Rain Shadow Light: Drying out in the Oregon Badlands Wilderness

I hope the following paints a sunnier portrait of the desert. 

The Oregon Badlands Wilderness is a 29,000-acre protected area in the high desert administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The desert’s hardy flora roots itself into the land’s shield volcano, which came into being 80,000 years ago when a lava tube running underneath the ground sprung a leak. Lava oozing north, south, east, and west created the badlands.

The sandy, light colored soil that the raccoon prints are imbedded in comes from thousands of years of eroded lava. At various locations in the badlands, there are elevated volcanic rock formations—ships in the sagebrush sea—that allow for unobstructed views of the Cascade volcanoes to the west and the vast desert to the east. 

The Oregon desert summer is hot and windy, and the winter is cold and windy. Water is scarce. Though the Friends of the Oregon Badlands Wilderness is a diligent caretaker of this desert, rusty tin cans still lurk in the washes. Desert plants are stunted, and when brushed against, rip fleece and draw blood. The fine sand blowing in the desiccated wind will shrivel your sensitive lips, and after a couple of hours walking into the wind, you’ll wonder why you didn’t purchase those awful rainbow-lensed wraparound sun glasses with the fluorescent green strap languishing by the jerky carousel at the Redmond truck stop. The cold night wind carries with it coyote chatter. That stereo chatter may unsettle you. If so, wrap yourself in the blanket and stargaze until the juniper campfire dies. Once you trick yourself into thinking that the coyotes are laughing because they smell the dog pee on your blanket and do not have sinister motives, you’ll fall right to sleep.

You are awakened by a Townsend’s solitaire perched on the crown of a thousand-year-old juniper. The gray songbird’s melody adds a soft touch to the hard landscape. A mountain bluebird flies over an ancient lava flow and fades into the powder blue sky. High above, a raven banks into a corkscrew dive and lets out a guttural call as she eases into level flight. The wind pauses and the birds fall silent. The analog tick of the Timex is the only sound your worn ears detect. By midmorning, the drone of Cessna propellers and Learjet engines will garble the tranquil desert soundscape, yet even with the relentless encroachment of the nearby city of Bend, silence still owns the desert dawn. 

The scorched soil encircling a lightning vaporized juniper is void of bunch grasses, but beyond the electrocution site, desert fauna thrives. In deserts overgrown with invasive grasses, lightning strikes ignite wildfires, but in this Wilderness, where the cheat grass-toting four wheelers have been banished, native Idaho fescue and gnarly ancient junipers thrive. The spaces between the plants are filled with volcanic soil rather than combustable cheat grass. Fire ignited by a lightning strike cooks the juniper but spares the desert. The intact native grasses of the Wilderness make the badlands a haven for wintering mule deer and pronghorn antelope.  

As a resident of Oregon’s clearcut Coast Range, I periodically like to sun my rain saturated gills in the desert. Like you and the other mountain people reading this essay, I am a stranger in the desert. However, also like you and the other nine billion hairless bipedal apes living on this planet, my parts, discursive thoughts, and methods of moving through space were molded into my DNA by millions of games of trial and error played by ancestors living on the East African savanna, a land with a topography similar to that of the Oregon desert. If you visit the desert and temporarily discard the bug that directs you to equate hiking with glaciated peaks and small mountain lakes, you may find this space to your liking. But even if initially the desert sojourn doesn’t guide you to rapture, your nostalgia bathed genes will appreciate the homecoming, and after a few days, you—whatever that you is—will catch up with what your genes have known for tens of thousands of years.

All people are desert people. 

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