Protecting the Landscape

"What do we want to give up for renewable energy in Oregon?Do we want to give up a place like this?” asks Matt Little, conservation director for the Bend-based Oregon Natural Desert Association.We are standing at the base of the nearly 10,000-foot peaks that make up the east ridge of the Steens Mountain Wilderness.It's taken 3 1/2f hours of driving east from Bend, then south from Burns to reach this spot alongside Mann Lake.Pelicans are soaring above, circling up towards the peaks, riding the thermal air currents that flow along the mountainside. Other than the wind, the only sound are the birds. Thousands of them, scattered across the shallow, weed-filled lake.“I don't think people would want them on the top of Crater Lake or the Grand Canyon," says Little, referring to the proposed wind towers.The Echanis wind power project, planned by Columbia Energy Partners, has obtained its final approval to be built on private land.While it's hard to imagine the turbines, each said to be comparable in size to the Statue of Liberty, towering down on this wilderness, it's equally hard to imagine halting a project that produces clean, renewable energy and jobs in a county with 12.5 percent unemployment.

The Voice of the People

"We need jobs. We need to use our renewable resources," said Pete Runnels, a Harney County commissioner.The Echanis project would bring 100 construction jobs and 8-12 jobs long-term.Though the numbers seem small, Harney County's population is equally small. Runnels says by comparison, it would be like bringing 1,500 new jobs to Portland.His deep love for the Steens Mountains and the appreciation for the natural beauty is obvious within a minute of our conversation. "I can remember hiking into a creek, and there was a chipmunk that was sick. I mean, you could tell, it just wasn't running from you, it would walk and stagger. And caring for that, the community of nature all around, it's a memory that's stuck in my mind forever," Runnels says, recounting a fond childhood memory in the Steens.It's a love for the landscape born from a lifetime in the community. A life that has led him to stay, when many others have left.Harney County still is not up to the employment level it saw in the 1980s when lumber was king of the town.For Runnels, the owner of the local Figaro's pizza franchise, Harney County is home, whether the economy sinks or swims. He is not excited to see the blinking red lights on the wind towers at night, but he's also frustrated.For years, he, along with others in the county government, have been working to bring jobs to Harney County.While he recognizes the projects' environmental impact, the trade-off in mitigation and community benefits outweigh the negatives, in his view.But the project may never come to fruition.ONDA has sued the Secretary of Interior, accusing his agency of violating the Steens Act in approving the transmission line needed to carry electricity from the turbines to the power grid.That's put county commissioners, like Runnels, on the sidelines of a lawsuit that directly impacts their community."This has to be just how the Native Americans felt when the white man came west. You talk about being run off your land and not having a voice in your land -- we're reliving it,” said Runnels.

The Ranch Owner's Struggle

County commissioners are not the only ones feeling left out of the decision."All too often, the decisions the government agencies make and the follow up litigation, does not involve the people that are effected most and most directly,” says Stacy Davies, manager of the Roaring Springs Ranch. The transmission line will cross his property."We have mixed feelings about the project,” says Davies. He's turned down several projects on the land he manages, but he has yet to turn down the transmission line crossing his land. No claim of eminent domain can be made, if a power pole is to go up, Davies will have to give his approval.A combination of income potential and simply being a 'good neighbor' has left him open and willing to give that okay. In a land where ranches are measured in the tens of thousands of acres, if not hundreds of thousands, being a good neighbor takes on new meaning.Davies makes a poignant argument against wind power.The project will be subsidized through tax breaks and other incentives. In his view, if it can't pay for itself without incentives, it does not make economic sense to build it in the first place.Instead, he advocates for building projects closer to where the power is needed.Those projects will also have some negative impacts on the environment. As part of all large-scale efforts, energy projects have to mitigate the damage they cause to specific environmental parameters.For example, the developer of a wind turbine that is expected to lead to the death of five golden eagles a year may be required to retrofit 30 power poles (that may also cause five eagle deaths a year) to make them safe and balance the losses.Davies advocates for a different form of mitigation. Why not allow companies who develop large-scale projects buy conservation easements on land, like his own, providing a long-term protection from development?

The Long Term

The long-term view takes on the most significant impact for everyone involved in this green vs. green debate.While ONDA points to the long-term need to sustain wide open, wild spaces, Harney County officials argue the Echanis wind power project is actually the best way to protect the land.Harney County Judge Steven Grasty believes if the project is squashed, ranchers will feel they cannot make money on their land as they see fit.Already, he says, some ranch owners have come to him with plans to break up thousands of acres into smaller plots. Trophy cabins could, in theory, dot the landscape -- their roads, power lines and construction potentially resulting in an even bigger environmental impact than the Echanis project.ONDA says that is not likely. Land use regulations would prevent most, if not all, of those houses from being built. But, like the rules that governed the Steens Moutain Wilderness prior to the Steens Act in 2000, land use labels can be changed.

The Immediate Future

The lawsuit is between ONDA and the defendant, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Filed early this year, it's yet to be heard in open court. The secretary's office declined to comment, pending the resolution of the case, Columbia Energy partners declined as well.For now, it appears the final decision on the transmission line, and thus likely the wind towers, will land in the hands of a judge. Likely, that judge will be hundreds of miles from the Steens, making a decision based upon the arguments of legal representatives for ONDA and the Interior Department.If the project is halted, it's possible the proposed transmission line could be moved to cross the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. That, too, likely would face a legal challenge, but the county has an easement in place that may bolster their argument.

Oregon and Clean Energy

Oregon has set a self-imposed goal of reaching 25 percent clean energy use by the year 2025. Coupled with federal goals and the accompanying tax credits, the state has become a focal point for the green energy movement.Geothermal test sites are being drilled in the Newberry National Volcanic Monument area, south of Bend. Wave energy is being tested off the Oregon coast at various points. Solar panels cover a hillside next to the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls.Wind turbines dot the landscape, particularly in Northeastern Oregon. Ironically, some of those turbines have been shut down on occasion, due to a complex relationship with electricity demand and commitments to purchase power already being produced elsewhere.As the state pushes towards its goals, questions about the impact of building out ways to harness renewable energy will rise, some being decided in the courts.Proving one clear thing, for the entire state: There are no easy answers.

