Dinner was PB&J David smeared together using the hood of the ‘bru as a table at deepest dusk in Long Hollow. Long Hollow, an east-west passway through to the Alvord–the eastern, desert side of the Steens–in the narrow notch between Steens and Pueblo Mountains, takes all of the loneliness of the Alvord, all the vastness of the Catlow Valley, and channels between them. It is a haunting place.

We stood there and ate and bats flew near us. We heard: a horned owl hoot-hooing, distant coyotes lamenting.

Driving again, it took both of us the entirety of our efforts to scan the road. Wildlife, everywhere. Eyes glowing on the side of the road.

David drove over a stick in the road.

“Oh, crap! I think that was a snake!” he yelled, when the report of the wheels was soft rather than hard.

Half a mile on there was another stick in the road, so we stopped and backed up and pointed our headlights at it.

It was a sinuous, handsome snake, lethargic, absorbing the heat of the day out of the blacktop of the road. Slender, tawny, with complex black markings. We looked at it for a bit and then felt very bad about the snake we’d ended. Poor snake. It stuck with me.

Tags: catlow, oregon, snake

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).

Tags: blitzen, catlow, ghost town, oregon