Jaci Dawn

I don’t know what it is about dropping over the pass and into the Alvord country, but I feel a sudden “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh” settle over my spirit when we do. There’s a junction at the bottom of the grade: south two miles to Fields and on to Nevada or north. We took north. The first five miles are paved, but then it turns into a wide gravel road that winds through ranches, the community of Andrews, and more ranches, turning along property lines and taking you steadily north. Cheat grass faded white, sagebrush and green alfalfa fields pass by until the last rise.

Suddenly, the earth drops off and you’re staring at the dry lake bed of the Alvord Desert on one side and rolling sagebrush foothills to Steens Mountain on the other side. There’s very little green except what is irrigated or where there is a natural water source (small springs up the draws and the natural hot springs at privately owned Alvord Hot Springs). One draw is always green: Pike Creek.

Pike Creek is glacier-fed from a multitude of springs in that high box canyon on the east side of Steens. It is a year-round creek, but I’ll post more on the water flow later.

It’s the house-sized boulders that fascinate. You can see them, littered down the canyon: remnants of some great glacial melt, push from that canyon and deposited along the hill side. They are not basalt rock, but some sort of sedimentary rock. And they aren’t ordinary colors: they are pink, green, purple, and then brown, black and white. The rocks are amazing and I will do an entire blog on them.

The road up takes some skill to navigate as the smaller boulders make up much of it.

You can’t see if anyone else is camped up there until you are right on top of them, so we always hold our breath going up: we want the campsite under the “big rock” with the juniper growing out of it, right at the very top of the camp ground.

(Yes, that’s Harvey barking. Harvey is always barking. Harvey can be a pest.)

We made it, we got our camp site, and we’re ready to do NOTHING for the next few days except to sit in our chairs and watch dogs play in the water or the wind blow up dust storms down on the Alvord.

ttfn –