The vast and sparsely populated county, with 12.5 percent unemployment, was counting on the Echanis project to provide 100 construction jobs and up to 12 full-time maintenance jobs, said Steven E. Grasty, chairman of the county commission.

"I have never seen anything deflate a community the way that lawsuit did," Grasty said, other than the loss of the Edward Hines Lumber Co. sawmill in 1980. "This is equal to about 1,500 jobs in Portland. Huge, huge impact."

Only two other counties -- Grant and Crook -- had a higher jobless rate in March.

For some of the county's 7,422 residents, losing the project also would waste a commodity that the area has in spades. During a 24-hour test in January 2010, the average wind speed clocked on the north face of Steens Mountain was 41 mph. Chris Crowley, president of Columbia Energy Partners, the Echanis developer, said that may be unique in Oregon.

Crowley said he has been advised by his attorneys not to discuss the lawsuit. The company is still waiting for permits for its Riddle Mountain project 14 miles north of Steens Mountain. It has abandoned plans for two other similar-sized wind projects near Steens Mountain.

The lawsuit focuses on findings in a BLM environmental impact statement released last July that the turbines and transmission lines would be visible from less than one-half of 1 percent of the 170,000-acre Steens Mountain Wilderness.

Portland Audubon and the Oregon Natural Desert Association argue that the figure is meaningless because the Steens Wilderness encompasses only a fraction of the entire Steens Mountain area. Both sides seem to agree that the 415-foot-tall rolled-steel turbines would be seen from Mann Lake, Fields-Denio Road on the east side of Steens Mountain and the Steens Loop Road on the summit, but not from Frenchglen or the Alvord Desert.

The groups claim the transmission lines, wind turbines, access roads and associated developments also would threaten migratory routes and breeding areas for bighorn sheep, golden eagles and sage grouse. Further, they would slice across one of the largest remaining undeveloped landscapes in the Northwest's Great Basin, Sallinger said.

This fact is a major reason why Oregon has only protected 4% of its wilderness lands, less than half or even a third of what neighboring states like Washington (10%), California (15%) and Idaho (9%) have protected. This is, of course, not for lack of incredible lands and rivers that make Oregon so unique. It is largely due to the fact that Oregon has yet to permanently protect even a fraction of its desert lands. In Oregon, approximately 2.2 million acres or nearly 7% of our forests have been designated as Wilderness – certainly not enough, but at least a step in the right direction. In contrast, a meager 200,000 acres, or less than 1%, of Oregon’s high desert is currently protected as Wilderness despite the fact that this ecosystem covers half the state.

Interestingly, by the federal government’s own admission, there are nearly three million acres of Oregon desert lands that qualify as Wilderness and have been managed as “Wilderness Study Areas” for nearly three decades (it’s worth noting that citizen-led wilderness inventories have found that there are actually nearly eight million acres of potential Wilderness in Oregon’s high desert). The protection of just the federally-designated “Wilderness Study Areas” would increase Oregon’s wilderness percentage to 9% and bring the Desert State, sometimes referred to as the Beaver State, in line with our Washington and Idaho neighbors.

The Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA) exists to fulfill this dream. ONDA remains the only group dedicated exclusively to protecting and restoring Oregon’s high desert. Founded in 1987, ONDA boasts over 4,000 members and supporters.

Over the years, ONDA has earned many successes, including the recent protection of Oregon’s Badlands and Spring Basin as the state’s second and third desert Wilderness areas. Badlands and Spring Basin were both established by the federal Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009. ONDA was also instrumental in the creation of Steens Mountain Wilderness in 2000 and has worked hard over the past 25 years to address threats to wildlife and wildlands from impacts such as energy development, livestock grazing and off-road vehicle use.

An active volunteer network not only helped ONDA protect these key areas but has also led to the restoration of fish and wildlife havens such as Hart Mountain and the John Day River. Hard-working volunteers have planted thousands for trees, restored dozens of miles of streams, decommissioned old roads and removed enough barbed wire to stretch from one end of Oregon to the other. The removal of this barbed wire fence is critical to restoring habitat for species like the sage grouse and pronghorn. The pronghorn antelope, for example, is North America’s fastest land mammal. Approaching speeds of 60 miles per hour, an unseen fence can be a rude awakening and is one contributing factor to the long-term decline in pronghorn populations across the West. Thanks to hardworking volunteers, wildlife like pronghorn can roam more freely.

In its 25th year, ONDA is working to ensure that the wilderness gap between Oregon and our neighbors is shrinking. We are actively promoting wilderness campaigns across eastern Oregon. In the John Day Basin region, the Cathedral Rock and Horse Heaven proposed Wilderness areas (pictured above) total nearly 18,000 acres.

This proposal was introduced as legislation by Senators Wyden and Merkley and is currently awaiting mark-up in the US Senate. ONDA is also crafting wilderness proposals encompassing 100,000 additional acres in nearby areas. The Central Oregon Wilderness campaign is building the local support for two wilderness proposals to protect over 150,000 acres of high desert near the town of Bend.

At over 2 million acres and located in the far southeast corner of the state, Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands region is the largest expanse of undeveloped and unprotected wildlands in the lower 48 states and represents an incredible opportunity for American conservation.

Collectively, these lands are emblematic of Oregon’s pristine beauty and essential to the survival of native wildlife. The permanent protection of these lands would also double the amount of Wilderness in the State of Oregon and serve as a permanent reminder to Oregonians that we live in a Desert State.

Then there’s the subject-verb agreement problem with them, with it. Is it, “Steens Mountain is” or “The Steens are”? To not make them plural after undertaking a late summer four-day trek up and across one of the most varied and beautiful settings, is grammatical heresy. Like many things in the Pacific Northwest that take the name of a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader or U.S. railroad or military attache, this mountain takes the name of Enoch Steen. Steen was a lieutenant colonel of the United States Army 1st Dragoons. Chasing off of its ancestral residents of the Paiute tribe earned Steen a mountain. Dragoons or not, the idea of a singular homogenized Steen breaks down the farther the foot-traveler gets into this fifty-mile-long microSteens ecology.

