Lost Forest
Little Devils Garden
I just spent part of the weekend in a somewhat different part of Eastern Oregon than some of our fellow board-mates did last weekend: Christmas Valley. The place sees quite a bit of mail during the holidays so everyone can get their "Christmas Valley, OR" postmark, otherwise it's a quiet farming community on the edge of the desert.
First, no trip to this area is incomplete without a visit to Oregon's Uluru in miniature, Fort Rock:
Nothing but Sand
Onto the biking. My riding destination is the sand dunes on the eastern edge of the valley: 10,000 acres of nothing but sand!Some of the dunes in this complex are 70 feet high, and most are at least 20-30 feet. Once you get yourself a little ways in you'd never know you weren't in the Sahara. (Unless you're here on a summer weekend, in which case the place is crawling with ORVs.) I've hiked here on a quiet weekday in early summer, and it's one of the most enjoyable hikes inaginable. With a walking stick and a towel wrapped around your head, you can pretend you're Lawrence of Arabia.
I've never tried to bike here though. But I figgered that this being winter and some fresh snow on the sand, the dunes might be firmed up enough to be ... bikeable!
I was wrong.
By late morning the temps were already in the lower 40s, the sun made it feel like it was 60, and last night's inch of snow was already mostly gone. The sand was as dry and loose as it would be on a 100 degree summer day! Riding in this stuff was absolutely exhausting, even in my 34:20 gear. I made it across a mile and a half of dunes, my jacket completely soaked in sweat, before retreating:
I'm not giving up on the idea though. Some "normal" winter (this one has been exceedingly dry, even by Oregon desert standards) I'm going to hit these dunes on a cloudy, subfreezing day and I swear they will be rideable.
Lost Forest
Rather than pack up and go home - or even return to the car - I just rode from the dunes into another unique 10,000-acre area called the Lost Forest. I move the chain over to my 2:1 (36:18) gear, much better for cruising the flat-to-rolling terrain. A couple miles in is a cool rock formation:
The reason it's called Lost Forest is that it's a true ponderosa pine forest in the middle of the desert. It only gets 8 inches of rain a year, half of what is supposed to be needed to support a forest like this. The theory is that the sand blowing in off the dunes traps what little moisture there is against the trees's roots, allowing them to survive. Some of these trees are really impressive, and I don't know of another place where you can find a giant Pondo surrounded by sand dunes:
After a few miles of this I emerge out onto the open desert range. I consider this spot the beginning of the real Oregon desert, and from here you could keep on riding pretty much as far as you wanted. Want to keep going on into Idaho or Nevada? Nothing to stop you. Mostly of the terrain is at least a little more interesting than this photo shows:
... but sometimes it isn't. Fine by me. I'm a sucker for these wide open spaces. Home on the range, don't fence me in, and all that. I've got no particular objective or timetable out here, and today I'm as free as the hawks I see flying overhead. What's over the next ridge? I know it's just more rimrock, hardpan and sage, but I have to ride over and take a look anyway. My original intention was to ride maybe a total of a dozen miles, but I end up doing almost twice that. Too bad every day can't be like this.
It is weird though, seeing things this dry in early March. Except for the temperature and the early sunset it could be mid-May. Most of Oregon has had a dry-ish winter, but nowhere is that more true than in the Southeast deserts. Even many of the mudholes are dry. Looks like another bad fire season is coming up.
Little Devils Garden
I hop in the car and head over to the other end of the valley, to check out another place I've hiked and thought might be fun to ride: Little Devils Garden. The hour of daylight left is just enough to explore this island of vegetated area, completely surrounded by a massive flow of barren lava. This lava flow consists of big, chunky blocks and is pretty much impenetrable even on foot, leaving this little dirt road as the only way in or out:
It's a fun little ride, with plenty of chunky lava rocks and a number of slickrock outcrops to keep things interesting. I managed to get to the Blowouts, a set of cool-looking spatter cones, just in time for sunset:
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