Travels in Oregon

As the years pass, I think more often of my trips across the country and of the many beautiful rivers I walked along or crossed in the course of those spirit-lifting travels into new lands. One of them in particular I can never forget and think about from time to time, specifically in connection with eastern Oregon, one of the last great open, empty places in the continental U.S.

The John Day River rises in the Umatilla National Forest of north central Oregon, at the convergence of several branches, including the North, South, and Middle Forks of the river which are stunningly beautiful streams in their own right. Up near the source waters in the Blue Mountains are towering and majestic Ponderosa Pines. After the main river is formed from its tributaries, it widens significantly and flows through basalt canyonlands with vertical cliffs up to 500 feet high, and then makes its way through sagebrush rangeland to the Columbia River. It is the longest free-flowing river in the Columbia’s basin, undammed for its entire length. For 246 miles it is protected as a Wild and Scenic River and 327 miles are designated as an Oregon Scenic Waterway.

Much of the fascinating history of eastern Oregon is associated with the John Day, and Arthur Campbell has chronicled it mile by mile in this book “John Day River: Drift and Historical Guide.” I remember staying in the little town of John Day and driving east one morning along the river and seeing a valley of incomparable beauty and the snow-capped peak of Strawberry Mountain in the distance. Here follows an excerpt from my travel journal, dated August 6, 1984 and written in Ontario, Oregon. It describes my first real acquaintance with this area of the country and my obervations about the John Day River:

Yesterday was a day of contrasts, of otherworldly scenery and vistas, constantly changing and new for me. Eastern Oregon was the Old West and a New World.

Deschutes River State Park is near the site where Oregon Trail emigrants first saw the wide Columbia River and got a glimpse of the end of their westward journey. A brisk wind was blowing as I stood on the banks of the river where it flows into the Columbia. To the north was the Columbia River Gorge and to the south and east the hills, plains, and rock outcroppings that characterize the dry eastern part of Oregon in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains.

On a remote stretch of highway, open space and wheat fields stretched out endlessly to the horizon. The land was gently rolling, then the road entered a drier, rockier area with high hills. Down again into canyons and on to the valley of the John Day River. At John Porres Park on the river, the John Day is in the last stretch of its 284-mile journey to the Columbia from its source waters high in the Blue Mountains. Here was perfect stillness by the river, slowing flowing through quite barren ranchland. There is an exquisite beauty to these hills and conyons, so silent and mysterious.

I just had to make a short side trip through the town of Fossil. Like other towns distantly interspersed on the highway, it is an outcropping of life, a sheltering habitat of green for humans who have settled in this great, open desert-like land. From Fossil it is about 100 miles to the nearest larger city or town. The place has a look of almost defiant independence, as did Condon and Wasco, two other tiny hamlets I passed through.

At the junction of two highways, I at last came to my goal for this day’s traveling — the road skirting the upper John Day River and leading to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. Again, hills and rock slides, but this time a winding road following every turn and bend in the John Day for more than 100 miles. The desert everywhere ended abruptly at the river, which was a long ribbon of oasis — cottonwoods, willows and lush reeds along its banks. The road would wind up low hills and to slight overlooks where the formerly narrow river widened and was separated by sand and gravel bars.

The stretch from Kimberly to near the town of John Day has fantasic rock formations, sedimentary layers of green and beige with basalt columns rising up in defiance of ceaseless erosion by the elements. There are occasional torrential rains and thunderstorms here, but the average annual rainfall is about 12 inches. Some of the most valuable fossil remains of plants and animals from as long ago as 40 million years have been found in these layers of rock. At Fornee Fossil Beds, I walked a short trail among sagebruch to an overview of the John Day River valley and the jagged rocks which protruded above the smoother hills. Silence but for the wind blowing strong. In ways I felt like I was at the top of a mountain on the moon or some other alien landscape. There was the slighly unreal sensation of being toally alone, apart from the rest of the world. I can just begin to appreciate what it must have been like for the Oregon settlers who traversed this land over the wagon ruts of earlier, perhaps luckier, expeditions. Water is a profoundly precious commodity. Nearly all the creeks which led to the John Day were nothing more than shallow, dry rock and gravel beds, with only the faintest hint of the water which last coursed down these streambeds.

Despite the strange new beauty of eastern Oregon, I began to wear down a bit after leaving a last scenic section of mountains and Ponderosa pine to enter this time a true desert with high hills in the distance. This wore on for many miles in 92 degree heat until I came at last to Ontario. One observer of those who endured the hardships of this area in pioneer times posed the question: Why would anyone leave the comforts of a settled life back East to strike out with family and every earthly possession capable of being transported on a trail which crossed mountains, deserts and Indian territory, and which offered the prospect of starvation, disease, a pitiless sun and no water? The answer, he concluded, will probably never be know. I think those determined early settlers who came across the country on the Oregon Trail were powerfully inner-motivated to discover a new life and have the chance to “follow the setting sun,” but their reasons must contain many other hidden truths.

(Written in 1999)