I’d once read that Steens Mountain might be the most beautiful place in all of Oregon. That’s much said. I’d been to Oregon’s beaches, up and down its coast, licked the icing from its Cascades, swatted mosquitoes in the heavy snows at Crater Lake in June. So Steens had a lot to live up to. As I drove up Steens Mountain Loop Road, herds of pronghorn browsed the lower slopes.
I gaze up Kiger Gorge, a deep glacial valley that ends in a cirque. Snowfields cling to the headwall that scrambles up to the flat-topped mountain that caps it. A massive fault-block, Steens is actually one mountain, 50 miles long. Basalt cliffs teeter and plummet down to steep slopes of Grand fir and aspen. It all ends in a stream a diagonal mile below. The wind thunders incessantly, torturing like Wyoming gusts out here in the Oregon Outback, the Big Empty.
Steens’s east crest is a jagged wall of razored, iced peaks that dive without the benefit of foothills a mile straight down to the alkali flats of the Alvord Desert. Its west face is cuesta-like, flat and gradually inclined to the east. It reminds me of the Sierras. From its sharp crest, three U-shaped valleys gouged by glaciers drop to the ordinary world below. Here in mid-May, I camped at a narrow pass where a swing gate closed the road for at least a few more weeks until the snow melted. The gales and the bitter cold meant I had the whole mountain alone.
I set camp and hiked the Steens Mountain Loop Road for a couple hours up the inclined plane until the snowfields I had to punch through became constant. The cold, abetted by the wind, became almost unbearable. I kept it up, walking a giant, igneous hogback boundered on both sides by the U-shaped gorges called Little Blitzen, Big Indian and Kiger. The valleys sculpted four gigantic prongs which rose to the alpine parks at the summit of the mountain’s west slope. The whole way up, my wind-blazed eyes seared into the outer walls of the valleys on either side of my rolling, sage world draped with silken snow.
Snowfields swept below toothy, basaltic peaks to the south. In the valley below, aspen leafed out for the spring. But up here, there were few trees. I passed a single stand of aspen that remained a wintry boneyard in the squalling wind. Spring began below, but winter held out up here.
I stepped across black scat with a healthy diameter, rife with half-digested grass. I prodded it with a sharp stone. Still soft. I was thinking bear, especially after I spotted several more piles of berried shit up the road. There weren’t supposed to be black bears in the Great Basin. A deserted, NFS campground farther down the mountain didn’t have any Bear Aware signs, and the garbage cans weren’t critter proof. My shit detector must not have been correctly calibrated yet.
Clouds coalesced at the peaks. The snow said ‘CAUTION: SLIPPERY WHEN WET,’ and I punched through snow bridges a couple times. A friend had almost lost his life in similar circumstances a few years ago. Time to head back.
Living in the Four Corners, I can summit the La Platas and see into four states, yet there I’m five hours away from the nearest city. But desolate as those Four Corners of the earth are, southeast Oregon has us beat in terms of forever. Near the summit of Steens, I am surrounded by an earth-girdling 300-degree panorama, rippled with distant peaks, bowed crags, inselbergs, and a mammoth plateau bunched with forests to the southwest on which Steens Mountain rides. Dots of snow fleck the flanks of far-off southern mountains. All of it emerald and rolling in a golden distance.
But it’s so frigging cold and windy, I head back down. Sometime last winter, a couch-sized boulder in the middle of the road had calved from the crumbling cliffs on my right. Rich, rhyolitic reds bled from the roadcut. The bluff was forested with fir that was in turn sashed with moss, with old man’s beard.
When I have the chance, no matter where I am, no matter what I’m doing, I try to find a boulder or a log, sit down, and watch the sun set. Yet it was so cold and windy in the High Steens, I went inside my truck camper instead. I was reading The Enlightened Mind, a collection of prose about the sacred gathered from all cultures throughout recorded time, which is the only time there really is. For if it were not kept track of, time itself wouldn’t be.
As usual, the mystics described the indescribable, wrote about nothingness when they wrote about something, about the All when they spoke of One. In such a place as this, I would have felt as if I were cheating the ineffable not to at least try and brave a dusk, however frozen the sun held in the lonely sky. The wind drove with such a hunger, that I didn’t bother to windup the popup on the bed of my pickup.
I hiked over a ridge across the road from my makeshift, BLM campsite. Little Blitzen Gorge dove a thousand feet down to the Blitzen River, with basalt towers emerging from the eroding walls of the defile. Snow showered in the sun. Blossoms of paintbrush in fields of saxifrage and hawksbeard, of jewelflower and gentian, all ambered in a falling light. Lichen enameled the chocolate rock in pine green, neon yellow, citrus orange and courthouse white. The stream gushed far below, an echoing roar that made the river sound 10 times its size.
To escape the gales, I found a grotto of volcanic walls notched into the clifftops. But the wind finds me everywhere, and zeroing blasts stabbed my lips and my toes numb. I turned east and headed up the hogback, its spine feathered with blue flax and bluebells. Tufts of witch’s hair hung stiffly off the low limbs of the mountain mahogany, which did not bow to the wind.
My eyes dared the sunset, and I was blinded by the forged light that set afire occasional snowflakes, sparks off a smith’s anvil. I thought of my grandfather who died when I was 13. The thought came out of nowhere, and so did the tears. I cred because I would not see him again. Then I realized that he saw through my eyes this cold, riotous beauty. He, and untold numbers of the unrevered dead. What were the living for, if not to offer our senses to those on whose back, the earth, we treaded?
As I hiked up the hogback, it narrowed. The basalt had fractured into stair-step terraces, its cliff-forming faces painted the green and yellow, the orange and white of the lichen which clung to the walls. The paradisical hues and the topography and the trees made it seem a subtropical mountainside. The crumbling, jointed cliffs were a temple complex abandoned and claimed by jungle.
I reached a nob in the hogback where I could see down the long line of the gorges of Kiger and Little Blitzen at the same time. As the sun reached the horizon behind me, it cast travertine colors on the hogback’s walls. It threw my shadow long across the stands of mahogany. I waved my arms to see if I could land my shadow miles away, painting the gorge’s outer walls with my numbra cast by the low-angled sun. But my shadow didn’t reach that far into the world.
Deep recesses of the ramparts along Kiger Gorge crawled out at dusk as reaching fingers and sharp claws. Far, far south, the whitewashed Pueblo Mountains faced the sunset, with a steel roll cloud churning above their summits. So arctic. So impossibly blistered with gusts. I scrabbled back to camp just as the sun sunk below a western storm that crawled over the horizon.
An unblighted land in the grip of slow destruction by eolian sprites. Falling in love with its torrid wildflower hues, with the insane, violence of its wind. All so gnawed with frost. How did the wildflowers survive, when I was numb from squall on my cheek?
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within