One person who knows the plurality of the Steens better than most is Brent Fenty, the 37-year-old director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, or ONDA. Fenty has hiked in them, pulled fences in them, fished in them, camped in them and defended them against invasive species and corrosive legislation. He’s also the reason I’m going into them and the only chance I have of coming out of them alive.

No one would argue that there was a lot of arm-twisting before I agreed to go. The sophisticated psychological tactics that Fenty deployed were likely rehearsed before a team of experts across many disciplines before being distilled into this nugget of innocence: “Hey, I’m going to hike from Fields to Frenchglen over Steens Mountain. Do you want to go?”
If all goes well, we will have taken photos, video and general inventory of a forty-mile segment of a proposed 700-mile Oregon Desert Trail that starts in Bend and follows the shape of two udders through Plush and Fields before turning north into the Jordan Valley ending at Lake Owyhee State Park.

Day One

Into Wildhorse Canyon
Any excuse to sit down at Fields Station for a half-pound burger and a one-liter shake is probably a good one. Find a new trainer/doctor if they counsel to the contrary. If you’re working outside in 90 degree heat, driving to Las Vegas or if you think this is your last meal, all are equal atonement for the Fieldsburger. Still the lunch counter is too close to the Alvord Desert, where our first ascent awaits.

The Alvord Desert, like Steens Mountain, is a misnomer. Naturalists probably gave it the desert moniker to scare away others and keep it for themselves. This desert is the kind that’s built around a big lake with lots of water in it. To be fair, the lake is shallow and rests on top of an enormous white sandbar, a tidepool that a prehistoric sea long ago forgot to take back. When it’s a bone-dry year, the flat lake bed becomes a playground for sailboats with wheels and for land speed records, such as the one Kitty O’Neill laid down in 1976 at 512 miles an hour.

As you start the climb into the Steens, you can appreciate the twelve-mile-long runway, the water’s reflection of Pueblo Mountain and the lunch you just ate. We loaded our packs with food and fly-rods and when most hikers “set off for …,” my companion bolted like a snakebitten colt up the eastern flank of the mountain. One minute later, I was lagging and overheating, a trust we would honor for days to come.

Suddenly Fenty stopped and spun on his heels. “A leopard lizard!” A six-inch spotted lizard disappeared into the underbrush. “You don’t see them that often.”

We made quick work of a steep Jeep trail, caught our breath and cut north to begin our first side-hill traverse. The terrain was a sea of sagebrush with an undercurrent of chunky rocks. Below us, the Alvord Desert became yet more beautiful yet no more desert-like in the distance. Beneath us, our feet were stinging, smearing off the angles of heated sauna rocks.
Packing lightly for the unknown is a challenge. Every potential item has a consequence in its presence and in its omission. Weight and bulk are the existential challenge. Leaving behind a package of feral bacon can be devastating, too. Two nights before the trip, I had laid out the essentials: a pair of trail shoes, a survival knife with flint, a water bladder, a sleeping bag and biv sack, hiking poles, twelve bars dense with protein, nuts, powdered Gatorade, a fly-rod, a pair of shorts, an extravagance of three shirts including one cotton for the novelty, socks, sun block, bug repellent and some other food.

The most essential gear when bushwhacking through the high desert is your shoes. Must protect your feet at all costs. A critical part of that defense are ankle desert gaiters. You may look like you’re the errant member of a rural marching band who hit the desert and kept going, but gaiters keep your shoes from filling with sediment. A few days before the trip, Fenty told me to pick up some gaiters at REI, if I didn’t already have them. I didn’t, so I did, though it sounded a bit dramatic at the time. Deep into the first slog, they were holding up and preventing frequent stops for shoe dumps.

Within the first few hours of hiking, we had jumped a leopard lizard, and coveys of quail and chukar, an upland bird known for its ability to make ordinary tacos extraordinary. As fast a pace as Fenty marched, he tirelessly identified reptiles, birds and plants for my edification. Once, when I thought he was striding so fast that his intent was to leave me at the mercy of these reptiles, birds and plants, he suddenly stooped over the black basalt and pulled a small stone from a narrow crack in the terrain.

“An arrowhead!” he proclaimed. “It looks like someone’s worked it,” he observed of its broken top and sped off.

It was better than 85 degrees, nearly 4:30 and we had gained our first ridge of The Steens. From this lesser summit, we could look down into Wildhorse Canyon, our next objective. Yonder, Fenty assured me, lay the Wildhorse Creek with real water!

As daylight faded and as we dropped deeper into the canyon, the ecology changed. At one point, as I stood catching my breath, I was surrounded by deep wet greens of wild rose and cottonwoods. Wildhorse Creek bubbled through dense underbrush. If I had been blindfolded and led to this point by an ironic faction of eco-terrorists, I would have sworn that they had taken me into the tropical Hawaiian Pools of Oheo.

In five and a half hours, we had found joyous water in the Wildhorse Creek, flowing with such strength and through so much green that it was oblivious to the fact that this was a dry ol’ desert. Steens Mountain was inching toward plurality even as we pitched our sleeping bags, and cooked two steaks and mashed potatoes over a propane flame.
Day Two

Into the Little Blitzen
I packed a few hours of sleep into the ten seconds my eyes were closed. Breakfast was oatmeal with cranberries, hazelnuts and brown sugar. An unspeakable delight that travels well with Advil.

We packed up and set off north up the creek. If there were no Enoch Steen, the area’s Paiute name, Tse Tse-ede meaning “The Cold One,” could have survived Manifest Destiny. From where we stood alongside the Wildhorse Creek in Wildhorse Canyon, we longed for a cold one.

Day two would be the second-most challenging of our four-day excursion. We climbed Wildhorse Creek, most of it before the sun overcame the canyon. Near the top of this route, we could boot west over a saddle and into Little Blitzen Canyon, or track north for the high alpine Wildhorse Lake. Later, we traversed the ridge of Steens Mountain and punched through The Cold One’s snowfield, down through a wilderness water park and into the Little Blitzen Canyon. In day two, we would do about 5,000 vertical feet.

