The phone at 900 Wall began ringing in April with people eager to make reservations for Saturday, July 23. They were staking a claim on elegant front-row seats for the Cascade Cycling Classic criterium races that will take place that afternoon and evening. The restaurant, like many others downtown, adds outdoor tables for the race, and is now completely booked, mostly with Bendites.

“It’s a fun event,” says 900 Wall’s Mike Millette. “It brings in a lot more locals than other events.”

Zydeco actually limits the length of time people can sit on the patio during the race due to demand for tables. “People will camp out there all night,” explains Manager Brian Bellew. “It’s a great event. If we could, we’d put rows of seating out there.”

The McKenzie River is running higher than usual for this time of year, making it the perfect day trip for those looking for a manageable whitewater adventure that is an easy drive from Bend. The scenery is lush and green with clear aqua blue waters, and there are a number of different runs for varying ability levels.

It’s a good time of year to be a cyclist in Central Oregon. The trails at higher elevation are opening up, with snow giving way to wildflowers, offering riders room to spread out on singletrack less seen. After a long winter, and an even longer spring, the roads now beckon with the promise of endless, sun-drenched miles and beautiful summertime vistas. We can vicariously enjoy the Tour de France, which is televised multiple times daily for almost an entire month, and root for hometown boy Chris Horner. Sweet.

And last weekend’s ride on McKenzie Pass was pure bike bliss, not so much due to my own experience, but because of the display of hundreds of cyclists paying homage to one of our most notable routes. The informal pilgrimage of riders churning up the car-free road took on a celebratory air, and almost qualified as a flash mob on wheels, as cyclists relished the complete ownership of a beautiful piece of road. Not to be elitist, but what if McKenzie Pass were closed to motorized vehicles?

It might be Oregon’s most famous trail, well, aside from the one that used to give your computer character malaria and cost you a wagon axle in the process. The McKenzie River Trail is in almost every mountain biking and hiking guidebook, yet you’re not likely to run into all that much traffic while riding it.  The Forest Service classifies its usage as “heavy,” but because of its length (26.5 miles) and the tendency of riders to shuttle the trail, riding only in one direction, you’ll likely disagree with the classification.

Gearing up for a ride on a recent Saturday, we saw a shuttle van drop off six riders from British Columbia. They set out on the trail ahead of us along with one other pair of riders. We gave them a 15-minute head start and never saw most of them again, save the last two riders when we briefly passed them. On the entire 24-mile, roughly five-hour, stretch that we rode, we only crossed paths with two pairs of riders who were headed up the trail.

Most folks who live or spend a significant amount of time in Central Oregon don’t make it long here before finding their way to the lower Deschutes, that 90-plus-mile stretch of desert canyon river that flows out of the Pelton-Round Butte dam outside Madras to the Columbia River near Biggs. Pam DiDente is the exception. A nurse who has been in Central Oregon for three decades, DiDente’s experience with the lower Deschutes was limited to crossing the bridge at Warm Springs while shuttling back and forth from Portland. That’s a shame, of course, given that famed and acclaimed stretch of water is at once a blue-ribbon trout fishery, steelheading mecca and premier white water river.

But after years of procrastinating, DiDente decided to change that last fall when she plunked down the winning bid in our annual charity auction to fish the lower Deschutes with myself and Les Stiles, the former Deschutes County sheriff and an accomplished river guide.