InsaneJournal

Lawns in the desert?
We just checked out of Mt. Bachelor Village (in Central Oregon, just outside of Bend). Mom and Dad were here for a Professional Photographers of Oregon conference. Verdict: it's an okay place for a professional conference, but sucks as a resort because it's small and there's not much to do besides swim in the pool--they don't even have paths or trails to walk around the place, if you don't drive you have to walk on the road. If you want to go to a resort in Central Oregon, I'd suggest either Inn at the Seventh Mountain or Sun River instead of this place.

Most Annoying Thing: all the wide expanses of green lawn. People think Oregon is rainy, but that's only the coast and the Willamette Valley (the Northwest corner of the state). The rest of the state is one huge desert. You don't hear much about it because most of the people in Oregon live in the Valley or along the coast. (Although Bend is growing fast, and has been for a few years.) I do not consider myself an environmentalist, mostly because most "environmentalists" in Oregon are nuts, or at least they're the ones who seem to be in control of the environmentalist groups. (Don't get me started on the Spotted Owl idiocy or the problems in the way they're regulating the timber industry and all the public forests.) However, I am a huge fan of common sense, and of being good stewards to the creation that God has given us.

Huge green lawns in a desert is NOT GOOD STEWARDSHIP and it is also STUPID. (Mt. Bachelor Village has lots of huge green lawns.) The water could be put to much better use. The water table in the area has been decreasing at an alarming rate and everyone knows it because there are already too many people living here for sustainable water use at current levels of usage, and it's getting worse because of all the people moving into the area. They're going to be in a world of hurt in a few years because there aren't many big rivers in the Oregon desert, so once the water table is used up they're SOL. Bend is almost certainly too far south to be able to draw from the Columbia and its tributaries, and it's too far east to draw from the Willamette. (Not to mention they'd have to get the water over/through the Cascade Mountains, to draw from the Willamette.