56481 Sunstone Loop

Caldera Springs sits fifteen miles south of Bend, next to Sunriver Resort, at roughly 4,170 feet of elevation in the high desert along the upper Deschutes River. The community's own design guidelines place the site in a semi-arid Montane Life Zone, a transition band between the Great Basin Desert and the Cascade Range, covered in ponderosa and lodgepole pine with an understory of sagebrush, bitterbrush, and manzanita. Average annual precipitation runs 18 inches and average snowfall 49 inches, though the range swings hard from year to year. One winter brought 13 inches of snow, the next brought 144, according to those same guidelines. Every builder in the community designs around that swing. Snow-load framing, solar gain through winter windows, and wildfire resistance all run through the same approval process. Caldera Springs holds Firewise Community status, and the guidelines require wildfire-resistant roofing, building materials, and defensible landscaping before anyone breaks ground.

PacTrust opened the community in 2006 on 400 acres, with an original plan for 320 single-family homesites and 45 cabins. A 600-acre eastward expansion, launched in 2021, brought the master plan to its current 1,000 acres. Roughly a fifth of that total, 220 acres, was set aside rather than built on, carried in the plat as a protected wildlife mitigation area and marketed today as the Wildlife Forest Preserve. The lake and stream system at the center of the community, 14.7 acres of water including Obsidian Lake and Trailmere Lake, predates the expansion and still anchors it. So does Caldera Links, a nine-hole, par-27 course designed by golf architect Bob Cupp, with holes running a tight 60 to 185 yards and built for an afternoon rather than a full day on the course.