At Ochoco Lake Campground — now open for the season — the camp host position is an ephemeral one, and those who volunteer to take care of the quiet lakeside site tend to move on after a month or two.

Bob Baker, a traveling writer and photographer who’s taken on the duty for April, is no different, except for an extra duty he’s added to the standard hosting responsibilities. Along with cleaning campsites, collecting campground fees and occasionally shooing a drunken rowdy, Baker is a volunteer public relations man for the Crook County park.

“Beautiful weather and scenery coupled with some hungry trout made the start of the camping season a success,” he wrote in a Crook County Parks & Recreation District news release, sent out Tuesday with some photos Baker took to announce the campground had opened for the season Friday.

Baker, 68, who’s written about travel and the environment for different magazines and newspapers over the years, started his camp host tenure last week. He thought he might mark the occasion with a note to local news organizations, penned by him.

“I’m doing the PR in my spare time,” he joked. “The camp hosts are only required to work a 20-hour week so there’s a lot of extra time, and it seemed like a good thing to do.”

Baker retired from Florida State Parks six years ago and has been traveling the country with his wife, Betsy, in their RV ever since. They’ve camped in all but six of the lower 48 states, he said, and when Portland proved to be too rainy they decided to drive east to Prineville.

When he’s not emptying the ashes out of the grills, Baker said he thought he might as well take a crack at advertising the campground before heading up to Alaska next month to photograph the blooming of alpine flowers.

Crook County Parks Director Duane Garner doesn’t mind. The 21-campsite Ochoco Lake Campground is something of a local secret, he said, and some advertising might encourage people to visit. Rarely more than half of the sites are occupied, according to statistics the park district keeps, and even in July — the campground’s busiest month — the average occupancy rate over the last three years was 62 percent,

“Bob came in and we got to visiting and he started telling us about his background,” Garner said. “He was telling me about how he’s written different articles for magazines, and I told him I wanted to do some more marketing for the lake. Not enough people know about it.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7829,

awest@bendbulletin.com