Hello Everybody,              2 September 2006

This has been a summer for taking it easy, often driving only an hour or
two in a day (or not at all), trying to explore more thoroughly  rather
than just hitting the high spots on the way through. No sense of 'having
to make some miles' on the way to Alaska and back. I'm now in
Portland, in NW Oregon, and it's taken me 45 days to cross the Idaho
panhandle and the state of Oregon. 

It's also been a summer for heat: many days around 95 degrees (35 C),
and when I visited Hells Canyon Dam a few weeks ago it was 106
degrees (41 C). A lot of the time I've been able to camp up high in the
mountains, and in the shade, so it hasn't been too bad, and the truck
air conditioner is a real blessing while driving - - not only for coolth, but
to keep down the noise and dust.

There are two unpaved roads which cross the central Idaho panhandle
in National Forest land, each around 100 miles long, the Lolo Trail and
the Magruder Motorway. My dad and I crossed on the somewhat
famous Lolo Trail back in 2001 when the truck and camper were only a
week old, and found the road often more a jeep track than a road,
and in 3 days the only vehicle we saw was a Forest Service truck which
we winched back onto the road from the precarious edge of a
thousand foot precipitous slope. The Lolo roughly follows the path taken
where Lewis and Clark's Expedition of Discovery nearly perished from
starvation and snow in September 1805.  
(http://www.lolo.k12.mt.us/lewisandclark/lewisandclark-mainpage.htm)
The Magruder is more civilized, with a much wider and smoother road,
and in 3 days I saw several dozen vehicles. It's named after a gold
miner who back around the time of the Civil War was robbed and
murdered by outlaws who had joined his party, probably not such a
rare occurrence in those times. Much of the route is through forests
which have been burned by wildfires over the last century - - at first this
seems really ugly, but after a while it comes to look natural and not
objectionable - - and even has the advantage that one can see the
distant views better. And when you come back into the unburned forest
it seems so green!

I spent nearly a month in the northeastern corner of Oregon, and have
included an annotated map in the slideshow to try to give some idea of
what the country is like. There are several attractions, the first being Hells
Canyon, where the Snake River forms the border between Idaho and
Oregon. Though not nearly so beautiful (to my eye, at least) as the
Grand Canyon of Arizona, it is actually deeper, and driving the many
dirt roads to overlooks surrounding the canyon gives some impressive
views. Some small wildfires nearby, and large ones across the state in
western Oregon, were producing some haze, but never enough to be a
problem. 

Just west of Hells Canyon lie the Wallowa mountains, with a pretty little
valley to their northeast containing the little ranching town of Enterprise
and the tourist town of Joseph (named for Chief Joseph, who led the
Nez Perce on their epic but unsuccessful 800 mile flight trying to reach
Canada before being slaughtered by the US Army). Just north of the
valley lies the Zumwalt Prairie Grassland, which has become well known
from Marcy Houle's book THE PRAIRIE KEEPERS. In the early 1990s, as a
young wildlife biologist assigned to study the hawk population of the
Zumwalt, she astonished all the experts by finding that the area had
one of the most dense populations of large hawks in North America and
that the grasslands were in extraordinarily good health - - in spite of
being entirely privately owned and ranched with grazing cattle, against
the prevailing belief that only by government ownership could such a
thing be accomplished. Much of the Zumwalt is now owned and
managed by the Nature Conservancy, which hopefully will be able to
do as well as the ranchers have been. I saw several dozen large hawks
in the area, once with three telephone poles in a row occupied.

Surrounding the Zumwalt is much Forest Service land with nice dirt roads
for exploring and camping, often with great canyon views. All if the
higher elevations of the Wallowa Mountains themselves constitute the
Eagle Cap Wilderness, by definition roadless, but the surrounding Forest
Service land offers many access points where one can drive up to and
camp near the border of the Wilderness, and this occupied me for
nearly a week (as shown on the map).

Finally leaving the Wallowa area, I followed mostly Forest Service roads
southwest nearly to the California border (as shown on the second
map), then back up to Portland. At the Malheur NWR, where E.V. and
had such great birding last April, it was 'off season', but one of the
volunteers at a historic ranch site showed me a great rookery of egrets,
herons, and cormorants, with several dozen nests high up in a half
dozen large cottonwood trees which had been planted when the
ranch was founded around 1870. This was a gold mine for great photos!
One would hardly expect these giant birds, with long gangly legs for
wading, to roost in trees, and it is amazing to watch them land in the
small treetop branches with apparent ease. Next, the hummingbird
feeder at the NWR headquarters provided a few pictures of
hummingbirds, the first ones I have gotten showing their tails spread. A
female Rufous Hummingbird had staked out a second feeder nearby,
and I watcher her for a quarter of an hour chasing away every hummer
that tried to approach this feeder. , She would zoom out from her perch
and chase the interloper away, zoom back to her perch, then again a
few seconds later, over and over again. 

Just southeast of Malheur is the Steens Mountain Loop road, which was
snowed in last April. By the time you have climbed to the top of the
escarpment from the west and can look down several thousand feet to
the desert almost straight below you on the eastern side, you realize
how BIG everything there is. There are several huge gorges cut into the
western side, carved by glaciers which were not part of the overall
glacier advance during the last ice age, but were local glaciers formed
in the Steens themselves at that time.

South central Oregon seems to have a lot of these tilted escarpments,
modestly tilted on one side and very steep at the other. Before I went to
the birding areas at Abert Lake and Summer Lake, I had similar
experiences, camping on the top in nice Ponderosa pine forest and
looking down at flat desert far below. The high ground above Summer
Lake was named the 'Winter Rim' by earlier explorers who were
suffering from cold and snow there while looking down to balmy
springtime below. 

This was a good summer for butterflies: the otherwise rare California
Tortoiseshell was in an 'irruption year', during which they are seen
everywhere. The last picture in the slideshow is of a brightly colored
moth; even a search of several hundred pictures of moths on the
internet failed to identify it, and I learned that compared to the
approximately 700 birds and 700 butterflies in North America, there are
11,500 moths! 

Here are the same old instructions for the slideshows:

http://www.firestardesign.com/johna 

(Note that this is still 'johna' in spite of my email address change to be
just 'john')

The new slideshow is < 06 July August ID OR.exe > 

Most of you will be using Internet Explorer: you can either choose OPEN
to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK if you want to have it
your hard drive for future re-viewing. I have used my updated PC-cillin
to be sure the .exe file is virus free, and in this case you can safely ignore
Windows's warning about 'dangerous <.exe> files'. 

Right-Arrow or Right-Click will advance to the next picture
Left-Arrow or Left-Click will return to the previous picture
Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc if the show seems stuck

If you don't have a broadband Internet connection it's not realistic to
download these large files   please let me know, as it is very easy for
me to send them to you on a CD. And if you would like any of the
individual images, just let me know. I have limited space on
firestardesign.com, so must sometimes remove older slideshows to put
up new ones; let me know if you want me to send you a CD of any of
the 'back issues', or of all of them from 2004-2006 along with their
accompanying eMails, on CD. And if you don't want to get any more
eMails like this one in the future, just let me know.

Regards, John Armitage