Horse Butte is a small red cinder cone a mile from my house. There is a trailhead there, otherwise it would just be another one of dozens (hundreds?) of buttes that pop up from the ground for miles to the south and east of the Cascade Mountains in Central Oregon. It is topped with a scraggly ponderosa on the south and a row of healthier trees, mostly junipers, to the north. When I am out on the trails near my …
Tag: central oregon
I live in a bubble at the edge of the forest, but that bubble still exists on earth and I am not able to write anything lately that doesn’t feel beside the point. But I do think it is appropriate to say a word of thanks to those people that have shown graciousness and generosity in the spring of 2020. A season when people went from months of isolation and fear of an invisible threat to rage and collective action …
Spring in Central Oregon is untamed, unfriendly, and moody. Not just wild but downright grumpy. Like a cranky old man being woken from a too-short sleep, his dinner burning, his chickens being bullied by coyotes, neighbor cats pooping in his garden, and his truck with two flat tires. Still, he takes the time to walk to the fence line and ask how you are*. It snows even when it is sunny. Squalls are on and off for days. The wind …
With strokes of luck and intuition, RK and I ended up in the perfect place. We can observe the Milky Way in the night sky with owls and coyotes as the soundtrack. The forest is just down the street, where we know the trails so well we have even named some of the rocks. The neighbors aren’t always perfect, there are faraway gunshots heard from the buttes, but this is the wabi-sabi in our lives — something to notice and …
Aside from the abundant wax current blooms, which count as flowers, of course, but as tiny and pale pink as they are, do not satisfy the flower itch, the first wildflower that I spotted this year was a scrappy little white thing alone in the dirt. I loved it! And was secretly worried that someone was going to tell me it was invasive, not native, not a wildflower at all. I did a little research and feel safe in my …
There are things to fear at the edge of the forest. A man on the road told RK to carry a pistol on dog walks in case of coyotes, bobcats, and cougars. A woman screamed when Mack startled her on the trail, she said she thought he was a bear. And, I’ve been told, you have to watch out for unsavory characters. Our neighbors, usually reticent at best, have been all a-buzz about a recent cougar sighting just down the …
The first time I ran on my current backyard trail was April 2017. RK and I went to central Oregon hoping to mountain bike and instead we went running in sideways rain/sleet/snow. There are two loops, stacked. Or you might visualize it as a big loop bisected into a small loop and a medium-sized loop. I guesstimated the small loop was maybe 5 miles and convinced RK it would be great! Back then RK had one bum knee and wasn’t …
Most of us remember connect-the-dot puzzles, moving a pencil around a piece of partially printed newsprint from numbered dot to numbered dot until a composition is revealed. I guess this is a way of teaching kids how to count because as we all know, in real life dots can be connected any which way and the connection does not always reveal anything sensical. My friend Lisa visited us in Central Oregon recently and after painting a mural so pretty it …
A few weeks ago, before we moved, and one of the last times I pulled into the trailhead parking lot in the dark. I was not surprised to be the only car. Central Oregon doesn’t have as many fans of early morning trail running and now that it is headlamp time, and cold, the number of people out and about pretty much includes me. Even the rooster that lives at the house nearby wasn’t up. The thermometer on my dashboard …
Friends! It seems like forever, but it has been a tumultuous time. RK and I have been finding our way in Central Oregon, which has a different kind of pace, style, and energy than we are used to. Rest assured, bikes are being ridden, trails are being run, fish are being moved, and we are enjoying the great outdoors as much as ever. What has changed? We are the proud owners of a vintage 1981 passive solar monopoly house sitting …
As a wave of Giant House Spiders migrates across our tiny house, the ever-present marmots have gone missing, and wildfire smoke chokes the mountains and rivers, it’s easy to think that we are all royally screwed. We usually see the spiders at night, a shadow of long black legs in our peripheral vision, as they make their way across the bedroom carpet. The leg span of one of them fills the bottom of a large Mason jar (which is how …
With less than sixty seconds of research last weekend we decided to visit Chush Falls: a 200’ waterfall with an easy trail and possible fishing on Whychus Creek along the way. In a serious rookie move, we asked google maps for directions which most definitely were wrong. By the time we realized this we were well out of cell coverage and couldn’t determine which forest road might take us to the trailhead. But where we were looked pretty, so we …
There is a marmot living under my front porch. I also heard it on the roof (hopefully the roof and not the attic), perhaps having a scuffle with a jay. Most days he/she is lounging on the front step or eating things in the field next door. It’s a little scruffy, the fur not as immaculately fluffed as the marmots on Wikipedia. But aside from being a little brazen, it seems nice enough. It has probably lived here longer than …