The Great Desert Trip
Off trail in the desert
The trip was designed as an off-trail total desert exploration trip in the high desert west of Burns, Oregon. We had two groups that parked about 20 miles apart with a goal of crossing in the middle, making it essential that we locate the other party’s car! We ate lunch before saying goodbye to the van and topped off our water bottle with a jug from the trunk. Each person had 6 to 8 liters, as we weren’t sure any of the springs would be running in November. We had heard rumors they could be “cowed out.” We started our hike with an observant mindset. Before traveling one mile, we had already stopped to examine bones and discuss the current ecology of the young juniper forest. Sad news that I won’t burden the reader with. We came upon a pile of hundreds of tin cans and speculated on their age and origin. As we crested our first saddle, spread below us was the varied grass, rock, and juniper landscape we would spend the next 3 days exploring. The leaders let the kids go ahead a ways and practice leading over open terrain, aiming for a point on the horizon or using the angle of their shadow to the sun to keep a true course. Occasionally we had to cross a barbed wire fence, and the kids held the wire for each other as they crawled under. Around 4pm we came to the edge of a lofty rocky escarpment and decided to make camp there. We could see the highway far in the distance. We all ate dinner as the sun went down in the most spectacular sunset ever, setting Jack Gladwin’s hair aflame. Then we had a campfire and Peter read the first half of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1935 account of crashing his plane somewhere in the great North African desert and becoming hopelessly stranded. Everyone clutched their water bottles a little more tightly after that. We went to bed, with almost everyone sleeping out under the stars.
The sun rose, and so too did we. We planned to exchange car keys with the other group at noon at an agreed-upon point on the map near Roger’s Ridge. Despite the schedule, it was a morning of discovery. We started seeing obsidian flakes everywhere, brought in by native tribes years ago to fashion arrowheads. Two students found actual arrowheads! OMG. We also found a collapsed shack, a strange and unexpected rock formation, and a cow trough fed by a spring. We were joyous and aa little proud when we arrived at the meeting point at 11:59 am. But our friends were nowhere to be seen! We radioed them and attempted to find each other. But even after another half mile of uphill walking, they were not in sight, and in fact seemed mad at us on the radio. Dejected, we plopped down and ate lunch. A few minutes later Roland and Oshea came galloping into our group with one car key and instructions for how to break into the other car, whose keys had inexplicably been locked inside it! Both young men were warm and charming and when they left we were in a good mood again. But the bad mood returned almost immediately as our bearing took us through scratchy bushes and dense juniper trees. For our suffering, though, we came across a natural stone bridge! Nobody else knows it is there. Incredible. It’s existence is a forever secret. When the suffering ended, we came upon another spring, and oh Lord, there was an actual clear stream running through a stand of quaking aspen. No one saw that coming. Due to our good planning we hardly needed to fill any bottles, but the sight of clear water in a real desert always brings joy to the hearts of men.
The day was getting late but we got a few more miles under our belt before settling for a flat, but relatively plain campground in a grove of large juniper trees. Over dinner we discussed faltering high school foreign language programs. The campfire kept us warm as Peter finished Saint-Exupéry’s story. We all imagined lying on hot sand, throat too dry to speak, praying a passing Bedouin would turn his head and catch a glimpse of dying men unable to move or speak. Little did we know something close to this scenario was playing out in group 2, as by now they were collectively down to their last half liter of water. When the story ended, the students put out the fire in the usual fashion and promptly went to bed.
We rose early, that evening’s chapter 1 General meeting in faraway Portland already on our minds. Before leaving we noticed a shrine near Peter’s tent: the druids had gathered there in the night. We walked a while on the road for efficiency’s sake, then cut across a broad flat plain of low sagebrush to the cars. Or rather, to where we thought the cars should be. In fact, we had to walk another mile and a half towards the highway to reach the cars. We sent Lucca and Luca ahead to do the obligatory break-in, and dragged ourselves after them, somehow arriving 25 minutes later. We reunited with group 2 in Brothers and then booked it back to Portland.