The race Fenty was in didn’t seem to account for the challenge ahead, pace without pacing. Pace, I always thought, implied restraint, as in “Pace yourself, Kevin! There’s plenty more, if you eat that.” We pushed through alder, willow, cottonwood, wild roses and currant at pace.
In the flower department, there was lupine, elephant’s head, mariposa lilies, penstemon, paintbrush, wild onions, aster, gentian and, Fenty spasmed, “Monkshood!” a beautiful purple flower shaped like a helmet of a Roman soldier. Like all things inside or outside of wilderness, the more beautiful, the more lethal. If this flower would have grazed our bushwhacked shins in the wrong way and found its way into our bushwhacked legs and up to our bushwhacked hearts, it could have reduced our blistering progress to permanent stasis.

Up we went, though, following the creek’s spectacular waterfalls and through wildflower beds galore. At noon, we popped over a ridge and encountered Wildhorse Lake. At nearly 8,400 feet and 90 degrees in the middle of August, patches of snow still clung to its banks, as if trucked in as part of a massive public works project. With dimensions of 1,200 feet long by 800 feet wide, Wildhorse Lake stood out like a big ol’ aqueous oddity in a tub made of porous basalt.

Two flower-mongers in their sixties had hiked down the steep trail from the Steens Mountain Loop and lingered along the rim of the lake. They must have been as impressed with this oasis as we were, for their hike back up to the rim and parking lot would be a steep one. We honed in on a sandy beach, stripped to the bug-bitten, bushwhacken flesh and jumped into the glacial waters. Ten seconds go by slowly when you’re bathing in ice water.

Dropping into the Little Blitzen Canyon is perhaps the most challenging counterpoint to the argument of this assertion of desert. The Steens Mountain snowfield rolls over its rim and dissolves into a million rivulets with tropical cabbages that double as solid footholds on steep descents. At the base is a field of flowers that rivals any I’ve seen on the wetter side of the Cascades.

Farther along down the Little Blitzen, just below a falls and a pool, we dropped our packs, took out our fly-rods and cast into the shadows.

Preparation is everything. The day before the trip, I had walked into a fly-fishing outfitter, laid my rod and reel on the counter and asked a young store clerk how not to embarrass myself while deploying these. I quickly learned which end was for fishing and which was for reeling. The coordination part would have to be banged out in practice.

Within the first few casts into the Little Blitzen, I had caught my first victim—a 20-pound redside rosebush on a new grasshopper fly. My well-angled companion caught and released two Redband trout not big enough for our appetites.

That night, Fenty pulled from his pack two welcome guests: bacon and whiskey. His flask reminded me that I had forgotten mine. The lovely liquidation made it easier to forget that I had forgotten long pants and that the brittle underbrush had carved a Jackson Pollock into my legs.

Bacon is a salve that, taken orally, is known to alleviate symptoms from bug bites to bubonic plague. Torn to pieces and folded into mac n cheese, it made for a filling end to an arduous day. We didn’t know that the toughest leg of the trip lay in ambush just over night’s dark horizon.

Day Three

Into the Blitzen
On this day, the sun rose early and furnaced itself to 90-some degrees by the time it hit the unshaded stretch of the Blitzen Crossing. This stretch was a fifteen-mile stomp along a so-called Jeep trail. After it was done, we’d plod more than eight hours through scorching heat to reach mother Blitzen, a body that collects most of the other bodies of water across several drainages in The Steens.

Early morning, the dark cool pools along the Little Blitzen were too fish-able to get an early start. My right hand and left leg began to swell from something that got into my sleeping bag that night. We had five tablets of benedryl, so I ate two.

As we trekked through the remaining thick bushes and trees along the Little Blitzen, Fenty again led out the attack. By now, I had realized that he was faster than me on the ascents, the descents, the flats, on side hills and pretty much any angle Earth and gravity would support.

Because of the rattlesnakes known to inhabit any of the thousands of bushes we were kicking into, I told him that I was happy with this pecking order. “Rattlers never bite the first one through,” he threw back at me. “It’s the second one that annoys them.”

Just before leaving the river canyon, Fenty’s hand shot up and slapped his right eye so loudly that his scream seemed of secondary import in his defense. Bees apparently don’t wait for the second hiker. A giant bee had just stung him in the right eyelid. It puffed out within seconds and we were now down to one benedryl tablet for the next day and a half.
Even with an eye and a half, Fenty seemed no slower as we strode into the hottest stretch of the trip. For our next trick, we had to cover ten miles of a rock-strewn Jeep trail to get to the Blitzen River in Cold Springs Canyon.

No Jeep ever built could have made it more than a mile on this trail without a mechanical concussion. The trail was overgrown with blonde hay and rocked with boulders. The rough provided no relief to the trail. We relied continually on our hiking poles for balance as our feet skidded this way and that over the side of rocks.

After a few hours, we pulled up for food in a small side canyon. I looked at my hand and my leg but said nothing about how large they had grown. For a while, it seemed the anti-inflammatory was getting the upper hand. Now the leg and the hand were gaining the upper hand. Fenty’s eyes followed mine.

“It’s about two and a half miles to the Steens Mountain Loop if we walk directly that way,” he said pointing west. “We can get out of here if we need to.”

I checked the temperature of both swollen areas and then my forehead for a fever caused by infection. Everything was hot, but only so hot as the day itself.
“I’m all in,” I said. “Let’s keep going.” Bravado starts and ends with binding phrases like these that you feel silly taking back later. So we went.

Fenty checked his GPS and said that we had only about five more miles to go. At our pace in this terrain, that meant a little more than two hours. We were conserving dwindling water supplies and eating along the way. For the first time this trip, I dumped Gatorade powder into my water, almost enough to caulk tile then cursed my wife for buying and packing the healthier less sugary G2.

According to the GPS gods, a couple miles ahead we would cross an “intermittent creek.” We shouldered our bags and melted back into the heat. Given the amount of snow we had this winter and the amount of water cascading down the Wildhorse and Little Blitzen canyons just a couple of drainages over, this creek was bound to be more mittent than the less fequent inter.

