After meeting with a team from the Idaho Museum of Natural History at Owl Cave, a lava-tube rockshelter on the Snake River Plain, I turn west on Hwy 20 to traverse toward Craters of the Moon National Monument. It is a busy, blue highway*, not as enjoyable as I hoped. It winds around lava flows and mountain slopes until dropping to Mountain Home, Idaho. Here, I find another blue road along the Snake River from Grand View to Marsing, where I jump west to Hwy 95. It is a long loop, and I would have liked to take an overland route from Grand View, ID, to Jordan Valley, OR – I must save that for another day.
Well into Oregon, I eventually turn west at Burns Junction. My goal is Hart Mountain, so I traverse along the base of the Steens Mountains in the Alvord Basin; one of my favorite routes, in an area I have yet to explore enough. It is a perfect time to drop south along the base of the Steens’ eastern escarpment. The late sun rakes low and casts long shadows toward Whitehorse Valley. It is a good road to Alvord Hot Springs and on to Fields. I turn toward Catlow Valley as it gets dark.
I need to find a camp spot somewhere on Hart Mountain. It is turning into a long drive-day and now going deep into the night. I decide to turn onto a two-track where I find some closed roads intersecting. The closures provide a small turn around, so I set a camp just before the marked sign. I am short of refuge lands, and it is time to stop. It is a lovely, dark evening, I set the tent and turn in.
A Sage Sparrow and a Brewer’s Sparrow sing to greet the sunrise, and I am out of the tent before dawn. Beattys Butte, an ancient volcano with very good obsidian, looks nice in the south distance. There is color in the few clouds over the Steens Mountains, so I get some nice simple photos.
Driving through the refuge, I feel the desperation of the Hart Mountain fire of 2024; it did incredible damage. It is greening now, but woodland groves are mostly gone. A few interesting but distant ‘white elven’ trees – skeletons of once flourishing trees – stand in lonely silence. There is an historic-era rock wall at the summit of the Hart Mountain switch-backing road. I have passed this spot dozens of times before the fire, I am sure I have not noticed it previously.
I drop off the Hart Mountain fault block to visit the CCC camp in Warner Valley. At a nearby campground I meet a couple working on the Oregon Bee Atlas. Their passion is contagious as I hear about the systematic work around individual plants where bees are observed and netted. They have an interesting, if morbid, collection. I learn that bees are not long-lived, and these have given their short lives to science and census. It is a little confusing.
I taught an archaeological field school in Warner Valley for several summers in the early 1990s, after attending my field school here in 1988 and being a crew-chief for a few years after that. I basically lived in this historic camp at the base of Hart Mountain for over a year, cumulatively. Like many places of fond memory, it has lost some of its aura as it ages, and I age along with it. I photograph the CCC building, sad in its new paint. The waterfall above the camp is in bad shape, the fire burned the canyon as in a chimney, obviously raging upward, destroying a vast aspen grove in its path.
After checking out the relatively high water levels in Flagstaff Lake, one of the many segmented lakes in the basin of Warner Valley. It was dry when I was here in the fall of 2023, and I spent many years trying to understand the processes and landform evolution, including the distribution of ancient wetlands, that were influenced by the lake level variation. The birds bring hope and resilience after the scars on the mountain.
I follow the backroad between Plush and Adel, Oregon, down to Twelvemile Creek. I turn up the two-track that Des and I had followed with Todd and Rollie, the fish-squeezers working for Fish and Wildlife who shared our camp during several Warner Valley field seasons. I had collected rounded obsidian nodules in the drainage over thirty years ago, and I collected more from upper reaches of the creek recently. I can document their setting more completely today.
The road from Adel continues to Surprise Valley where I rendezvous with Desna at our friend’s place in Lake City. Des arrived just before I pulled in. Sandhill Cranes are singing in the lower fields, a lovely afternoon. It is nicely motivation for our annual breeding bird census on our designated track through Surprise Valley. We do our annual bird count tomorrow.
Keep going.
*Blue Highways: A Journey into America, by William Least-Heat Moon. Little, Brown, and Company, 1982.
Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.
I love the lost tree picture. And Poker Jim Ridge. Gorgeous wildlife and of course the aspens I now mourn.
Your aura is not dimmed, only shifted away from youth.