Postcards from the Rogue Valley

I’ve never been much of a stargazer. The urban northeast, where I lived for more than fifty years, offered scant prospecting beyond the Big and Little Dippers and the North Star, unless you had a telescope. My stargazing had been mostly limited to family trips to less populated parts of the country, from the Outer Banks in North Carolina to national parks like Yellowstone or Mesa Verde.

Since childhood, though, I’ve followed National Geographic, and a few months ago a headline in the travel section caught my eye: “The Oregon Outback, with its utter lack of illumination, is home to the largest dark sky sanctuary in the world. Here’s how to visit.” 

When this August’s Perseid meteor showers hit the news — with truly dark skies the holy grail — I remembered the Oregon Outback and decided that Tony and I should give it a try. The officially designated sanctuary covers 2.4 million acres of volcanic landscape, deserts, and mountains in eastern Oregon’s Lake County. But it is a camping only affair and we don’t camp. (My Italian husband, who grew up with no indoor plumbing or electricity, says he is done with camping.) 

Instead we headed to the next best outpost, the 100-year-old Frenchglen Hotel at the foot of the Steens Mountains — 75 miles east of Lake County in Harney County. The drive included three hours of gravel roads across the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge where we saw three antelopes but not a single car. When we pulled into Frenchglen (at 4,203 feet with a winter population of 12), I could write my name in the thick layer of dust that covered our Subaru and the smell of sagebrush filled the late afternoon air.

That night we set the alarm clock for 4:30 a.m., hopeful that we would catch a predawn view of the Perseids. But when the alarm sounded and we stepped outside, a starless grey canvas greeted our upward glance. The fact that the moon was 85 percent full, we knew, might diminish the spectacle, but the cloud cover that had seeped in during the night brought the curtains down.

When the sun rose and we went for a walk before catching breakfast in the hotel’s small dining room (joining three other guests), we encountered a different sort of spectacle: a passel of tiny birds scurrying across a lane flanked by tall wheatgrass. We counted two moms and more than a dozen little ones, not more than three inches tall and probably less than a few days old. Two miniature stragglers dashed to catch up with the departing entourage. We cheered them on.

The Steens

We had been to Frenchglen and the Steens Mountains before to breathe and hike in the stunning grandeur of this remote landscape. New to Oregon, we have kept in touch with friends back in the urban Northeast who thought we had gone to the other side of the universe when we moved to this corner of the country. They were right.

On our first trip to the Steens, we arrived in Frenchglen to learn that the 55-mile gravel road up to the summit was still covered with snow. It was early June. On our second trip, four years ago in July, the Steens Loop — the highest road in Oregon, reaching just shy of 10,000 feet — was open. A quarter of the way up the road, we encountered small groups of men dressed in camouflage and armed with rifles. We wondered if they were members of the right-wing militia group, the Proud Boys, on a training exercise in a land where Trump signs reign. We later learned that it was the start of the hunting season.

A list of the non-humans who live, largely out of sight, in this fault-block mountain range explains the hunting lure: golden eagles, owls, grouse, rattlesnakes, scorpions, elk, bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, and cougars. The area is also home to wild horses, protected, happily, from hunters.

When I asked a hunter we encountered in a scenic turnout how the hunting was going, he told me, “You have to be patient and look hard to find them.” He added: “I come for the solitude and scenery more than the trophies. The day before, I came across two young pronghorn. I took out my binoculars, not my rifle.” 

Meanwhile, the visible landmarks — the deep gorges, crystal green lakes, vast panoramas, the views of the white Alford Desert, a precipitous 6,000 feet below — are other worldly.

On our last visit, Tony and I hiked the Wildhorse Lake Trail, a series of sunbaked switchbacks dropping 1,100 feet in a mile. At the bottom lies Wildhorse Lake, a deep cirque with high surrounding walls on three sides that give way on one side to an open view of the horizon beyond, 200 miles or more. 

This time, we reckoned we’d aged out of this trail and headed instead up the rocky path to the Steens Mountain summit.

We exited the Steens via the Alford Desert, a 12-by-7 mile dry lake bed that averages 7 inches of rain a year. We stopped at Fields Station, with a population of 25, and paid eight dollars for a chocolate milkshake, billed as one of the best in the world.

Harney County cattle

When the innkeeper at the Frenchglen Hotel told me she was headed to town to stock up on groceries for dinner, I took a double take. What town did she mean? 

“Oh, Burns,” she said, 60 miles to the north. 

Harney County, of which Burns with a population of 2,689 is the county seat, is one of the largest counties in the United States. Here, cattle outnumber people 14-to-1. About 500 ranches producing cattle and hay operate within the county and approximately 75 percent of the land is federally owned. The human population in 2024 topped out at 7,402.

When not watching the stunning landscapes, Tony and I found ourselves musing, endlessly at times, about the cattle who seem to graze wherever they want. 

We learned the difference between free and open ranging, operative words in these parts. 

Here, as in much of the western U.S., open range is rangeland where cattle roam freely regardless of land ownership. Those wanting to keep animals off their property must erect a fence to keep animals out; this applies to public roads as well. By contrast, most eastern states and jurisdictions in Canada require owners to fence in or herd their livestock.

This is where Tony and I got snared, however. As we passed cattle, often alone without another cow in sight and grazing in what seems like slim pickings (rocks and sagebrush) and then come upon land with bundles of hay, we wondered if and how the two ever met.

