Good Medicine

Tuesday September 25 2012

If you're feeling blah, or deflated, or out of sorts, and you really can't be motivated to be impassioned because you can't ride your favorite horse because he has an ill-timed allergy attack, the best thing that can happen is that your friend talks you into climbing aboard one of her extra lovely horses, who gets you out on another spectacular Owyhee trail, like 50 miles on Day 1 of the Owyhee Canyonlands.

When your horse takes you up to the mouth of Brown's Creek Canyon

then climbs above it

so you can look down in it

then he takes you to the Spivey Ranch on Castle Creek for lunch

then he takes you further up Castle Creek

then he climbs up out of Castle Creek

and he carries you back toward home across the Brown's Creek drainage

and across and up the steep hill out of Alder Creek 

and across and up the very steep hill out of Hart Creek

and back home,

you know that if it doesn't cure what ails ya, riding in Owyhee is at least good medicine.

Thanks Judy and Milon!

More photos and stories:

http://www.endurance.net/international/USA/2012OwyheeCanyonlands/

Owyhee Canyonlands Preview: Hart Creek Trail

Tuesday September 11 2012

The spectacular Hart Creek trail will be Day 2 of the Owyhee Canyonlands ride, September 25-29. 

The Old West really comes to life when you ride this trail. When you pass the historic detritus of an old homestead, you can't fail to think about the pioneers who settled this country, and you imagine what it must have been like without cars and phones and internet, in the drought-summers and snowy winters, depending solely on the running water of Hart Creek to keep you going here.

(This is just the White People history; of course the Native American Indians were here doing their thing long before the white people invaded - their leavings are harder to find, and I'd just as soon keep them secret anyway.)

[video here]

More to come, and a recap of the last 9 years of the Owyhee Canyonlands at:

http://www.endurance.net/international/USA/2012OwyheeCanyonlands/http://www.endurance.net/international/USA/2012OwyheeCanyonlands/

Red Canyon of the Hart

Sunday June 6 2010

I used to hike a lot. Long hikes. Hard hikes. Peaks. Cross country. Forests and mountains. Now it's only on occasion. Last few hikes I did, I stumbled about gracelessly, the ground feeling foreign. My feet were out of practice, my body uncoordinated. I must get my hiking legs back underneath me.


Today I head cross country in the Owyhee desert to the Deep Red Canyon of the Hart. The skies are dark, blue-gray and heavy; the rain is moving down from the Owyhees. It begins to fall on the desert, on me, first a soft mist. Then I hear the sound of drumbeats all around me. Then I feel the drumbeats. The earth turns dark, glistening; the flowers emanate intense hues - the Indian paintbrush, purple sage, wild onion, buckwheat, penstemmon, globemallow, lupine. The earth gets wet. My skin gets wet. The flowers reach skyward and drip raindrops. I turn my head skyward and rain drips from my face.

Today my feet are feeling the earth, molding to the uneven ground, moving over it without tripping, without slipping on the wet rocks. I smell the wet desert, the sweet sage and flowers of the shadscale. I absorb the rain like the desert.

Today it's just me an a lone pronghorn on a ridge in the distance. We study each other. I have binoculars. He has the speed with which to disappear. It takes me half an hour to reach where he was.

Before I see the cliffs of the Deep Red Canyon, I hear the roaring waterfalls on Hart Creek far below. The cliffs are red and gray in the rain. Tall. I can't see the bottom of the canyon. Slippery. I don't get too close to the edge today. They rise abruptly from the wide valley floor to become a deep chasm.


Two empty eagle nests perch on the face of the cliffs. Pigeons fly about in confusion at this rare human intrusion. Canyon wrens sing their melodic downward spiraling tune.

I follow the rim of the canyon. It is magnificent, this hidden canyon in the Owyhee desert, the rhyolite rock carved and sliced over eons by water running down from the Owyhee mountains. A lone juniper stands guard over the canyon walls. I stand beside it, dumbfounded by its perpetual view.


My feet find and follow a game trail down into the canyon. I startle a prairie falcon. It flies away, perturbed, screeching at me. A lush ecosystem crowds this narrow canyon. Fat cottonwood trees squeeze alongside the creek. They are thick with luxuriant leaves. Willows choke the ground. Bouquets of rice grass reach my waist.


I climb back up to the canyon rim and follow it until the high cliffs meld into the soft hills that cover the Owyhee desert, and hide these marvelous canyons.

The flamboyant wildflowers line my return path with a royal carpet. Three baby ravens screech and squawk until I climb a hill to see them. They sit silently and study me then discuss among themselves my place in their desert.


I have my hiking legs back under me today. I think the Ravens approve.

Chasm

Wednesday March 17 2010

You can see the two canyon notches here: Hart Creek on the left, Little Hart Creek on the right. When we do the Hart Creek Homestead ride, we ride right up to the Little Hart notch on the downstream side, before we turn off and climb around and up onto the ridge above it.

Often we'll see an eagle or two flying around in this Little Hart Creek canyon. There's supposed to be a historic nest in the Hart Creek notch. We've never ridden to or around that one.

