Steens Odyssey

On the way home from the eclipse I spent a couple days in southeastern Oregon.  This is one of the remotest areas in the US...the emptiness reminds me of the Australian outback.  It's not quite that empty, but it's fairly close.  And there's a lot of surprising country.  Here, south of Burns, hay is big.  In late August, there are fields of bales.

The big man in these parts in the last quarter of the 19th century was Pete French, who amassed large holdings into a vast ranching operation.  Pete used some spurious methods, including buying land surrounding a private inholding, then denying access to the inholding owner if he wouldn't sell to French.  This was one of French's properties...Sod House Ranch near Malheur Lake.  He stayed in this building when visiting the ranch.

Although SE Oregon is very dry, the topography...high mountains scattered here and there...catches some rain and snow which irrigates some of the flatlands.  Such is the case on the Blitzen River, which has vast wetlands that form a refuge for many thousands of birds through much of the year in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

The historic Frenchglen Hotel, built in the early 1900s.  You can stay here.  This is the second time I've been in this area...first was around 2000. It's literally an oasis in the desert.  

I headed up Steens Mountain.  The road is unpaved, but the northern leg of it is well maintained so you can get up to the top with a passenger car.  The southern leg of the loop is BAD!!  I took it in 2000 and barely made it; some of the potholes were almost big enough to swallow my car.  So this time I went up the north leg and back the way I came.  This country was settled in the late 1800s by Basque sheepherders, and their descendants are still here, raising sheep.  These guys are hanging out around 8000 feet elevation.

Getting near the summit of Steens, 9000 feet up, I encountered patches of snow in shady north facing spots. 

  Kiger Gorge, a perfect U-shaped glacial valley.  The notch at the top of the wall was also cut by ice overflowing the top of the ridge.

At the top of Steens...9700 feet above sea level...the weather was dynamic.  Showers and turbulent clouds shrouded the playa a mile below.

Volcanic rocks and virga.

The Lizards do Steens!

Downbursts from the convective clouds raised dust from the Alvord Lake playa far below.

After descending Steens, I visited Pete French's round barn, some distance to the north.  This structure was built in the 1880s by the fabulously named Nimrod Comegys, Pete's architect.  It was designed to train horses indoors during the long, cold winters.

Blow up this pic and the plaque explains the barn.

The interior of the round barn features ingeniously designed symmetrical roof supports, the largest being essentially tree trunks left in their natural state, minus the bark.