Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Böglands (Part Three)

 

 

The Montero lurches back and forth and sideways. Kip has become adept enough to accurately pick his way between the most aggressive rocks, but it is still a careful balancing act to maintain a speed slow enough to keep us from bouncing our heads off the ceiling, yet fast enough to keep Rico in sight..at least mostly in sight. Then again, it doesn’t pay to follow Rico too closely on account of the curtain of dust tossed up by his tires.

Once again we are approaching the edge of the canyon and once again we will be required to survey our resources and evaluate our prospects. Not having a vehicle, I’m not troubled much with these decisions beyond figuring out which driver is liable to kill me the most and lobbying to ride with the one who won’t. Fortunately, we’ve ridden rapids on wilderness rivers together, negotiated powerful tidal currents together, and together even stood at the edge of Rico’s conspicuously excessive campfires.Maybe all of this has simply fostered a false sense of security, but it might also be interpreted as a history of shared experiences that lead to trust.

Somewhere down there is our campsite. At this point, I feel it is important to add that this picture could have, besides expressing the drama of at least two adventurers facing their unknown futures, easily also been a marvelous advertisement for Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer (Want to sponsor us? Leave a note in the comments). We all drink it, and some of us drink it exclusively (We’re talking about you, water!). Just what do you think Rico and Kip have in their hands right now?

 

Imagine product placement like this…

 

Or this (see what we’ve done there? It says Drive Slowly and Enjoy BeEr!).

 

The path before us surrenders more and more of its area to encroaching vegetation and the grade becomes more pronounced.

 

But finally we begin to catch glimpses of the Owyhee River.

 

In a parched land, the shimmering, pulsing artery of blue and green is unmistakable, bringing the possibility of life to this vast landscape.

 

 

As the path grows narrower and as it begins to trace switchbacks into the hills in its effort to dip to the valley floor, we become aware that in places, we may find it difficult or impossible to turn around - that is, once we begin our decent, we may be forced to proceed forward unless, as a driver, you can tackle complicated off-road bits going backwards. So perched on the edge of Yoda’s proverbial, “...do or do not.” Rico elects to reconnoiter the route ahead on foot.

To me, the route looks kind of crazy. It straddles the pointy edge of a ridge that makes it look like Kip and Rico will be driving on the cutting edge of the curved blade of a scimitar.

And this I suppose, is the reason we go on these camping trips. Up until this point, you could say we’ve been on vacation. We’ve been on a guided tour. We’ve visited spots along the way, like you do on the way to Disneyland. But now, just maybe, there’s a chance that this can all turn into an adventure. We don’t know exactly where we will camp. We don’t know exactly how or if we’ll get there. We’ve found a place to step into the unknown - a place where we can take calculated risks and the results will depend on the quality of our decisions and our skills.

 

 

Now, instead of the mediators our culture has devised to serve as a safety net, we will be dealing more directly with the Earth. Granted, we aren’t exactly adrenaline junkies, but I feel it is correct to say that finding that primal connection - fitting more closely into the Eco-system - slipping back into the food chain - somehow it feeds latent appetites.

Our day-to-day media-rich environment is saturated with memes that implore us to “Boldly go where no one has gone before” or “...take the road less traveled”, or “Don’t follow any path at all…but make a trail”. Cinema, literature, music, they all have substantial road-trip genres. Even our earliest stories, our scriptures and our myths tell of adventurers and quests and God imploring patriarchs to step into unknown futures.

 

 

“...Mellow is the man who knows what he’s been missing

Many, many men can’t see the open road…”

- Led Zeppelin 

 

 

If all goes well, we assume we’ll soon be passing by that lone shrub down below.

 

 

 

 

It seems the Owyhee has meandered back and forth across the wide valley floor for a very long time. The place it has settled in for now is far away from the picturesque canyon walls. The river wears a delicate necklace of grasses and shrubs and opportunistic trees. We find a small stand of trees with healthy canopies and set up camp.

 

 

Up river, the road terminates in an abandoned ranch. The canyon stretches around a bend and on out of sight.

 

 

Tall grasses grow along the river and hide its banks in shade…

 

Photo Credit: Rico

 

…and Uncle Rico quickly sets about filling up his stringer.

 

Photo Credit: Kip

 

For a change, I try to remember how to clean fish without asking Rico again.

 

 

Kip and Rico have already begun setting up the kitchen.

 

 

Rico deep fries the batter-dipped small-mouth bass.

 

 

Kip acts as bartender.

