Jefferson County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Jefferson County

Three rivers — the Crooked, the Deschutes, and the Metolius — converge inside Jefferson County's Cove Palisades State Park where the 440-ft Round Butte Dam (completed 1964, owned by Portland General Electric under federal license) impounds all three into Lake Billy Chinook, a high-desert reservoir surrounded by 700-ft basalt rim cliffs that more closely resembles a Lake Powell sliver than the rest of central Oregon. The lake is named for an early-20th-century Tygh chief who guided the original USGS survey crews into the canyon system. Round Butte Dam's selective-withdrawal tower (commissioned 2010, the largest of its kind in North America at the time) was a $100 million engineering retrofit that draws cold deep-lake water in summer and warm surface water in winter to restore the natural Deschutes River temperature regime downstream — the reservoir's prior single-elevation outlet had blocked Chinook and steelhead from reaching their historic upper Deschutes spawning grounds for 50 years, and the new selective-withdrawal system combined with juvenile-fish collection facilities reopened the basin to anadromous fish for the first time since 1964.

The park's two campgrounds (Crooked River and Deschutes River) accept rigs to 50 ft with full hookups across roughly 200 sites combined, the canonical RV-friendly base for any rig staging the Painted Hills Unit of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument 60 miles east on US-26. Madras (county seat, population 7,419, founded by Irish immigrants in 1903) is the only full-service town inside Jefferson County and the only place between Bend and Maupin to find diesel, propane, and full grocery in a single grid. The Cove Palisades' Tam-a-láu Trail climbs 600 ft from the reservoir for a Three Sisters panorama. Ochoco NF dispersed-camping along Forest Roads 22 and 27 accepts rigs to 35 ft.