Two-laners all the way. They make the best kind of road trip, and I am building my preference list one journey at a time. My current favorite, the daylong run from Eugene to Baker City. You motor up through the Willamette National Forest, skirting the shimmering McKenzie River and over the spine of the Cascades down into congested yet adorable Sisters. Yes it is a tourist town. But the restaurants are fine. The ice cream parlor has been there forever and the city park is cool on hot days. After Sisters, you roll eastward across the high country through handsome ponderosa pine forests then jump into the Ochoco Mountains, where lodgepole and quaking aspen rise around you. John Day. If I stopped to talk about John Day, I’d have to get back in the car and go there. It’s its own deep-dive destination. But continue on to Prairie City, and give a shout southward to the Strawberry Mountains, then cross at last into the Blue Mountains.
One day’s drive, three mountain ranges. Or so I thought. But when I went looking — via maps, via Google — for the boundaries of the Blues, I was in for a lesson. The Blues go on and on, encompassing many other ranges. The stunning white-peaked Wallowas? The Greenhorns? The Elkhorns? The Maurys? All part of the Blues. And yes, even the Ochocos.
Geologists know this kind of thing. And now, thanks to geologist Marli Miller’s fine essay on the Blues for the Oregon Encyclopedia, I do too. Her article included the above map, taken from the book Roadside Geology of Oregon that Miller also wrote. The extent of the range is impressive — 15,000 square miles. That’s bigger than the state of Maryland. Or Massachusetts. Or Hawaii.
Why are these other named ranges all nested within the vast Blue Mountains? Short answer? Well, there is no short answer. First, the mountains share the same bedrock and were uplifted together a honking long time ago. From afar, the forested mountains have a blue look to them and were referred to as the Blue Mountains by early trappers and immigrants. Eventually mapmakers began naming particular mountains and ranges for human purposes like mining, timber and other land-ownership stuff. Then the ecologists came along and recognized that these mountains all sit in the rain shadow of the Cascades and have similar climate and critters. So. One name to rule them all.
Now, you could do interstates all the way to Baker City — Interstate 5, then Interstate 84, basically divided multi-lane freeways. But I love the state two-laners: 126 to 26 to 7 and there you are. Baker City, a place with a hell of a past: range wars, gold mining, Oregon Trail wagon-wheel ruts still visible in the hardpan. And a fabulous view of the Elkhorn version of the Blues.
To get there, you’ve gone through fine small towns like Prineville and Mitchell and Austin. (You could hit Sumpter if you wanted a close-up look at how a gold dredge can mar a landscape, and also a walkthrough of the old gold dredge itself if you’ve a mind to gawk at antique feats of engineering.)
It’s all the Blues — big and wide and Oregon. They invite you in, the people in the small towns make you welcome and the landscape says “Come back soon. You missed a few spots.”
Top photo by Susan Palmer
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 