Camping - Steens Mountain / Malheur Refuge

28 Jun 2019

Two Week Camping Trip Part 4 - Steens Mountain / Malheur Refuge

We stopped for lunch at a food truck in Seneca where we shared a table with some motorcyclists. They were touring around Oregon from California, and also complained how cold it had been. As we ate our huge and tasty lunches an organized motorcycle group of at least two hundred bikes rode past.

We stopped in Burns for gas and a credit union ATM, then arrived shortly afterward at The Narrows RV Park, Grocery, Gas, Cafe, and Saloon. It’s a decent place for what it is, and we appreciate that instead of just a gravel parking lot as an RV Park they have planted lots of trees to separate the spots and provide shade, but unfortunately there are lots of mosquitos, so being outside in the evening was nearly unbearable.

We sat in the trailer for a while enjoying having wifi, then drove out to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge visitor center. They closed at four, so we were planning to just walk around a bit, but the mosquitos at The Narrows seemed minor compared to the swarms there. We tried walking very briskly and staying out in the open where there was a breeze and that, along with lots of Cutter spray, sort of worked. But then we began walking up a brushy hill to an overlook. The brush hummed with insects, they swarmed all over Daisy, and it became difficult to breath without sucking in a bug. We ran back down the hill and into the truck. But then my wife realized she no longer had her iPhone. Apple’s Find Friends app told us it was still on the hillside, so we ran back and retrieved it. It was an impressive but unpleasant site to see a cloud of bugs following each of us and the dog as we failed to outrun them.

We found that driving the Refuge roads at speeds over fifteen miles per hour allowed us to roll down the windows and look at the birds and rabbits. We saw a big pheasant right beside the road on the way in and a bunch of yellow-headed black birds, ducks, a number of what I think were white-faced ibis, and several other kinds that I can’t identify.

We returned to the trailer, ducked inside and killed most of the mosquitoes that followed us in, then planned a dinner. We got a “to go” salad bar plate from the cafe. Despite little apparent custom for the salad bar it offers a wide selection of fresh-looking veg, and it made a nice accompaniment to our left-over Five Can Chili.

We stayed up until dark playing The Clockmaker hoping the mosquitos would retire, but our attempted dog walk was very short because they were still out in full force.

The next morning we enjoyed short-seeming six minute showers for $2.50 after finishing off the Klinkhammer coffee cake for breakfast. Then we packed hiking boots and some warm clothes into the truck with the idea of hiking in the snow that we heard was still abundant near the top of Steens mountain.

We drove south on the highway and decided to check out the town of Diamond and the Peter French Round Barn. We took a wrong turn and saw a sign for an eleven mile road to the Kiger Valley Wild Horse management area. We began driving that road and found it pretty slow going. We got lucky at about six miles in (twenty-five minutes of four-wheel-driving) and found a large herd of the Kiger Mustangs. They seemed nervous when we stopped the truck, so we drove on over the next rise and parked to walk back and view them from a distance without disturbing them more.

Once back on the nice gravel road we continued on the “Diamond Loop” to the Peter French Round Barn. It is architecturally interesting, but the interpretive signs make it pretty clear that Peter French was a shady land baron. There is a large gift shop nearby that surprised me by having pretty nice stuff. My wife bought some books about ‘gross things in nature’ for her students.

We continued the “Diamond Loop” to the Diamond Craters, a bunch of curious lava formations. Then we got back out on the highway to Frenchglenn, then turned onto the north part of the Steens Mountain Loop. This is a gravel road in good condition that was, unfortunately, closed about twenty miles in, and before any of the interesting overlooks or hiking trails we read about. We checked out the Fish Lake Campground and found that it, too, had a lot of mosquitos.

We returned to Frenchglenn and walked around the historic hotel. My wife looked inside for a map and found a nice guy sitting in the porch who was able to answer some questions about Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge, and who suggested that we try driving the south part of the Steens Mountain Loop, as it had more interesting stuff before the road closure. So we took the advice and found more wild horses near the highway on the Steens Mountain Loop, then we stopped at the Riddle Ranch and walked in to see the old cabins and homestead there. The caretaker there was very nice and it was good to get out of the truck and walk for a while.

Then we drove a few miles more to the road closure, which is at Big Indian overlook, an amazing viewpoint.

Tired and ready to get back “home”, we began driving the twenty-five or so miles of gravel back out to the highway, but found one of the wild horse herds very close to the road near a pond. We stopped and watched from the truck while one of the stallions mounted one of the mares, the colts frolicked, and another stallion sniffed a pile of horse poop on the road in front of us just like a dog, and then pooped on top of it. The setting sun made the lighting difficult, but it was several minutes of really amazing viewing. We could even hear them eating as they wandered past the truck.

The next day we drove a two hundred mile loop around Steens Mountain. We drove east from The Narrows, through the Refuge, and then on to Highway 78 over a pass, then onto a county road that travels down the east side of the Steens. It’s about seventy miles, more than half of it gravel. We stopped at Pike Creek. There is a primitive campground here operated by the Alvord Hot Springs.

We avoided the campground/trailhead parking fee and just walked the half mile of rough road up to the campground where there is a trail that goes up Pike Creek canyon. There is an old uranium mine that apparently did not produce well up the canyon, so part of the trail is the old road to the mine. It’s not a long hike, but it was nearly eighty degrees and Daisy seemed worn out, so we only went to the second creek crossing and came back, about three miles in all, but we got some interesting views of the Alvord Desert and the canyon had a large variety of rock types.

We drove out onto the desert at Frog Springs. The wind came up so I flew my stunt kite for a while as we enjoyed the view of the snow-capped mountains rising nearly from the desert floor.

Then we drove down to Fields Station and I had one of their famous milkshakes while my wife had a beer in the shade on their patio. There was a group of three motorcyclists and one cave man/psychiatrist. A couple of the motorcyclists were chatty and they seemed tired and hot, but trying to have a good time. The psychiatrist had just spent a month camped out in a cave in the hills above Alvord Hot Springs. He drank a milkshake and ate a bacon cheeseburger, probably at least two thousand calories together, told us he’d spent the month eating freeze-dried food, and talked about meditating in the cave and the vision quest he had been on. Apparently he only sees patients in Ashland for a few weeks every other month.

Then we drove back up Highway 205 to our trailer at The Narrows where the mosquitos were, unfortunately, still out in full force. So we got another “to go” salad bar from the cafe and hung out in the trailer playing games and checking email.

We had planned to spend another day and night at The Narrows, but the mosquitos convinced us to go home a day early.