RETIREMENT TRIP #7

Santa Wouldn't Retire in Christmas Valley

                                            Goose Lake did have water in it this past spring, according to the motel clerk.  What happened was the snow pack melted much earlier than usual, and there has been no rain all summer.  Lakeview averages 16 inches of precipitation per year, so every bit of moisture is crucial.  It’s just one more example of the climate changes from global warming, I thought.

Bleak hills and lack of vegetation typify the Oregon desert.

“This doesn’t look like Oregon,” said Andy, as we drove northwest on Route #395.

I agreed.  “Oregon is supposed to be green with mossy trees,” I told him.  “It’s kind of like what people think when they hear New York… all big, bustling city, when most of the state is farm country.”

He laughed.  “This reminds me of Nevada.  Did you notice there isn’t even any grass in between the clumps of sage?  It’s land nobody wanted, so most of it belongs to the Bureau of Land Management.”

The dry bed of Summer Lake temporarily
offers  some grass for grazing.  

Hay is the only crop here.  We read that the hay is actually alfalfa, a more nutritious variety of hay.  It’s too cold and dry to grow anything else for profit.  But hay maintains the cattle in the winter.  There were tens of thousands of cows and millions of bales of alfalfa in the fields. 

We passed through the tiny town of Paisley.  All was quiet, except for the trucks at a local coffee shop and the cars outside the school.

Alfalfa grows abundantly in the
warm, dry air of the Oregon outback.

North of Paisley, Summer Lake was a dry white bed of minerals.  Cows grazed peacefully in fields surrounding the old lake bed.  A water truck heading inland kicked up dust along the dirt road.  We passed an overturned semi on its side in the ditch just before the bend.

“No! You can’t take a picture,” said Andy.  “The tow truck is there.  The driver must have fallen asleep at the wheel.”

Everywhere cows grazed—meandering and munching, lying down and walking.

There was some water in the northernmost end of Summer Lake.  There, the farms looked more profitable, and pivot irrigation sprayed water on hay fields.

Trunks of trees on Winter Rim suggest that fire had had a
hand in shaping this landscape.

The mountains to our left rose at least a thousand feet.  The whole slope had been burned over.  A one-room schoolhouse, painted white, stood out against the starkness of the steep, dark hillside, the Winter Rim of the Fremont National Forest.

“This must be good hunting ground,” said Andy.  Three hawks perched on three consecutive telephone poles. I wasn’t quick enough to capture them with the camera.

At the Fremont Memorial Rest Stop, the hills were starting to take on some fall color.  Birds twittered noisily in the poplar trees.

Butte lives up to its name as a
volcanic outcropping.

At Silver Lake, about 12 miles from the turn-off to Christmas Valley, the black lava buttes popped up again.  “Oregon is really volcanic,” said Andy.  We stopped at a pullout at Picture Rock Pass, elevation 4,830 feet.  A huge valley opened out before us.  The mountain on our right, named Butte at 5,698 feet, rose majestically in jagged black lava crags.  The sides were jumbled masses of lava chunks, broken off and tumbled down in all sizes and shapes.

Yellow Rubber Rabbitbrush and small juniper trees
dot Picture Rock Pass at lower elevations.

Four huge cattle trucks carrying live animals passed us coming up the hill. “Winter’s coming,” said Andy.  “Now is the time to sell off the fattest cows so you don’t have to feed then all winter.”

We both cringed.  “That’s a job I couldn’t do,” he added.  “Work in a slaughterhouse, that is,”

Such big, arid country reminds us of
the Nevada desert.

A flat-topped butte, named Table Rock, elevation 5,630 feet, looked rugged and uninhabited, but Andy noticed a cell tower at the top.  “That’s a high point,” he said.  Cultivated alfalfa fields spread beneath the butte in the valley as we turned due north.  Christmas Valley was 18 miles ahead.

“We know where the cattle trucks are coming from,” said Andy, when we passed a huge feeding and fattening lot.  Cows in pens ate at fattening troughs.  Surrounding fields with pivot irrigation and piles of hay bales supplied the fattening farm.  A high power transmission line brought in energy.

The driver of a hay truck takes the
third successive turn too fast!

Andy added, “I’d say there’s something big ahead.  That power’s probably from the Columbia River Gorge.  They are shipping to Las Vegas or California.”

Suddenly, a siren sounded behind us.  Andy pulled over and a Sheriff truck raced by.  Just ahead a sign read, “Sharp Curve,” and on the other side of the bend a hay truck lay on its side in the ditch, hay bales scattered in heaps.  “He took the curve too fast,” said Andy.  “He couldn’t hold it, but the load might have shifted was well.”

