Malheur in the spring
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
Birding south of Burns over Memorial Day weekend we discovered what really lies at the end of the rainbow in Harney County: an abandoned and wrecked farmhouse.
Eastern Oregon on The Real Oregon
Most of Oregon is not covered in green trees. About two thirds of the state, in fact, is high desert — Great Basin country, in more exact terms — and has its own distinct culture, one far removed from the liberal-leaning towns of the Willamette Valley.
Eastern Oregon is a land of cowboys and sagebrush. It’s where the deer and antelope play, and where, each year, people go to hunt them.
It’s a remote and unpopulated place, where people travel long distances to get anywhere — even to a neighbor’s house. The Crane school district, which is the size of some Eastern states, has one high school, so most of its students board there five days a week. Some students arrive by airplane from remote ranches.
Steens Mountain is nearly 10,000 feet tall and has the most beautiful gorges you’ll ever see, even though the Bureau of Land Management built a road right to the top.
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Harney County south of Burns, is spectacular for the birds that stop there during spring migration. Head south to Fields for a great cheeseburger and shake with the cowboys who wander in for lunch. Go to the far southeast corner of the state, at a place called Three Forks, and you might as well have driven back to the 19th century.
To the north, a little-traveled desert mountain range can be found in the Strawberry Wilderness in Grant County.
Read on to discover more about the Oregon high desert:
Malheur in the winter
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
Most people come here to Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in spring, summer or fall. They don’t know what they’re missing by skipping the remote vastness of eastern Oregon’s Harney County during the months when the landscape is brilliant with cold and almost completely empty of people.
We’ve been making regular winter trips here for the last few years and love it. There is nothing quite as bracing as a winter dawn at Malheur, whether it’s 3 degrees on a sharp clear morning or 15 degrees and foggy.
And, yes, there are birds, even in the most challenging weather. We found a flock of Bohemian Waxwings next to the Blitzen River at Page Springs Campground — which was, inexplicably, completely empty on a beautiful (OK, chilly) weekend day.
Coyotes serenaded us day and night, and we saw half a dozen Great Horned Owls in the willows by the river — all cold enough to sit quietly while we watched and photographed them. We stayed, as usual, at the delightful Malheur Field Station, right inside the refuge itself.
Photos on this page are all courtesy Noah Strycker.
