The High Desert: East of the Cascades, the Other Oregon

Most people who think of Oregon picture rain. The mossy forests, the fog-draped coast, the persistent grey skies of the Willamette Valley. That Oregon is real, but it is only the western third of the state. Cross the Cascades heading east and everything changes within a few miles. The rainfall drops from sixty or seventy inches a year to eight or ten. The Douglas fir gives way to ponderosa pine, then high desert scrub, then the wide silence of the Great Basin.

Eastern Oregon is, in area, the largest part of the state, and it is home to roughly five percent of Oregon's population. The high desert country covers much of Harney County, Malheur County, Lake County, and the Owyhee uplands, a sweep of sagebrush and rimrock and alkali flats larger than many Eastern states. The towns out there are small and widely spaced, and the distances between them are the kind of distances that mean something. Burns, the county seat of Harney County, is more than a hundred miles from the nearest comparable town in any direction.

The Northern Paiute peoples lived across this high desert for thousands of years, hunting and gathering across a landscape that required an intimate and encyclopedic knowledge to survive. Their territory ranged across present-day Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, and California, adapted to a basin-and-range geography of seasonal water sources, pine nut harvests, and root-plant digging grounds. The Malheur Indian Reservation was established for Paiute people in eighteen seventy-two, a large reservation by the standards of the era, and was then dissolved in eighteen seventy-eight following the Bannock War, in which Paiute people were forcibly removed. The Northern Paiute peoples were not given reservation land in Oregon again for decades.

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, established in nineteen oh eight, sits on what had been Paiute homeland. It covers nearly one hundred ninety thousand acres in the Harney Basin, a closed hydrological system, meaning water flows in but has no river outlet, that creates shallow lakes and marshes in an otherwise arid landscape. The refuge is one of the most important migratory bird stopovers in the Pacific Flyway, sheltering hundreds of species during spring and fall migrations. Birders come from across the country to Malheur in spring, when the marsh is full and the sound is extraordinary.

The high desert came to national attention in January of twenty sixteen, when an armed occupation of the Malheur refuge headquarters, led by Ammon Bundy and a group of anti-federal-land activists, lasted forty-one days before ending with arrests. The occupation was framed by its participants as a protest against federal land management. It was criticized by the Burns Paiute Tribe, whose ancestral homeland the refuge occupies, for failing to engage with the actual history of federal land in the region.

The Steens Mountain, rising to nearly ten thousand feet south of the Malheur refuge, runs along one of the largest fault-block escarpments in North America, its eastern face dropping five thousand feet in less than a mile. On a clear day from the summit, you can see into Nevada. The nearest town is forty miles away, and you are very much in the other Oregon.