Ten miles farther, Andy realized we were on the wrong road.  “I didn’t intend to come to Fort Rock until tomorrow,” he said, “but now that we’re here, we’ll take advantage of the lovely weather.”  Temperatures were probably in the mid-70’s with lots of high fleecy cirrus clouds.

Fort Rock, a volcanic tuff ring or maar,
 looms large, rising 300 feet above the flat Outback plain.

Fort Rock, an immense natural stone stockade and a Registered Natural Landmark, towers 300 feet above the flat plain.  A third of a mile in diameter, Fort Rock is a volcanic tuff ring or maar.  It formed between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, when the valley was part of an ancient lake covering as much as 200 square miles and as deep as 200 feet.  Here molten lava from deep in the earth met water-saturated rocks beneath the lake.  The steam produced violent explosions.  Hot ash and rock, tossed high in the air, fell in a circle, like a spewing fountain, and solidified in the tuff ring.

Andy waves from one end of Fort Rock.

Waves, driven by wind, eroded away the south part of the ring, leaving a horseshoe shape.
We walked the inside perimeter, amazed at the height and ruggedness of the area.  Like all of Oregon’s state parks, it was clean and beautiful but not easy to find.

Sue rests after the climb into the
center of the tuff ring.

Back on track, we retraced our 25 miles and located the correct road.  It meant going back past the overturned hay truck.  A young guy, probably in his 20’s, a girl and a German shepherd dog stood sullenly looking at all the bales of hay, still slightly green.

We back up quite a way into the Outback to photograph
all of Fort Rock at one time.

The truck had been uprighted, and firemen hosed down the spilled gasoline.  A sign nearby the road announced, “Wreck Ahead.”

We felt bad for the driver.

 

We drove through Christmas Valley, advertised as a retirement community, because it was too early to check in at the motel.  Andy was in search of Lost Forest, a biological anomaly.

The Lost Forest Research Area preserves a 9,000-acre stand of ponderosa pine growing in the middle of Oregon’s high desert.  These trees receive eight to ten inches of rain a year, whereas ponderosa normally require at least 14 inches.  No one knows how they live here so isolated, 40 miles east of the Fremont National Forest.  A water-resistant layer of soil may allow surface sand to trap and retain moisture, so these trees could be Pleistocene Age remnants when the climate was wetter and cooler.  The road in was seven miles of rutted dirt.  We weren’t even thinking about that one!



Crack-in-the-Ground is
another volcanic feature
of the Oregon Outback.

We gave up on the sand dunes.  They were only open to off-road vehicles anyway.  The pamphlet said they have reached 60 feet and are part of a 16,000-acre Sand Dunes Wilderness Study Area.

Nothing is marked clearly and most of the roads are dirt, but we tracked down what we thought was Fossil Lake by the clouds of blowing white dust.  We parked on a dirt drive and walked in about 500 feet.  “I’d never got out if I had tried to drive in here,” said Andy.  “The Fiesta doesn’t have enough clearance.”  Clouds of powdery dirt rose from our feet with each step.  Talk about soil erosion!   But we wanted to see this veritable treasure trove of fossils from the Pleistocene Epoch, 10,000 years ago.  Fossil Lake has yielded bones of 68 bird species, including flamingos, eagles and geese, and 23 mammal species, including mammoths, camels, beavers, giant ground sloths and three horse species.  The dust blew in clouds.  This is NOT a nice place.

For two miles the earth opens up and
explorers can walk between the cracks.

“I really feel sorry for anyone who lives to the east,” said Andy.

It was only later that we found out the lake we thought was Fossil Lake was really Christmas Lake, the centerpiece for what was to be the beautiful retirement community of Christmas Valley!

“Crack-in-the-Ground” is supposed to be off a paved road,” said Andy.  I noticed a small marker, but the road was certainly not paved.  We followed the washboard dirt for 7.1 miles, at first going 10 m.p.h. with our brains rattling and then learning that at 20 m.p.h. the car took the bumps better than we did.  It kind of glided over some of the washboard instead of settling into each groove.

The road took us high and deep into sage brush country to a distinctive volcanic feature called Crack-in-the-Ground.  We parked and followed a dirt path about .3-mile to a picnic area with a visitor sign-in pad.  Before us was a two-mile long fracture in a lava flow that reaches a depth of 50 feet in places and is 10 to 15 feet wide.  The two opposing walls form an exact match.  Stepping carefully, we made our way down into the 1,000-year old seam.

Earthquake! It was all I could think of!

The crack traps cold air, like being in a cave.  We probably walked about half a mile before turning around.  There was no way to scale the sides to get out.  “It goes on and on,” called Andy, a couple turns or crooks ahead of me.  I think we’ll have to retrace our steps, but isn’t it cool?”

He was absolutely right; it was fascinating, but I was uncomfortable.  All I could think of was earthquake!

“Okay,” I said, “but you had better wait for me!”

He usually does!