 

Fish Taco (One species, two if you count avocado as a species)

Now that we are in the canyon, the temperature at night is much warmer. Even so, the increase in insects spurs Kip to break out his tent.

Deb catches the four Galilean Moons careening around Jupiter

...to be continued...

PART 4: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part Four) 

Have you missed any previous installments?

PART 1: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part One)

 

PART 2: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Böglands (Part Two) 

Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Böglands (Part Two)

 

It wasn’t until The Riley Store that I remembered I hadn’t brought my sleeping bag. That’s a pretty significant omission. It doesn’t inspire your team very much with your level of expertise and camping experience so I didn’t make a big deal about it. 

 

Unfortunately, with the Riley store situated in the middle of nowhere, everything in it fell under the heading of rare or endangered and therefore everything was exponentially more expensive then, say, if I bought it on sale at Bi-mart. Besides, we were entering the heat of the day, and just how cold can it get at night in the desert anyway? So with a sense of unwarranted pride and denial, I managed to repress this issue until night had fallen and it came time to unroll my sleeping bag. 

 

My first idea was to put on all the clothes I had packed and hope my tent could make up the difference, but it wasn’t long before I found I was shivering. The way my tent is constructed, the rain-fly acts as the roof and it’s the only thing that keeps the heat in. That rain-fly worked more efficiently though when I took it down and wrapped it around me burrito-style. 

 

Finally comfortable, I tried to stay awake and watch, through the top of my tent, the stars’ hourly testimony regarding the Earth’s off-axis twirling. Meteors would wait for me to give up looking for them and then shoot across the sky so fast I thought I imagined them. Soon enough, blazing Van Gogh stars whirled like dervishes in my dreams.

TANGENT ALERT!

I’ve just tried to give you a glimmer of an idea of what it’s like to be in a tent on a desert plateau beneath the Milky Way. But, as I reviewed my photo archives, it became apparent that I hadn’t actually taken a picture from the perspective of inside my tent. I guess, in real life, you don’t necessarily know what the ‘photo moments’ are going to be, or, for one reason or another, you may lack the coordination and patience to operate your camera (thank you Kip’s new Margarita recipe!). Yet, despite the shivering, and the middle of the night repurposing of equipment, those moments of awe beneath the gaze of the universe…well, those are the moments.

 

The only thing I can tell you for sure is that none of my pictures do those moments justice. I still want to try to share them though, so in this case, I thought I could suggest the scene via a combination of photos that I did take.

 

 

 

First, I found this picture of the Milky Way from that same night. The Montero and the Jeep are visible at lower right. I’m facing South for this picture, but my tent was orientated East-West and I was laying on my back with my head to the East. That means I had to re-orientate the sky like this…

 

 

 

Now the South side of the picture is at left. Also I’ve zoomed in a little bit to replicate the fact that I’ll only be able to see a portion of the view through the top of my tent. Technically, that’s the sky from that night, though technically, it obviously can’t be exactly the same portion I was able to see looking through the top of the tent while lying down.

 

 

 

The next image I need is the inside of my tent. I found one from an old trip near the Deschutes River. I take some time to painstakingly cut out the segments of the picture that have sky in them and then I use the leftover tent bits as a frame.

 

 

 

Then I work at trying to make the layers fit together, darkening the colors evident in the tent to match the night. Since I’ve cut out the mosquito netting in the original tent picture, I insert an exaggerated canvas texture into the star picture to simulate the missing netting. The net result is a composite which seems accurate to my memory. It’s the real sky from that night. It’s really my tent. The parts that don’t seem correct to me are the stars - how bright and clear they were - and how they twinkled.

 

 

But a real picture wouldn’t show that either. In fact, in this particular picture, my light-painting of the foreground convinced the camera’s white-balance auto-adjustment feature to paint the sky a hideous magenta color that I couldn’t stomach, and, not smart enough to correct the color balance manually, I settled for de-saturation. The arrow, by the way, points to my topless tent (people who bring their sleeping bags evidently don’t need to set up their tents). As you can see, I’m not trying to pull a fast one over on you with my composite photo. 

 

I’ve provided this photography tangent for the sake of transparency and hopefully to preserve my integrity as a reliable narrator.

Speaking of photographic integrity. Our next stop was The Pillars of Rome. Sounds exotic, doesn’t it? As context, I should point out that planning these trips is an unlikely beer-fueled brainstorming process that most resembles disparate dogs meeting each other at a random dog park. I’m tempted to characterize just how disparate we are, but I think I’ll limit my remarks to myself and say that the Kip, Rico, and Deb triumvirate is a rare association where the Vulcan philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations isn’t just a corny science fiction concept…or at least it’s an environment where I can make a nerdy observation like that and not be ridiculed and exiled…I think…mostly. 

