I wasn’t feeling very ambitious last week when my wife, Catherine, asked me if I wanted to take a midweek hike up Bessie Butte after work that evening.

Generally speaking, by Wednesday, the last thing on my mind is a steep, nearly 1-mile ascent up a butte. Besides, Catherine and I had done our usual 2-mile walk-with-spates-of-jogging that morning.

We’d been intending to hike up Bessie for a few weeks, knowing that starting May 1, public access to some 34,600 acres around China Hat and that vicinity of Deschutes National Forest would be closed for at least a year for camp clearing and forest thinning. Nevertheless, the last day of April had rolled around before we’d gotten our act together and gone up.

Hiking is one of our mainstay activities together, along with nerding out to word games, reading, traveling and cooking. We have a few regular destinations for hiking, including Black Rock Trail near Lava Butte, and a semi-secret old forest road winding to the Deschutes River.

And when it comes to an uphill hike, Bessie has long been our go-to. Our family became Bessie regulars after moving into our current home a mile from China Hat Road, nearly 20 years ago. We can recall a family hike at Bessie on Thanksgiving Day 2013, mostly memorable for what happened on the way home after our sunset hike: A deer ran across China Hat, and we hit and killed it.

We’ve been up Bessie so often we even have a nickname for a certain pine tree about 90% of the way up, after an extra-steep sandy stretch as you near the summit: Catherine started referring to it as Heartbreak Tree because it was so often there that kids — and not just ours; we’ve witnessed others — would want to call it quits.

So around 5 p.m. last Wednesday, Catherine and I met at home, hopped in our RAV4 and set out toward China Hat Road, not quite knowing what to expect.

On our way out China Hat, we saw a lot of campsites in various states of being dismantled, and a lot of trash strewn along the roadside. Everyone’s got an opinion, and I’m of several myself. I recreate out there quite a bit. The mess and debris bother me. The sight of my fellow citizens reduced to camping in forests and having to rely on their wits in a way I can only imagine depresses me. The forest fire risk mere miles from my home and thousands of others scares me. I don’t have the answers. If I did, I’d tell them to someone important.

Given it was evening as we made our way to Bessie Butte, we passed a succession of fifth wheels and RVs pulling off of the forest roads onto China Hat, trailing clouds of Central Oregon moon dust in their wake as they drove north toward Knott Road, getting out before the gate just a short distance east of Lost Tracks Golf Club gets closed for the next year.

As we headed south toward Bessie, most of the hikes we’ve taken here blend together. My wife hikes it more often than I do, and expressed her sadness that for at least the next year, possibly longer, there will be no tracing the change of the seasons at Bessie.

I’d have guessed that Bessie Butte would have been teeming with people on this last day, but when we arrived, there were just three other vehicles, and they all happened to be leaving.

I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had Bessie Butte all to ourselves. The solitude didn’t last long. As we made our way counterclockwise up the corkscrew trail, we eventually saw more cars arriving. But we had it all to ourselves for a few minutes.

It could just have been the warm afternoon and sweet light of spring, or the knowledge that we wouldn’t be here again for at least another year, but I could swear the sea of pines stretching toward the neighboring buttes and mountains beyond looked alluring in a way they never had before. I took some pictures and just tried to soak it in. I also noticed that the forest here, several miles from the emptying campsites closer to town, seemed calm and quiet. It was also the first time in recent memory that I heard zero gunfire.

As much as I’ll miss it, I started thinking how Bessie Butte and the forest around it, all the birds, lizards and mammals that call it home, might just appreciate a respite from so many humans doing human things on their turf. Maybe over the next year the dog droppings along the Bessie Butte trail will decompose, and the dogs’ owners will procure some bags and be better trail users in the future. Hey, one can dream.

On the way back down, Heartbreak Tree’s name took on a different meaning.

So long for now. Enjoy the peace and quiet.

Don’t worry about us. Living in Central Oregon means no shortage of other places we can hike while this portion of the forest is closed.

I doubt the folks we saw draining out of the woods that evening, people who have seen their own share of Heartbreak Trees, have nearly as many options.