http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/travel/bivouacking-in-oregons-outback.html
ON a chilly afternoon in late June, we stood contemplating our options in an icy Oregon
rain that pricked our skin like needles. The canyon’s 300-foot-high
walls of chocolate rhyolite had corralled the river into a pool too deep
to wade through, too cold to swim in. Turning back would mean a
grueling two-day retreat upstream. If we pushed ahead we could be out in
a day. The decision was painful but clear: time to strip and swim.
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).
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