Today we drop down behind the Little Hart Creek notch on the upstream side. The notch looks quite tame and unimpressive from the this side. Here it's a wide drainage. There's no water coming down here now.


As always, Jose likes to stop and take in the view.




Between Hart and Little Hart Creek canyons is a box canyon.

It's a rocky climb to the top. The top is a broad plateau, with a view down the entire Hart Creek drainage, all the way to the distant Snake River. As if on cue, we see a golden eagle flying around.

We ride toward the rim of Hart Creek Canyon.


Holy cow!


It's like the Grand Canyon of Owyhee. It's amazing the power of water can carve such a deep gash in the earth. Some of it so dark and deep I can't see the bottom. I can hear the water running far below. I can see part of a waterfall. The only word I can say for five minutes is - WOW!








Jose didn't even graze because he was fascinated by the view.




This is looking downstream toward the Snake River. Hart Creek and Little Hart Creek join below us (right around Suz's butt).


Looking upstream at Little Hart Creek notch, behind which we first descended.


You won't find the Grand Canyon of the Owyhee marked on a map, and there's no easy way to get there by vehicle or on foot or on horseback. Probably best to keep it our secret anyway.

Off the Beaten Path

Thursday January 21 2010

You could live here for a lifetime and not see all this Owyhee country. You could live here for years and not know what's in your back yard. I sort of have an excuse - I've been here only almost 3 years; Carol has no excuse; she's been here almost ten.

"You know," she said as we made our way on Jose and Suz, on another ridiculously mild winter day, up the Hart Creek drainage on our usual trail, "I've never ridden along the base of those bluffs."

Well? What were we waiting for? We're always riding either down by the creek and crossing it, or up on the rim looking down into it. Why not explore something new?

"Let's follow this little wash up to the bluffs."


The rim rises ultimately about 400 feet above the wide drainage of Hart Creek. The closer we got to the bottom of the bluffs, the more they became cliffs, and the more amazing it got. "This isn't a wimpy version of the Badlands of South Dakota, this is the Real Badlands of Owhyee!" We rounded the side of a hill, where a surprising big box canyon opened up in front of us. Boulders fallen from the rim over time littered the ground like shrapnel from a volcano. We topped a little rise in this canyon to see a deep little wash lined with rye grass and a patch of quail bush, which could mean only one thing - a spring! There wasn't any standing water by the grass (the quail bush was too thick to see underneath), but the wash was quite muddy.

All these years, and we never knew this was here.




We thought we might be the only humans on the planet to know about this spot, but we did ride past an old (or maybe not so old) wine or moonshine jug. There is an old Homestead near here.

And of course it's fun to ride a horse who seems to enjoy exploring, and who definitely likes to stop and look at and appreciate the beautiful scenery. Jose especially likes to take in the sweeping views from the tops of hills.

We rode up a narrow ridge to look down into the box canyon, then turned around and climbed back down, and rode on to the Homestead. On the way, there's a dirt road that goes off to the south by some old corrals; Carol said, "I've never taken this road either - let's see where it goes!" It wound up the hill a ways then stopped at a lookout over Hart Creek - the REAL Hart Creek. Up until last year, we always thought (sadly) we were riding up to the Hart Creek Notch in the cliffs on our regular trail. But no, after consulting a map, we realized that was Little Hart Creek. This narrow cleft in the cliffs we were now looking at is Hart Creek. The notches are about a mile apart. Too narrow to ride a horse in, but I must come back on foot one day. There is supposed to be a historic golden eagle nest in this Hart Creek notch anyway, more than enough excuse to hike into it.

And all these years, we'd just ridden through and past the old Homestead on our Hart Creek trail. I've never stopped to explore around it. (The main structure washed away into Oreana in a flood in the 1960's.)

I didn't get off to go in this structure today, but, crossing the creek, I wanted to look at the old corral we always turned at and rode away from.

Carol said "There must be something over there, because there's a locust tree. It didn't get there by itself." The homesteaders always planted locust trees, because they grew quickly and provided good shade and windbreaks.

Carol held Jose while I climbed the little rise and crossed the fence - old wooden boards lay in the middle of the pen - probably part of a barn. Further on: "an old wagon! And a plow!" And a little further on, "Another dugout house!" This one still has a stovepipe in it, well-preserved stonework, and there are still pieces of willow branches on the roof that were used for thatching. These partial underground homes were an excellent idea for this area - to stay cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.

We then followed our usual path, past the Little Hart Creek notch, up the Knife Edge trail back onto the rim. The same view of the Owyhees as they emerge above the ridge never fails to impress; and the same question always pops in my head, about the lone juniper tree that lives on the steep side of the hill between the ridge and Hart Creek. How the heck did it get there? Where the heck does it get its water from? There must be some sort of water source reaching it at this odd spot, or, maybe, as Carol suggested, "A Raven planted the tree there, and Ravens come and water it." You do see a lot of Ravens cavorting in the updrafts along this whole rim.

Who really knows?

All the trails here are great, but sometimes it pays to leave the beaten path and follow your whims in this fabulous country. There are mysteries and surprises waiting to be discovered.


More photos of the Hart Creek Hidden Spring Box Canyon ride