Lakeview
Burns to Lakeview
After filling up in Burns, it was time for another trek across the high desert, about 140 miles to Lakeview, which is 14 miles north of the Oregon-California border, and approximately halfway between the coast and the Oregon-Idaho border.
By this time, I’d about had my fill of the high desert. For someone who moved to Oregon for mountains and pine trees, the desert is intriguing for only so long. One of the three faint signs of civilization along the way is called Wagontire. Probably named after the sole remaining evidence of some misfortunate pioneer family.
About halfway along, I stopped at a rest stop. The appropriately modified sign describes the drive well.
A few miles south was Lake Albert, one of many lakes in the region which give the county its name. Most of these lakes grow and shrink considerably depending on rain. When they recede, they leave a pasty white alkaline residue on the exposed sand.
This stretch of US-395 runs parallel to the 35-mile-long Albert Rim, one of the tallest and longest exposed faults in the world. The top of the 2500-foot basalt cliffs were once at the same level as the valley floor where I stood photographing Lake Albert. The tectonic plates are moving like half-fallen dominoes, at a rate of about one centimeter per year.
After passing a little town called Valley Falls, I suddenly realized that there were trees. The sagebrush and grasses still prevailed, but trees were lightly scattered across the hills, or concentrated in small clumps. This is part of the Fremont National Forest, which covers 1.2 million acres and stretches from the southern state line near Lakeview, then northwest almost to the Newberry Volcano, where the Deschutes National Forest takes over.
Lakeview
I rolled into Lakeview around 16:00 (4:00 pm). At an elevation of 4800 feet, it’s earned the moniker “Oregon’s Tallest Town”. Lakeview could be any small Oklahoma town if it wasn’t for the elevation (which is difficult to perceive), and the 8500-ft mountains to the east.
I stopped at a gas station to get some water, which barely qualified as having been refrigerated. I enquired about the geyser I’d heard about, and he gave me brief directions, and a wisecrack about it drying up. Seriously, he continued, it did dry up last year for the first time ever, but that was late in the summer.
Despite the directions, and a red square on my map clearly labeled, I had to make three or four passes of a two-mile stretch at the edge of town, before I realized that the entry drive with the big sign that said HUNTERS HOT SPRINGS must be the way to get to this geyser, the only one in Oregon (or the Pacific Northwest for that matter, apparently).
Hunters Hot Springs and Geyser
Hunters Hot Springs features a store, museum, and lodge (and maybe a few other things thrown in for good measure). I drove down the paved road to a decent-sized but unmarked parking lot, and there was a collection of one-story buildings housing aforementioned activities, and then two small ponds.
A sign near the smaller pond proclaimed “Old Perpetual”, Oregon’s only geyser, “since 1923″. This caused a wrinkle in my brow. Geysers are natural steam vents that develop over hundreds or even millions of years; how is it that this one only first appeared in 1923? Somewhat nonplussed, I trotted out to the little pond. A bubbling hissing sound reached my ears, and a jet of water shot about 60 feet into the sky. This was sufficiently impressive, so I readied my camera to capture the next one, scheduled to blow 90 seconds later. However, I was given pause once again, because out in the middle of this pond… was a rusty metal pipe about 8 inches in diameter and sticking up above a little pile of rock or concrete just above the surface of the water. Sure enough, about 90 seconds later (I trust them on this, I have no reason to actually time it with a stopwatch), water shot out of the pipe into the air.
Now I was extremely skeptical of the situation. Not only did this geyser appear only about 80 years ago, but it shoots through a pipe! Questions streamed through my mind faster than the geyser could load another volley. Was the pipe placed there to make the blast more impressive? Perhaps the vent was on the pond floor and the body of water diffused the force of the geyser into little more than some bubbles and ripples on the surface. Was the whole thing engineered by some enterprising local in the 20’s to draw tourists to the area? Maybe there’s not a real steam vent at all, perhaps the whole thing is generated by some unseen pump underwater. But a 60-foot jet of water out of an 8-inch diameter pipe would take a pretty serious pump. And when the stream subsides, the steam rising out of the pipe attests to the considerable temperature of the water.
A few days later, back home and on the internet, I discovered that the geyser is the inadvertent result of a well drilled in 1923, and the pond is manmade. So much for Oregon’s geyser, I feel like a naive tourist. But watching the thing go was still pretty cool.
I wandered back over to the bigger pond, where a fairly large population of geese, gulls, and a few varieties of ducks seemed to be at home. Some of them were quite wary; particularly those with young, but others were obviously quite accustomed to humans. I spent about four hours in and around a national wildlife refuge renowned for migratory birds, and photographed one. I spent about five minutes at this pond and fired off ten shots at close range.
On my way out, I had to wait for an extended family of adult and adolescent geese that were crossing the road with no sense of urgency.
Frenchglen