Malheur National Forest: Strawberry Mountains and the Last Ponderosa Desert

The Malheur National Forest sits in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, a corner of the state that most people drive through on Interstate Eighty-Four on their way somewhere else. The forest covers about one and a half million acres of the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness, the high plateau country around John Day, and the upper drainages of the Malheur and John Day rivers.

The name Malheur is French for 'misfortune.' It was applied by early French-Canadian fur trappers to the river and the surrounding country after a party was robbed by Indigenous people, a name that embeds the trappers' perspective on an encounter that the Indigenous people of the region, the Northern Paiute and the Paiute of the Burns Paiute Tribe, might have characterized differently.

The Strawberry Mountains, a subrange that anchors the forest's western portion, rise to just over nine thousand feet and are surrounded by ponderosa pine forest that extends east into the high desert. The forest here is the transition zone between the wet western Cascades and the arid Great Basin, and the resulting ecosystem is genuinely unusual: ponderosa pine growing at elevations and in conditions that mimic savanna, with bunchgrass understory and a fire ecology that required the Paiute's intentional burning to maintain.

The John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, administered by the National Park Service, sits adjacent to the forest on its northern edge. The monument's Sheep Rock, Blue Basin, and Painted Hills units preserve more than forty million years of mammal evolution in a fossil record that is among the most complete in the world. You can walk through the timeline in a day and a half.