We plodded on quietly determined to make it to the mittent creek, controlling our energy levels and conserving our last sloshes of water. Ahead, at a treeline that denoted a creek, Fenty had stopped and was looking down. The creek! Merciful mittent creek!
“There’s not enough here.” Fenty was frowning at a series of small muddy puddles that came from the slope above him. We’d have to push on. Intermittently.

One foot in front of the other we went. Now we were in wilderness and just needed the next rivulet, the next creek, any trickle where we could pool the water then pump it into our bodies through a filtering device. We pushed on with the relentlessness of junkies in search of a fix, our water bottles boiling in the heat.

After five hours, the terrain began to soften and deepen. There were trees, and down a steep embankment lay the mighty Blitzen. Water! We took off our shoes and dipped our swollen feet in the river, got in it with clothes still on, and lay in it and filled our water bottles with it. Tomorrow would be a ceremonial hike to the finish line at Page Springs.

Dinner couldn’t come soon enough at our campsite along the Blitzen. Lasagna with meat. It’s amazing what boiling water can partially reconstitute in the wilderness.
I saved all of my sleeping for one night and this was it. There was a light breeze, the lullaby of the river and no menacing black flies nor mosquitos in the area. By 8:00, I was in a wilderness of sleep.

Day Four

Out of The Steens
Our spirits lifted knowing this was a short scramble across two rivers to Page Springs. The prior day had taken its toll on Fenty’s feet. He taped everything he could, and we de-camped. At least on that final day, I thought, I’d be able to keep pace with the debilitated version of him. Of course, he found that his wounds actually felt less worse if he quickened his pace to a jog. Oh joy.
Out of Cold Springs Canyon, across the Blitzen and out of the Steens we came … at a jog. Four days and forty miles from the Alvord Desert to outside of Frenchglen, we had ticked off an incredibly beautiful section of the proposed 700-mile Oregon Desert Trail. Though day three was classic desert, much of our desert trip was spent in some version of the tropics without humidity, surrounded by cascading water and too many flowers to name. The Steens were many, not one . They were not what I’d thought they’d be after driving past them en route to Las Vegas.
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My dad often calls from his airy in Vermont with story ideas gleaned from books he’s read, Vermont Public Radio or his own contrivance. These ideas take the form of vast generalities that need only a little bit of work to Oregon-ize them for the magazine. “Do a piece on trappers,” he has blurted. “Do a thing on fire,” he’s demanded. “What about shepherds? Are there any shepherds left?” If the roles were reversed and I were the retired professor with gads of time and peaty scotch, I might call him and say, “You got mountains there, right? They run right down the middle of the damned state! Has anyone written anything about that? Smack down the middle of the state!”

One day a year ago, though, he was onto something and it couldn’t wait. Hello? “Yeah, I was just looking at a map.” Uh-huh. “Well, the southeastern part of the state looks to be a complete shite-hole. Get down there and check it out.”

Brent Fenty, the 37-year-old executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA), a conservation group, ripped off his shirt and eased waist-deep into the water. Goosebumps rippled down his arms. His backpack bobbed before him. “I’m not getting any braver,” he said. Then he went for it, swimming for all he was worth toward a gravel bank 100 feet away. One by one, the five of us made it across.

It was Day 3 of a four-day, nearly 50-mile exploratory hike through Louse Canyon in the Upper West Little Owyhee Wilderness Study Area of southeastern Oregon, and there was no doubt we were getting spanked. But unexpected swims like this came as no surprise because no one really knew what to expect.

About 350 air miles southeast of Portland, the West Little Owyhee River, a rarely visited tributary of the better-known Owyhee River, has cut a squiggle of a gorge through sandy expanses of sage and rye. The canyon is surely among the most inaccessible places in the West. At its loneliest, the nearest human living under a proper roof is about 24 hours away by four-wheel drive, then horseback and foot. This cool crack in what is known as I.O.N. country, where Idaho, Oregon and Nevada collide, is so deep in the back of beyond that it sits in a different time zone from the rest of the Pacific Northwest. Our route would take us along the West Little Owyhee, from a rough dirt road at Anderson Crossing in the south to the river’s confluence with the main stem of the Owyhee in the north.

Most people think of Oregon as craggy coasts and big trees, but nearly half of the nation’s 10th largest state is a barren sagebrush sea so vast that distant clouds seem to disappear below the earth’s curve. ONDA, which works to protect some six million acres of the high desert east of the Cascades, which run from California to Washington, has proposed a 700-mile-long hiking trail from Bend up to the Idaho state line that would wander along more than a dozen proposed wilderness areas that highlight the desert’s often overlooked magnificence. The plan is to have the route entirely surveyed next year, with maps and signage ready by spring 2014. Much of the trail — the more accessible parts — will follow existing game trails, hiking paths and old dirt roads used occasionally by ranchers. ONDA has already mapped close to 150 miles, using a seed grant from the Portland-based Lazar Foundation, ONDA membership fees and donations from local businesses to arm volunteers with GPS units and geo-referencing cameras to document where a hiker could find water, skirt a butte or make camp.

The section through Louse Canyon is the most rugged, complicated and largely unknown part of the proposal, so Brent assembled a small team of ONDA workers to survey it themselves. My friend Chris Solomon, a regular contributor to the Travel section, and I tagged along for fun.

While the Upper West Little Owyhee River corridor itself is federally protected as a Wild and Scenic River, the land surrounding it is not. On either side of the rim you can find the lower 48’s largest swath of roadless turf that has no permanent federal protection — about two million acres of nothing but nothing. The hope is that with accurate maps, signs and route descriptions people will go and stiffer protection will follow.

The five of us were all avid backpackers with considerable experience in trail-less country, and we set off confidently into the canyon under crisp blue skies. A wild horse crested a ridge as we made our way through shin-deep water and along gravel bars lined with sweet peas and wild roses. I stopped to photograph pinnacles protruding like a pipe organ into the sky and noticed tiny fish flickering around my ankles. Brent caught one, a northern pikeminnow, with his hands. Above us soared hoodoos, those Wile E. Coyote rocks perched atop thin pillars. There were graceful arches and even hoodoos with arches. It was exceedingly gorgeous, a Utah dipped in fudge.

