North of Eugene, above tract houses so cheek by jowl they appear tesselated, a single mylar balloon is escaping. It’s metallic and draws the eye because there are no clouds and it is sunny. Likely someone below, likely someone young, is momentarily sad.
One dusty day about two years ago, I, solo, in the Catlow Valley, after suffering misdirected starts and inaccurate maps, found the ghost town of Blitzen, Ore.
You can see photos from that endeavor here.
This time I brought David. This time at sundown. This time someone had graded the mud-rutted road enough that it was passable and didn’t require a mile-long hike to reach the scattered, dying buildings.
Blitzen was a prosperous enough town in the early 20th century. Homesteaders came optimistic of the farming potential of the valley, disregarding ghosty thoughts of droughts and isolation. It built: a hotel, a store, a school, post office, families. Then dryness hit the region and harvests failed. Folks packed up. The highway got relocated to the west, along Catlow Rim. A standard story. The store was the last to falter and it closed its doors sometime around 1942.
Now Blitzen–a town named after lightning–is dying into the sage plains. It’s tough to find–you cannot really make it out from the highway, and it may well be on Roaring Springs Ranch land; the no trespassing signs are ambiguous–and far, far from anything safe or settled.
In the past couple of years since I first found it, another of the few standing structures collapsed. The hotel is tilting, tilting. A pair of enormous ravens live in an enormous nest in its upper floor.
(The hotel).
(Detail of the hotel).
Lakeview, Ore., named for its vantage over “formerly larger” Goose Lake (now shorelined some 15 miles from the town), is the county seat of the eponymous Lake County in south central Oregon.
With about 2700 folks, it’s a veritable bustling metropolis, when considered against the vastness of Lake County–fully a third of the county’s population lives within town limits. Heck, Wikipedia even goes so far as to claim Lake County has a population density of zero people per square mile, which, though romantic and apparently apropos when dashing around the emptier parts of the hinterlands, isn’t exactly accurate (it’s more like .88 person per square mile).
New Jersey, which is roughly the same size, packs 8.4 million people. So there you go. And I haven’t even started on Harney County.
Here’s what I can tell you about Lakeview after my first visit there, ever.
Watch the video:
It is difficult to explain the scale and peculiarity of the Catlow Valley. It’s as if everything is stretched out wider and thinner here in this mysterious part of southeastern Oregon. Distances between things are far, far, as if the land were inflated beneath you like a balloon. Such strange places, with such vastness.
Catlow Valley is classic basin-and-range topology; the floor of it dropped down flat as a puddle and its eastern rim scarped up sharp like cliffs, hundreds of feet. Far far west you can see Hart Mountain and Poker Jim Ridge. Closer in and south, buttes. And east, of course, beyond the rim, the flat oblong of Steens Mountain.
Deep dusk and we’d already had a close-call run-in with a jackrabbit, driving north on the far eastern edge of the valley, just under the sinuous rim. Within the past hour we’d seen antelope and mule deer and prairie dogs and ducks. It’s that crepuscular hour that bodes of automotive collisions with wildlife. So we are not surprised when a mammal lopes out ahead of us across the highway.
What does surprise us is that it’s not a deer, nor a coyote even. It takes us a moment to realize it’s tailless and tawny. And that its ears were tufted. A bobcat!
I have never had the luck to see any sort of wild cat. So this, for me, was a startling and wondrous moment.
(Just a few minutes before and near the bobcat.)
I failed again on this trip, I did. I still have never found an arrowhead, despite inclinations to the contrary. I look and peer and stare at my feet a lot when I’m in the hinterlands. I can’t seem to pull it off.
But leave it to Mr. Pencil’s keen eyes and we have something much better. I am not going to tell you exactly where we found this, but I will say that it is within the boundaries of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and it can be spotted from the (gravel) road to which it is adjacent. I don’t think other people have mentioned it often, as googling for the location I found it and “petroglyph” doesn’t give me anything relevant.
When David first spotted the boulder and stopped the car and backed it up and I saw it, I was so sure it was fake (so easy to find! Such complex and clear carving! Such something I’d not seen before!) that I sort of skeptically took a few sullen digi-snaps and wandered off again. However, interrogation of knowledgeable parties determined that it is indeed the genuine article.
These are likely the work of the Paiute people.
