Ochoco National Forest: The High Desert Juniper Country Nobody Talks About

The Ochoco National Forest receives less attention than any national forest in Oregon. It sits east of the Cascades, north of Bend, in the hill country between Prineville and the John Day River, and it covers about eight hundred forty thousand acres of ponderosa pine and juniper forest, volcanic rimrock, and high-elevation meadow. It is not the place people drive to on purpose. It is the place you discover when you turn off Highway Twenty-Six and follow a road into the hills.

The Ochoco Mountains are a subdued range, nothing like the dramatic Cascades to the west, but they receive enough elevation to support a ponderosa pine ecosystem above the surrounding high desert juniper flats. The Paiute used these uplands seasonally, moving between the desert valleys in winter and the higher forests in summer, following game and the camas and biscuitroot that grew in the mountain meadows.

The Painted Hills, one of three units of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, sit just outside the forest's northern boundary near the town of Mitchell. The Painted Hills are low, banded mounds of Eocene and Oligocene-age volcanic ash laid down over thirty million years, colored in horizontal stripes of red, tan, black, and yellow by iron and manganese compounds. They are at their most visually striking in the late afternoon or after a rain, when the colors deepen.

The Ochoco Reservoir, created by a dam on Ochoco Creek inside the forest boundary, serves the dry farming country around Prineville. The Crooked River downstream supports a population of redband trout, a desert-adapted subspecies that has been in this drainage since the Pleistocene.