We try to be sensitive to each other’s interests, whether that’s blasting bunnies with a shotgun, mastering off-road skills, or capturing scenic landscapes. I had steeped myself in internet images of The Pillars of Rome to the point that I had begun to believe it might be one of the seven wonders of the world, and having mentioned it at a planning meeting, Rico did his due diligence and fit it into our itinerary. 

Not so early in the morning, the Montero is whizzing along an actual road, smooth enough to permit me long stretches of dozing as I wait for my headache to dissipate. The sound of the tires and a sudden inertial shift alert me that we are following Rico off to the side of the road. I open my eyes to find myself in what might be characterized as a broad flood-plain. I guess that someone has to make a pit-stop. I exit the car and look around. In the distance I note some variegated erosional land-forms. 

 

“This is it,” Rico says, “The Pillars of Rome.”

 

 

One of Rico's pictures + one of my pictures combined

 

Kip opens a can of sour cream flavored Pringles and shares them. We munch away together and dutifully look at the scene for a few moments.

I wonder. Would people come to visit my backyard if I called it The Layered Gardens of Nebuchadnezzar? Would they be disappointed to see out-of-control blackberries and an old apple tree tipping over? 

‘Marketing’ really makes a difference.

 

 

 

Later as our two vehicle convoy winds its way through Rome, I see that these land-forms are common and taken for granted by the locals.

 

We leave Rome behind in our dust trails and venture out into refreshingly unremarked-upon land.

 

 

 

Rico and Kip continue to follow inscrutable markings and symbols on their GPS devices. The idea is to find a way into the canyon. Somewhere down there at the bottom of the canyon is a river.

 

We follow way-points and coordinates gleaned from specialized internet forums rather than the tentative, outdated, dashed lines that appear on our maps and which are optimistically described as jeep trails. We have managed to drop some distance down the side of the canyon, to a point where the road below seems tantalizingly close.

 

 

 

But a few more bouncy miles around the next switchback reveals another washed-out section of road standing between us and our goal. Rico and Kip hike down to the blockage and compare the appearance of the problematic terrain to their self-perceived skill-sets and to the capabilities of their vehicles. They have to consider how much gas we have left, what our plan of action is if one of the vehicles get stuck, and how much water remains. Then, assuming they can negotiate the path down, will they be able to do it again coming back up? If they can’t, do we have enough gas to find another way out?

 

Once again the verdict is - too risky. We don’t even know for sure if there is a suitable place to camp down there. We manage to turn around on the single-lane track and begin our climb back up to level ground when a Ford pick-up truck pulls up. We stop and exchange greetings and we warn the old white-haired octogenarian couple inside about the washed out section of road that lies before them.

 

 

 

I can see a walker in the back of their truck and I’m thinking it would be pretty bad if those two got stuck out here. The old man driving is cordial and polite and he listens to us, but he doesn’t seem too concerned. He decides to drive on around the corner to see for himself. We hang around briefly, just in case they get in trouble and need assistance, but it isn’t too long before down below, we see the dust trail from his truck as it speeds away across the canyon floor.

 

 

 

 

Well…we still have other way-points to check out. Who knows, maybe we'll decide to come back this way when that old guy isn't looking.

 

In the meantime, there are other options which look very promising. 

 

(To be continued...)

 

Did you miss Part One? Follow this link:

Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part One)

Part Three can be found here: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part Three)

Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Böglands (Part One)

 

Ruby and Gemma celebrate the end of the world in 2020

In August of 2021, as Summer rounded out the year with its characteristic spurt of heat, Oregon wildfires decided it was finally time to make their bid for infamy and proceeded to scorch the sky by burning 10 times the acreage they burned the previous year. Then, also, U.S. COVID-19 deaths surged past the 600,000 mark (currently 1,127,152) a year and a half after Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow reassured the public, “We have contained this, I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight. We have done a good job…”

 

Owhyee Canyonlands in 2021

The Southeast corner of Oregon had long been enticing Kip, Uncle Rico, and me ever since our introduction to Steens Mountain, and though we knew the area was isolated and often desert-like, we also reasoned that triple-digit temperatures somehow seemed more wholesome in an actual desert rather than urban Portland. Shifting winds modulated the atmosphere from opaque to hazy to clear, but never predictably. For the most part, the smoke made even the most epic vistas look something like the dystopian environments depicted in motion pictures like Soylent Green.

