Three Amazing High Desert Inhabitants
Oregon’s high desert is a land of many superlatives. You’ll find North America’s fastest land mammal here, as well as its largest fault block mountain. Perhaps most intriguing are the ways that the plants, animals and insects that call the high desert home have evolved over millennia in ways that allow them to survive...
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Hart Mountain Revealed Recap
During our 2019 High Desert Speaker Series, ONDA’s Hart-Sheldon Coordinator Jeremy Austin presented in both Bend and Portland. Here’s the “CliffsNotes” version of his for Hart Mountain Revealed talk. Where is Hart Mountain? Roughly 230 miles southeast of Bend, Oregon, Hart Mountain sits at the northern extent of the largest desert in the United...
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Desert Wilderness Retrospective
A Tale of Two Wilderness Areas: Badlands and Spring Basin On March 30, 2009, President Obama signed a massive public lands package into law, with the Oregon Badlands Wilderness and Spring Basin Wilderness among the many places protected. Besides sharing the same birthday and being located in Oregon’s high desert, the Badlands and Spring...
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Dark Desert Skies
For those of us who have spent time in Oregon’s high desert, there is no need to explain how truly dark skies showcase the wonders of the stars viewable by the naked eye. Night skies relatively free from light pollution — that is, human-created artificial lighting and atmospheric disturbances such as smog — will...
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Happy Birthday!Oregon Desert Trail Turns Five
In the spring of 2014, ONDA released a basic map-set for an ambitious route we’d started to call the “Oregon Desert Trail.” It wasn’t long before a few hikers set their sights on completing the route. Over the past five years, we’ve developed and refined many new resources to make our challenging eastern Oregon...
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Meet Mary McCord
ONDA Volunteer Extraordinaire Over the past few years, Mary McCord went from being newly introduced to ONDA to becoming a frequent volunteer in Bend. Mary and her husband, Tom, attended an annual Wild & Scenic Film Festival event and were instantly inspired to become ONDA members. They formed a personal connection with Oregon’s high...
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Species Spotlight: Burrowing Owl
A Funny Little Owl By LeeAnn Kriegh Pronghorn are perhaps the most graceful animal native to the high desert country of Central and Eastern Oregon. Golden Eagles are the most majestic, Greater Sage-Grouse the most emblematic. And Burrowing Owls? They’re the funniest. Let us never overlook the fact that we’re talking about owls who...
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How to Shoot a Desert Video
Videos can tell stories, convey ideas and immerse the viewer into an environment in ways that are difficult to achieve with photographs or the written word. And, with many video cameras becoming better and more affordable and a number of free editing programs available, creating videos has become increasingly accessible. Perhaps you’d like to...
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How to Shoot a Desert Video
Did you already read How to Shoot a Desert Video – Part 1 that covers planning for and shooting your video? If so, check out this post to get some pointers on how to turn your raw footage into a final product! Editing 1. Determine the right length for your video For the kind of...
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The Creation Story and the Malheur Cave
For the Paiute of the Great Basin of the American West, winter is storytelling season. Around the fires of Paiute camps and villages, storytellers passed on tribal visions of the animal people and the human people, their origins and values, their spiritual and natural environment, and their culture and daily lives. The book “Legends...
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