Two more photos from the Steens trip, these taken with a borrowed Bronica medium format camera. You might say: “Oh, look at that cool tilt-shift effect on the hotel photo, where intriguing bits are displaying remarkably shallow depth of field.” Sadly, that’s a scanning issue. My film isn’t mounted, so when I put it in the medium-format adapter thingy, it sometimes “bends” a bit. I considered briefly getting the accessory for my scanner for mounted 6×6 slides, but it’s something like $90 and I don’t even own a medium format camera.
I have long ignored the dirt road leading off up and west from Alvord Hot Springs, heading up the steep, steep eastern ascent of Steens Mountain. I assumed it went nowhere; most of the little spurs don’t around there. On crowded days in the Alvord, this is where people camp (by “crowded” I mean: when there are upwards of five people within ten miles). I have a thing for Pike Creek, anyway, which is another couple of miles north.
But this time Mr. Pencil and I turned onto the road that leads up the Indian Creek drainage. And, as it turns out, the only “crowded” weekend in the Steens is Memorial Day weekend anyway. So, empty.
And, lo, the road went and went and went. We forded Indian Creek and continued. I got out and spotted while David steered the ‘bru over potential high-center obstacles. He straddled ruts and small boulders.
Ultimately, we realized it was just as fast to walk, so we hiked a while up and up along the track. We discovered an extraordinarily eerie abandoned cabin (”I think I found Jacob’s cabin,” said David–it was that kind of decrepitude, and then some) and the remnants of a mine. The views, it’s probably extraneous to mention, were exceptional.
We could hear sage grouse carrying on in the near distance, and things were in bloom: lupine, paintbrush, fresh sage leaves.
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.
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.
Lakeview claims to be the “Tallest Town in Oregon” which turns out to obscure its slightly more complex technical claim, which is that it has the highest elevation of any incorporated town in Oregon with year-round residents. Phew. Coincidentally there was an article in The Oregonian today about Greenhorn, a town in northeastern Oregon that clocks in at 6300 feet (compare Lakeview’s measly 4800-ish). Not my war to fight.
Literature about Lakeview boasts very friendly people. But really, what town doesn’t have a chamber of commerce that boasts of its friendly people? Yet Lakeview was alive with old-timers in Stetsons and happy-eyed teenager and every single one of them was astoundingly courteous. With cheer. There must be something in the water.
Lakeview has Oregon’s only “active geyser.” In 1923, a fella called Hunter was starting work on a therapeutic hot springs resort a few miles north of the town. Guess what happens if you drill through rock that overlays a fairly sizable hot spring? Such a hole might just provide the only escape the pressurized hot water has. Zoinks! And thus Lakeview ended up with a “geyser.” Information about Old Perpetual (no, I am serious) claims it erupts every few minutes, but in our experience, it was more like every thirty seconds.
Lakeview has a welcoming, tidy and comforting downtown. Despite the fact that pretty much the entire business district burned down in 1900, there is still a quiet, historical feel to things. Recommended.
To get to where we’re going this weekend we are going to travel through the Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge in southeastern Oregon, where I have not technically been. We were driving south on I-5 near Salem and I had anticipation.
I asked, “Do you think we’ll see ‘lopes?”
“Probably,” said David, “unlike bighorn sheep, which we won’t see.”
“Right, because they don’t exist,” we both said at once.
“The biggest biological hoax ever played on the American public,” swore David. No one ever sees Bighorn Sheep.
“I don’t know why I’m asking. I always see antelope when I go where we’re ultimately going.”
“Right, with their one long horn.”
“Yeah, and their…wings.”
“And the glitter they leave everywhere.”
“You can tell it’s them from the soft nickering sounds they make when they’re grazing in the fields of ambrosia.”
June 25th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Nice photos! Time to shell out for that medium-format camera.