“The dream is alive!” shouted Chris Hansen, ONDA’s 27-year-old Owyhee regional representative.

While such remote grandeur fueled our sense of discovery, this area of the Owyhee Plateau was actually first explored centuries ago by the Tagu, a band of Northern Paiute Indians who lived off wild onions, tubers and pronghorns that today still bound across the uplands. In 1819 Donald Mackenzie, a Canadian fur trapper, named the main river stem the Owyhee after Hawaiian trappers he sent down it never returned. (“Owyhee,” pronounced “oh-WHY-hee,” comes from the word “Hawaii”). In 1863, miners struck gold north of here, but with limited water and poor soil, no towns this far south took root.

What has taken root, however, are thick stands of willows, and bashing through them is dreadful business. Within an hour of starting our hike a rubbery limb whipped my face so hard it left a bloody welt. Jeremy Fox, ONDA’s 31-year-old trail-mapping coordinator, slipped and toppled into the river. I was about to step on a rock but panicked when a rattlesnake lurking below made the consequences of that action clear. “Just step back slowly,” Chris Hansen said, using a long piece of willow — his trusty “snake stick” — to scoot the snake along. Soon all of us had snake sticks, their ends sheered off by beavers.

On that first night, we made camp on a pleasant bend in the river with a white gravel beach framed by towering gray walls. I swam in the crisp black water, which felt refreshing in the heat, as cliff sparrows darted around me, mating in midflight. It was magical, but the reality of the day was depressing: four hours of thrashing and we’d only covered four miles. At this rate we’d never make it out before our supplies and wits ran out.

“We don’t want to get to a point of no return where we can’t get out in time,” Brent said, after a dinner of corn chowder and hard-boiled eggs. “Tomorrow’s a big day. If it’s not going well, we’ll have to get out.”

But things went impressively well. The GPS on Day 2 said we’d covered a whopping 19 miles in 10 hours of hiking — a pace twice as fast as the day before. We climbed along Winnebago-size boulders, spotted golden eagles and waded around muffin-top crags. The canyon had grown no easier, but we’d learned how to move through it with the craftiness of water, aiming for the inside bends where the water was shallower and looking for small clearings in the willows so that we could push through more easily. At trouble spots we fanned out like commandos to find ways through in seconds rather than minutes. It was multisport backpacking at its best.

All hell broke loose that night as a hailstorm strafed our camp with marble-size missiles. In an effort to go as light and fast as possible, no one had brought a proper tent. Instead we slept under tarps or in weatherproof bags, called bivy sacks, and the onslaught left us confined in synthetic coffins splattered in wet sand. In the morning even my energy bars were soggy in their unopened wrappers. A cold drizzle dragged temperatures down to the low 60s, with no sun to wring us out. Worse, we hiked only a few miles before we came to the pool we had to swim across to avoid a difficult retreat. The last thing I wanted to do was dive in, but Plan B — an arduous hike upstream — was worse. I shoveled in sugary pineapple chunks to stoke my metabolic fire. My heart exploded in my ribcage as I made the other side at last.

After a second, even colder pool, Brent and Chris Hansen were shivering uncontrollably, so we paused under a rocky overhang, did jumping jacks and boiled river water to drink. “This is the best-tasting hot water I’ve ever had,” Chris Solomon said. Only after we stopped shivering did we realize how truly beautiful a spot we were in. Tiny white wildflowers clung to cracks in the weeping walls. A red-tailed hawk circling overhead fired a shrill salvo that ricocheted off the marbled rock.

“If this had been a hot July day you’d be psyched,” Brent said. “Look at these pools! You’d want to play and swim.” He was right. The place was surreal, a narrow fissure so well hidden a wagon train could fall in before anyone noticed the ground was gone.

By noon the clouds had parted, the sun had come out, and our spirits soared along with our core temperatures. We logged nearly 14 miles that day, the canyon walls opening and closing around us like an accordion. That evening we stopped on a bank within striking distance of a truck we’d parked on the canyon rim nearly a week earlier.

The final 12 miles blew by that last day, which turned hot and sunny again. We stopped to slay redband trout with wet flies that we flung into emerald green pools, and ran our fingers over the velvety white petals of mariposa lilies. Chris Solomon found a sparkling quartz arrowhead and then yanked a sun-bleached skull of a bighorn sheep out from under a rock. He strapped it to his pack for the hike out, its thick horns protruding out the sides.

On our last evening we laid in the fescue and mint along the main stem of the Owyhee. We hadn’t seen a soul, and Brent conceded that it would be tough to send hikers the way we had just come. Instead, ONDA will look at the data we’ve gathered and recommend a route that drops into the canyon for its best sections — the trout-choked holes, the pinnacles — while skirting the worst ones by moving high along the rim.

But mapping out a viable route is really just a means to an end. “It’s hard to explain to people why the desert is worth protecting and what wilderness really means,” Brent said. “But you drop somebody back in here and it all becomes immediately clear.”

IF YOU GO

Hikers should be experienced, able to swim and completely self-sufficient. Dry bags and footwear are key. Traditional hiking boots will become waterlogged nightmares. A sturdy water shoe, like Keen’s aptly named McKenzie, for the McKenzie River (which took its name from the Canadian fur trapper, Donald Mackenzie, who named the Owyhee), is critical.

WHEN TO GO Late June to August.

GUIDES The Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA) often organizes guided hikes through Oregon’s high desert, but none are as demanding as backpacking the length of Louse Canyon.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ONDA, as of now, is the best source for up-to-date information for hikers seeking to explore this region (541-330-2638; onda.org).

The Oregon Desert Trail is just a concept, but staff and volunteers with the Oregon Natural Desert Association plan to check out the 700-mile route this summer to see if it could become a reality.

“People wonder, could you get from point A to point B, entirely on public lands — with enough water — through all the areas you would want to enjoy and spend time in?” said Brent Fenty, executive director of the conservation organization.

Layers of land data

So Fenty and others with ONDA looked at where existing trails crossed portions of the High Desert, where hikers could find water, and where the wilderness and wilderness study areas connected across the landscape.

They also looked for routes that wouldn't overlap with key sage grouse habitat or interrupt other wildlife breeding seasons.

