided against it.
Gunning the bus for all it was worth, we made it back up the incline and onto the highway. Our backup dive site was Clear Lake, another twenty minutes up the road. The few cars out on the road had a bad tendency of blinding us as they drove past. Our windshield was filmed over with whatever the highway department uses to deice the roads.
To make a long story short, we somehow missed Clear Lake all together. In retrospect, the driveway was probably not plowed out yet and the lodge was most likely shuttered. Five foot tall walls of snow lining the road will do that.
In a fit of pure insane genius, rather than turning around and heading down to lower elevation lakes or back to Corvallis, we instead drove toward Bend. Alina’s mother has a second home north of Bend near Lake Billy Chinook. A brief phone call later to confirm her mom was at the lake, and we were celebrating not having to sleep in an old VW bus in 15 degree weather.
We were greeted in the driveway by her mom driving a tricked-out Polaris ATV. She yelled at us to jump on the back with the case of beer we had bought in Redmond. Hanging on to whatever we could, the ATV tore off down the gravel road to a neighbor’s house.
At the neighbor’s house, we hung out a bit, chatted, and had a couple of beers. Alina’s mom’s boyfriend then offered to let us ride the ATV. Off into the night we went on a grand little adventure along the canyon rim.
The next morning we loaded our dive gear onto a 22 foot pontoon party boat. Down on the water, we hung on as we took the boat up toward 35 miles per hour. For a pontoon boat, it goes fast!
Up the Deschutes branch of the lake, we donned our gear and dropped down into the water. The hardest part of finding a good place to dive was finding somewhere that wasn’t too deep. The lake rests in a deep canyon and hits depths of up to 400 feet quite often.
The water was cold — 38 degrees at the bottom. We saw a few crawdads and one or two fish. On our second dive, I also found a small blue tarp. At Alina’s insistence, I did not open it up. Sometimes it’s best to let dead bodies rest.
Later in the day after we had retrailered the boat and and loaded our dive gear back in the bus, we headed west. Up and over the mountain pass and down toward Salem we drove. Just as we got onto the interstate a bit south of Salem, the bus started making a funny noise.
At Albany, we started smelling a funny burning oil odor. The bus began to loose power. Floored we could only manage 50 MPH. The red warning light for low oil came on. The exit for Corvallis appeared. We barely managed to limp into a gas station parking lot.
The back of the bus was smoking pretty badly. Oil dripped out onto the ground from the engine compartment. We went inside the convenience store to get out of the cold and let the engine cool.
A quart of oil and some cold air allowed us to restart the bus and get another 15 miles before it had another fit. The red oil light burned brightly as we lost all power. We coasted into a convenience store parking lot less than a half mile from Corvallis. The bus had finally had it. A tow truck was called.
Brent met us at Independent Auto Werks, the de facto old VW car repair shop in Corvallis. All of our SCUBA gear barely managed to squeeze into his car. It seemed a fitting end for a rather unexpectedly adventurous weekend.
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