Bonnie Lure State Park

Some photos from Bonnie Lure State Park [map], on Eagle Creek out near Estacada. I'd never heard of the place until recently, while I was looking at the state parks website. The state parks department was running a photo contest for their 2008 calendar, so I thought I'd check the place out and see if there was anything photogenic there. It later turned out that my puny little camera doesn't have enough megapixels to meet the minimum entry requirements, and I doubt I'd have entered any of these anyway, but I figured I could still get a blog post out of the excursion, at least.



The park's a pretty low key affair. The state calls it a "State Recreation Site" officially; I don't know precisely how that differs from a regular state park, but there's no sign at the parking lot, so you pretty much have to know it's there. There are a few trails, but they're unmarked, and I don't know where they go. The main event is river access to Eagle Creek [map #2].



It seems the park is a local swimming hole in the summer, and a local fishing hole in season. Most of the info on the net is about fishing, like these two examples. It sounds like the place gets sort of tense in fishing season, since the other bank of the creek is private property, and the property owners have gotten sick and tired of trespassing fisherfolk.

A couple shots from around the bridge & parking lot shown in the "map #2" link:





Here's one report of a visit to the park, by someone who wasn't very impressed with the place. (The page also has cute pix of puppies.) Probably had something to do with the drunken teenagers. There weren't any of those when I stopped by, just a couple of families -- kids splashing around, parents reading and working on their tans, everyone just having a carefree and uncomplicated summer day.





I'll let you in on a secret: I was playing hooky from the office when I visited, using the old "working from home" trick. Stop gasping in dismay, everybody does it now and then. The now-past calendar deadline was fast approaching, and I figured I ought to go get a move on and go hit as many state parks in one day as I could. But after wandering around for a bit, I sort of got into the spirit of the place, took my shoes off, and cooled my feet in the creek while trying to remember how to skip rocks. It comes back to you pretty quickly, in the right circumstances. So that was pretty fun, I mean, what's the point of playing hooky if you don't get to skip any rocks? So then I got ambitious and thought I'd see if I could toss a rock in the air and time it just right so I could get a photo of the splash. Cameras are always right handed, so it helps a lot if you throw left handed, which I do. Here's the best of the batch. It may not look like much, but it looks like "Mission Accomplished" to me...