Despite the paving of roads, irrigation agriculture in the valleys and decades of overgrazing and the long runs of drift fence on the deserts, most of that country is intact in a natural way, the distances and flowering enclaves. We drove down from our sunrise on Steens Mountain, across the gravel roads on the northern edges of Catlow to the break over Hart Mountain into north Warner. Below us a long series of interconnected lakes were brimming full from the spring runoff, shimmering in the morning breezes and edged with green and populated by rafts of white water birds: the great pelicans, snow geese. We stood facing such beauty in that barren country as if given something from a dream about the way the world could be, if we let it, alive and significant without us.
                                              ~ William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky

Course Description

A ten-day natural history expedition that includes camping and hiking trips to study the biotic and geologic processes in the landscape and the influence of humans on the land.  Destinations change yearly and include the high deserts, the mountains and plateaus of central Oregon, coastal forests and shores, and the Cascades and Klamath Mountains.

 
Prerequisites:  Two years of natural sciences and permission of instructors.  This course is part of the Environmental Education core curriculum and may be repeated for up to six credits.

 

Destination 2003: Hart Mountain, Steens Mountain, Alvord Desert

BLM: Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Area

Hole in the Sky, William Kittredge

Springtime in Malheur Country

Desert Lands Restoration Task Force

The Big Empty:  BLM Environmental Education

Oregon Natural Deserts    Oregon High Desert Museum

Go Tell It On the Mountain!       Malheur Field Station

Land, Water, and Biota in the Northern Great Basin

Fort Rock        Native Cultures        Oregon Archeology

Steens Mountain ~ Alvord Desert Topographic Map

Flora of Steens Mountain     Western Juniper Woodlands     Juniper Reconsidered

Desert Mosses

Quaternary Mammals        Bighorn Institute

Checklist of Birds Known from Hart Mountain

Checklist of Birds at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

Geology of Fort Rock        Geothermal Aquifer in the Alvord Basin

Thermophilic Microorganisms         Cryptobiotic Crusts        Cyanobacteria and Cryptobiotic Crusts

Effects of livestock Grazing        Livestock and Weeds        Livestock and Riparian Ecosystems

FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN !!        Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer Satellite Images: Great Basin

USGS: Status and Trends, Pacific Northwest

"We were stunned by what seemed an infinity of antelope in little bands of two or three or eight or fifteen grazing the grassy edges of an alkaline playa. They paid us none of their sweet attention, but went on grazing in slow, intricate syncopation, leaving us witness to a sight left from times when our race was growing up amid what we want to think of as the enormous isolations of the past.

It was like an old song I had always known, and maybe forgotten. Those isolations are with us everywhere; we make our meanings from them."

"Go long enough without seeing and tasting and touching the world, living in your imagination, out of touch with the beloved, and you will find yourself pure crazy.

We are animals evolved to live in the interpenetrating energies of all the life there is so far as we know, our system of intricately interwoven subjectivities which coats the rock of earth like a moss."

                                                                            ~ William Kittredge,  ~ Hole in the Sky

Redemption
      For Wendell Berry

Driving toward Malheur Lake in the Great Basin of southeastern Oregon, I saw a coyote.  I stopped the car, opened the door, and walked toward him.

It was another crucifixion in the West, a hide hung on a barbed-wire fence with the wrangler's prayer: Cows are sacred.  Sheep, too.  No trespassing allowed.  The furred skin was torn with ragged edges, evidence that it had been pulled away from the dog-body by an angry hand and a dull knife.

Standing in the middle of the High Desert, cumulus clouds pulled my gaze upward.  I thought about Coyote Butte, a few miles south, how a person can sit on top between two sage-covered ears and watch a steady stream of western tanagers fly through during spring migration; yellow bodies, black wings, red heads.

And how a few miles west near Foster Flats, one can witness dancing grouse on their ancestral leks, even in the rain, crazy with desire, their booming breasts mimicking the sound of water.

Down the road, I watched a small herd of pronghorn on the other side of the fence, anxiously running back and forth parallel to the barbed wire, unable to jump.  Steens Mountain shimmered above the sage flats like a ghost.

My eyes returned to Jesus Coyote, stiff on his cross, savior of our American rangelands.  We can try to kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs for all to see, but spirit howls and wildness endures.

Anticipate resurrection.

          ~ Terry Tempest Williams, An Unspoken Hunger, Stories from the Field