Having learned that cattle are slaughtered at around 1.5 to 2 years, we wondered how the cattle we passed were rounded up, spread, as is often the case in this region, across miles of bunchgrass prairie. How are those destined for slaughter weeded out from those with more life to live? Do cowboys on horseback, often called buckaroos, still round up the cattle over the span of days? (The answer, according to AI, is yes.)

On hot days, we’ve observed, cattle love to hang out under the shade of a tree in their otherwise treeless range. Why don’t ranchers plant more trees for their livestock? It seems a simple act of kindness.

Then, of course, there is the question of where cattle belong on a planet where the methane gas they emit contributes to precipitous climate warming. We skirt this question.

Who is in charge? 

Land acknowledgments recognizing the Indigenous peoples who were the original stewards of the land where institutions, organizations, or events are located are de rigueur in Oregon. This is not true when it comes to the vast, non-urban lands that Indigenous people once called home.

The Native Americans living in eastern Oregon at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition were theNorthern Paiute. They lived a semi-nomadic life. The first white people to arrive in the region were French explorers, circa 1750. From there on it’s a familiar story: The newcomers and the original (Paiute) settlers fought over property, sometimes culminating in the armed involvement of the US Army. The struggle ended in the 1880s with the forceful removal of the Paiutes to reservations in Nevada and Washington.

Tensions shifted to the vagaries of public versus private ownership. 

At the time of Oregon’s admission to the Union in 1859, the federal government already held title to significant portions of land in Harney County and elsewhere in Eastern Oregon. Assigning arid and less desirable lands as public domain was already federal policy. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 shifted the long-term management of public lands for grazing purposes to the U.S. Grazing Service, which eventually became today’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM). 

Since then, it has been a complicated dance.

The tensions begin with grazing rights. Ranchers often rely on BLM-managed land for grazing livestock, and disputes can arise over permit renewals, grazing fees, and the conditions placed on grazing practices to protect the land and wildlife habitat.

They include land use policies and environmental concerns. Landowners and the BLM may have differing perspectives on how public lands should be managed, including issues like timber harvesting, mineral extraction, and recreational access. The BLM’s efforts to protect endangered species, water quality, and natural landscapes can sometimes clash with landowners’ desire for less restrictive land use.

Some landowners believe federal land ownership infringes on their property rights and advocate for the transfer of federal lands to state or local control, or even privatization. 

The Malheur Refuge Occupation

On our drive from Frenchglen to Burns (and on to Bend), we passed through the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, created in 1908 by order of President Theodore Roosevelt to protect habitat for diverse waterfowl and migratory birds. On our last visit, mosquitoes stopped us in our tracks as we attempted to explore its trails. This time, we christened our visit by revisiting the details of the “Malheur Refuge Occupation.”

On January 2nd, 2016 — 18 days shy of Trump’s inauguration — a few dozen folks calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom holed up at the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which shares the same Harney County footprint as the Steens. 

The occupation was purportedly started to support jailed Harney County ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, then imprisoned in California for illegally burning government land. The occupiers invited comrades from across the country to join them in their armed defiance of the federal government’s ownership of public land.  

Engulfed by law enforcement and fierce public meetings about the standoff — with the whole country watching — the occupation became an ideological proving ground. “This country is so torn up, it will never be the same—ever,” one local told The New York Times. 

Forty-one days after the occupation began, it ended.  All of the militants surrendered or withdrew from the occupation, with several of the leaders arrested after leaving the site. One, Lavoy Finnicum, was killed fighting arrest. 

On July 11, 2018, President Donald Trump pardoned the father-son duo, the Hammonds, whose imprisonment had sparked the Malheur drama.

A week ago rancher and anti-government militant Ammon Bundy, who led the occupation and recently ran for governor in Idaho, was denied his efforts to discharge a $52 million civil court judgment through declaring bankruptcy.

Cow free

In these times of intense political turmoil and divisiveness, we returned home from our trip to eastern Oregon with stories about missed meteors and landscapes that remind us of the vastness and solitude of remote places. Even within Oregon, the Steens Mountains are largely unknown.

As we were checking out of the Frenchglen Hotel, I learned of another story line.

I overheard a conversation between the young man, David, who manages the small hotel staff, and an older gentleman who appeared to be a long-standing rancher. They were talking about the nonprofit Oregon Natural Desert Assocation’s determiniation to make the Steens and other nearby high deserts one hundred percent “cow free.” 

Just before President Bill Clinton left office in 2000, he set the cow free movement in motion. He approved the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protective Act (billed as a “partnership to preserve the American West”) that created an alliance between the BLM and local landowners and ended cattle-grazing on a third of the Steens “wildest”425,000 acres. The act also placed 900,000 acres off limits for new mining and mineral leasing. 

In 2009, an additional 46,345 acres of grazing leases within the Steens were retired, leaving 94 percent of the Steens permanently closed to livestock grazing. 

Pepper Trail, a contributor to High Country News, writes:

The public lands of the West have far higher value as wildlife habitat, as the basis for our fragile water cycle, and as the last silent, open spaces on a crowded continent than as marginal pasture for cows.  Lease by lease, district by district, we need to retire public lands grazing, so that one day, we’ll be able to top any rise and look out across the broad land; healthy, whole, as it once was, as it should be: cow free.