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:
We’re not, as a rule, that fond of golf resorts. But Sunriver — outside Bend near Mount Bachelor — was so Christmasy during the holidays we had a ball staying there and skiing for a few days. Fresh snow blanketed the desert and it felt like a true winter wonderland.
The lodge was thoroughly decorated and even had a room full of gingerbread houses. How cool is that?
We don’t know whether it’s the two-headed calf, the delicious patty melts or the 21 stillborn fawns that are stuffed and mounted along the walls — but we love this place.
The Mohawk Restaurant & Lounge in Crescent — that’s right where Highway 58 from Willamette Pass runs into Highway 97 — has been there since the mid 1930s. Somewhere along the line they started collecting taxidermy. Then people started bringing them dead animals. No one apparently knew when to quit.
The result is a marvelously over the top collection of dead fauna, from native Oregon deer (all those babies’ mothers were road kills, the menu points out, presumably along the highway out front) and a bobcat, to more foreign critters.
Also proudly displayed are about a billion of those cheesy old whiskey bottles. How good does it get?
Oh yeah — the food’s great, too.