“We just layered all that information on top of each other, and through that were able to come out with a trail corridor proposal,” Fenty said.

The overall goal, he said, is to get people out in the High Desert, allowing them to connect to the wildlife and wilderness study areas and other public lands of the southeastern quarter of the state.

“People are more likely to work to protect places that they know and understand and have come to love,” he said.

“People know and understand places by going out and visiting them.”

This summer, ONDA is looking for volunteers to check the route.

“We're just making sure the trail on the ground makes sense,” said Jeremy Fox, Oregon Desert Trail inventory consultant for ONDA. “If the map says go up this ridge, but the ridge is incredibly steep or treacherous, then (the idea is) to find a route around it.”

Staffers to check route

ONDA staffers and volunteers will go out with mapping tools and cameras to document the route — whether it's old, off-highway vehicle trails or a cross-country stretch — and take notes about what's out there. About 400 miles of the 700-mile route isn't along a physical trail or road, Fox said.

Checking the route will probably take two summers, Fenty said, and once it's done, ONDA will figure out whether to submit a formal proposal to the Bureau of Land Management and other agencies. The group doesn't anticipate building new trails, he said.

In southeastern Oregon, the Lakeview District of the BLM has lots of juniper and upland desert as well as canyon lands and open sage, said Chris Bishop, outdoor recreation planner with the BLM's Lakeview District. But there aren't many hiking trails — just a few short stretches to get to wildlife viewing areas.

If ONDA wanted to develop a route through it, the group would have to submit a proposal and describe whether it would be disturbing any of the land, Bishop said.

Fox said part of the allure of the Oregon Desert Trail is being out in areas that don't have a path built in, that have more of a wild feel to them.

“I'd imagine there's a few hardy souls out there who would want to tackle the whole trail in one go,” Fox said. “It'll be incredibly logistically challenging because there's not a lot of water out there. I think most of the use of this trail in the long run will be people doing small sections of it at a time.”

Across the field, some 50 cows flick their ears and swish their tails. Behind them, the shoulders of Steens Mountain, striped with shaggy stands of juniper, hunch into a sky yellowed by smoke from a controlled burn. From here at its north end, the mountain looks like little more than a hill. But beyond, it climbs gently for miles, cresting at a 10,000-foot-high ridge of gray rock and plunging over gnarled cliffs a vertical mile down to the hardpan Alvord Desert to the east. Glacier-carved cirques gnaw at Steens' edges, and the valleys below shelter creeks and ranches like this one, which reaches into the largest of all: Kiger Gorge.

The mountain -- including this ranch and its public-land grazing allotments -- falls inside the 425,550-acre Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Area, a patchwork of private and Bureau of Land Management holdings set aside by President Bill Clinton a decade ago to protect working ranches as well as one of the most dramatic natural landscapes in Oregon. At the time, many hoped it would end longstanding conflicts between ranchers and environmentalists. The controversy, however, never really settled, and now a new kind of farm is testing efforts to cooperate.

Otley has leased part of his ranch to Columbia Energy Partners for a 104-megawatt wind farm called East Ridge, high on the gorge's rim. "There is a tremendous wind potential up here in a very small footprint if you ignore the viewshed," he says. "We can't manage the land based on subjective ideas." He's not the only one who feels that way: Two other local ranches have contracted with the Vancouver, Wash.-based company to build similar wind farms. Each will have 40 to 60 turbines standing 415 feet tall along high slopes; two of them lie within the protected area's boundaries.

Conservationists as well as some locals dread seeing turbines, flashing lights and power lines on Steens' escarpments. They say that the projects go against the spirit of the Steens Act itself, which states, "Development on public and private lands within the boundaries of the (protected area) which is different from the current character and uses of the lands is inconsistent with the purposes of this Act."

But the act doesn't provide specific protection from the wind projects because of compromises made when it was written, as well as a clear provision protecting ranchers' private-property rights. Meanwhile, critics say that the cooperative management mechanism laid out to help soothe conflicts like this has always been friendlier to locals than to outsiders. As scenic and wildlife values collide with the prospect of unexpected but much-needed economic development, tensions are rising -- not just between ranchers and environmentalists, but among ranchers themselves. "If there is a take-home message from the Steens Act," Wilderness Society consultant Andy Kerr wrote in a 2006 white paper for the Western Governors' Association, it's that "one cannot legislate cooperation."

Some 20 miles southwest of Otley's ranch, on the gentle western slope of Steens Mountain, sprawls the Roaring Springs Ranch, the largest in the protected area. It's where the final details of the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management Act were hammered out. "The whole mantra was to keep the mountain like it is," says ranch manager Stacy Davies, a key player.

The Oregon Natural Desert Association, or ONDA, a conservation group based in Bend, Ore., had long pushed for Steens Mountain to become a national park, where livestock grazing would be prohibited. In 1999, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt -- who first heard about Steens in a college geology course -- swooped into Harney County with an ultimatum: Find a way to protect the mountain, or accept a national monument. Ranchers didn't need to be reminded of the recent designation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which forbade future development, eliminated cross-country motor vehicle travel and -- critics feared -- opened the door to reduce grazing across a huge swath of federal land.

So Davies got together with a hunter, an Audubon Society staffer and a few other stakeholders to draft some legislation, which then kicked around the offices of Oregon's congressional delegation for about a year before finding its way back to Roaring Springs. Here, Davies and Otley sat down at the dining-room table with two of public-lands grazing's greatest enemies: Bill Marlett, then director of ONDA, and The Wilderness Society's Kerr. Over a few cans of Coors, they worked out the details of a law they hoped would satisfy conservationists without harming local ranches.

In October 2000, Clinton signed it. The new law designated three wild and scenic rivers and a trout reserve and forbade development of federal mineral and geothermal resources (except gravel pits) on Steens Mountain and surrounding lands. It also created the first cow-free wilderness area in the United States. Five ranches, including Otley's and Davies', surrendered a total 18,446 acres of high-elevation private land in exchange for over $5 million and 104,236 acres of arid, low-elevation grazing land.