Once again we comprised a convoy of two off-road capable vehicles (Rico’s Jeep and Kip’s increasingly capable Montero) and veered off the highway just after taking advantage of an ice-buying opportunity at the Riley Store, which, apart from the post office building across the highway, appears to embody the entirety of the town of Riley.

This region was once covered with Pleistocene pluvial lakes and hosts some of the oldest known inhabited sites in North America. Archaeologists have only recently found artifacts here that suggest humans were in the Riley area 18,000 years ago. With the advent of the Holocene, however, a long drying-out phase began which reduced formerly vast lakes to barren salty playas.

 

Evidence of a richer past can sometimes be discovered in the flat surfaces of rimrock that overlook long-lost shorelines.

 

Rock paintings as they appeared              after processing with D-stretch    

 

 

Since I was not required to drive, I hadn’t spent as much time previewing the route as I should have. I quickly lost my bearings in landscapes that reiterated a few basic themes about how to become alone and lost.

 

 

Eventually, we passed through the Saddle Butte W.S.A. (Wilderness Study Area). It was notable for possessing several lava tubes, one of which we managed to find by assuming a correlation between lava tubes and random rock cairns that dotted the terrain.

Tumbleweed receptacle

Some of the entryways were less amenable to guests than others.

Photo Credit: Kip

Uncle Rico eventually found a path into the underworld.

The cave was cool, but not delightfully cool in the same way that death is restful, but not the way I’d prefer to catch up on sleep. Once we cleared the large boulder-field at the narthex of the cave, the tube traced a serpentine path down a gravitationally defined incline of dried silt accumulated over ages(?) It didn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that, though subtle, the tube was laid out like an elongated funnel. 

I don’t know for sure how far or how long we walked (like fishing stories, spelunking stories lend themselves to exaggeration) until our path terminated in an Uncle Rico shaped hole beyond which Rico didn’t feel the need to probe and Kip and I couldn’t fit.

LEFT: That time lava dripped from the ceiling. CENTER: (Photo Credit: Rico) Mini stalactites? RIGHT: Cave wall with localized mystery sheen.

The walls of the lava tube doubtless tell informative stories to those who can read them. We supposed that we were reviewing a catalog of the different ways basalt can cool from its molten state or the ways chemicals can leech over geologic time. In places, the basalt walls had a curious donut-like icing. Where I was reticent to even touch unknown glazes - my brain harboring references to cautionary horror movies like The Thing, or Stormy Daniel's Bikini Kitchen - Uncle Rico’s scientific curiosity eventually compelled him to lick the wall in a quest for more data points. I don’t think he discovered anything conclusive, but on the bright side, he didn’t drop over dead from some prehistoric pathogen a matter of days later. I am still uncertain whether he should be emulated or not (what if cave walls taste like bacon?).

 

 

 

The question you have to ask yourself in a lava tube (or any cave) is, “How did all those big chunks of rock come to lie on the floor of the cave?” followed by, “Is that concavity in the ceiling a perfect fit for the rock lying below it?” 

Do you ever, when you’re walking down the street, happen upon groups of people being still and quiet, just silently waiting for an earthquake? I haven’t. There’s probably a good reason for that. So to summarize, when deep inside a lava cave, may the odds always be in your favor.

Though hidden in the depths of the Earth, we cannot yet hide from the relentless march of time. Rico reminds us that we must still find a path to the Owyhee River so three intrepid cavemen emerge into the lengthening rays of the sun. We are re-entering a world that teases the apocalypse, but hopefully, we are leaving our misshapen shadows behind on the walls of the cave (Given a little more thought, that could probably be crafted into a fine allegory).

I’m not driving, but I can’t help but notice that our working definition of ‘road’ has become somewhat more elemental. Here, a working road appears to be merely a story told by an unknown predecessor.

The Owyhee River Canyon is, in places, 1000 feet deep and Rico has chosen a particular story about how to get to its bottom. But it turns out the story is out of date and doesn’t account for one deluge or another that erased its physical basis. Given time and resources, we could perhaps create a path, or pick one through the prickly brush, but help is far away and there is no need to go all-in at this point in the trip. 

Deb makes chicken cordon bleu. It's not three species tacos, but it isn't Seven-Eleven roller hot-dogs either. (Photo Credit: Rico)

 

We retrace our route back to the plateau and set up camp in a bare spot. From this vantage point, half the world is sky and half the world is ground and as the last light from the sun retreats beyond the horizon, we soon discover how dark the nights can be and how radiant the stars.

 

Would you like to read Part Two? Follow this link:

Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Böglands (Part Two)