The act set up the 12-member Steens Mountain Advisory Council to advise the BLM. Council seats are reserved for representatives of outfitters, wild horses, hunting and fishing, motorized and non-motorized recreation and the Burns Paiute Tribe. There are also two seats for environmentalists, two for grazing permittees and one for a local landowner.

The act promised a new future for the mountain, one in which conservationists and ranchers would work together toward common goals. Although ranchers resented the federal government's involvement, they could still run cows on most of the mountain. And conservationists were delighted that the area finally had some protection. But once the advisory council began giving input to the BLM on roads, recreation and other plans for the mountain, the collaborative mechanism began to fray at the edges.

"I told Stacy (Davies) in the beginning, I'm going to give this five years before I file another lawsuit, and we'll see where it goes," says Marlett, who feared that the advisory council was weighted toward local economic interests. Environmentalists are outnumbered by motorized recreation and grazing representatives; there is only one seat for a statewide environmental professional, and ONDA staffers, including Marlett, applied five different times to fill it, only to be turned down by the Interior secretary. A Sierra Club staffer held the seat for some years, but now it's occupied by David Bilyeu, a librarian at Central Oregon Community College and an avid hiker. Joan Suther, the BLM's local field manager, is concerned about the balance on the council: "I'm not sure we have captured all the opinions we should," she says.

As Marlett had promised, ONDA waited five years. Then, in 2006, it sued over the BLM's resource management plan, charging that the agency didn't adequately consider wilderness values. Otley and other landowners spent over $100,000 to intervene, worried they'd lose motorized access to their grazing allotments. ONDA lost, but sued the BLM again in 2008, this time over an aggressive program supported by the advisory council that prescribed use of vehicles and chainsaws in the wilderness to control invasive western juniper. A settlement is pending.

The Steens Mountain group, unlike other BLM advisory councils in the state, "hasn't worked real well" for a number of reasons, says Borden Beck, the chairman of the Oregon Sierra Club's High Desert Committee. The Steens Act "never made crystal-clear how private inholdings in the protection area would be handled," he says. And now the council has to "backfill holes in the legislation, controversial stuff they left undone. It's just ripe for lawsuits from either side."

Nowhere have the problems been more apparent than with the wind-farm issue, which has divided the community. Five different companies have approached Davies with offers to lease parts of the Roaring Springs Ranch for up to 400 wind turbines. "We told them we  have  no  interest.  We  don't  want  to upset the natural environment," says Davies, who grew up in eastern Utah during an oil boom. "There is a change to the community when energy comes in."

But other neighbors found the offers more enticing. Hoyt Wilson's Mann Lake Ranch sits below the cliffs on the northeast edge of Steens Mountain, just outside the protected area boundary. "The only thing we have to sell are natural resources," Wilson says. "If we can't use (them), then you pretty much depopulate the area." He leased a ridgeline to Columbia Energy for a 104-megawatt development called Echanis, which is contracted to sell electricity to Southern California Edison.

The project -- the only one permitted so far -- ignited controversy, not just because of its possible impacts on nesting golden eagles, sage grouse and other species, but because of the way in which it was handled. Columbia Energy Partners carefully divided its Steens wind interest into Echanis and three other 104-megawatt projects (one of which is on state land outside the protected area), slipping under the 105-megawatt threshold that requires state review, including the evaluation of impacts on wildlife. So Echanis received what critics describe as a quick and dirty approval from Harney County officials. After environmentalists protested, Columbia Energy promised to submit land-use permits through the state for the remaining developments, something it has yet to do. Echanis is scheduled to begin construction this summer, pending approval of a 29-mile-long transmission line.

That line, which would cross 10 miles of federal land, is now under review by the BLM. The agency has listed it as a renewable-energy priority; a decision is expected later this spring. When it came up for discussion at an advisory council meeting last summer, both Otley and Wilson, who hold seats, were excused due to conflict of interest. Because two other seats were vacant, the council lacked a quorum. Those who were present weighed in, with five, including Davies, opposing the line and associated wind developments. Three other members were neutral or in favor.

Even if the council had tackled the project, there's little it could have done, at least directly; it has no authority over private land in the protected area. The council could urge the BLM not to approve the transmission line, and thus force the company to choose a longer route that wouldn't cross federal land. Or it could try to access the $25 million authorized by the Steens Act to purchase inholdings and development rights. But Congress would have to appropriate the money, plus matching funds would have to be raised, and so far no one appears eager to go that route. Besides, ranchers like Otley could always refuse the buyouts. "To me, jobs and sustainable energy are more important than the viewshed," Otley says.

It seems that the much-vaunted collaborative process has unraveled on Steens Mountain. Today, the stakeholders' interests appear as fractured as ever. "We will continue to fight this," says Bob Salinger, conservation director for the Audubon Society in Portland. He expects the wind farm to be approved, and when that happens, there is, he says, "strong potential for litigation."

Its immediate epicenter is Murderers Creek, a stream that slices through the northern end of the Malheur National Forest before it feeds into the south fork of the John Day. Since 1996, Loren and Piper Stout have sent their cattle to graze the spring grass on an allotment along Murderers Creek and nearby Deer Creek. But last spring, they kept their cows off the range; their grazing permit had been temporarily halted by a federal judge.

That injunction came in a suit the Oregon Natural Desert Association brought against the U.S. Forest Service. ONDA claimed the Stout's cows were trampling the stream bank, muddying the waters for native steelhead. The conservation group said the Forest Service wasn't doing its job to protect endangered fish.

It's is a familiar arguement around the West. But Loren Stout's next step was unconventional. He set out to document the damage wild elk and wild horses do to the rangeland. No cows were on it last year, so it was a perfect opportunity.

After months of measuring grass and taking photographs, the Stouts sued the Forest Service for letting wild horses run free on the rangeland — far more horses than Forest Service policy allows. The Stouts contend that elk and horses do more damage to streams and streambanks than cows do.

At the heart of this case is the question of who should be allowed to graze on public rangeland. Some organizations want to end public grazing, and hope they may gain traction with the new administration and Congress. Some ranchers — including almost a dozen near the proposed Soda Mountain Wilderness in Southern Oregon —  have agreed to give up their permits under certain conditions. But few, if any, support shifting grazing entirely to private land.