Episode summary:
I travelled to the southeastern corner of Oregon in the United States to visit the Alvord Desert. This dry, sunbaked salt pan is very different to the state’s magnificent Pacific coast forests but it is equally as dramatic and far less visited. If you love deserts you’ll love the Alvord. If you’re wondering ‘where is the Alvord Desert’, ‘how large is the Alvord Desert’ or ‘what is Eastern Oregon known for’ this podcast might give you some hints.
Listen to a podcast about visiting the amazing and remote Alvord Desert in Oregon.
Transcript – S2 E4: Getting dusty in an Oregon desert
This week, we’re getting a little dusty in a lesser-known North American desert.
For most of us the word ‘nature’ conjures images of green forests alive with birdsong, snow-capped mountains towering over pristine lakes, or white sand beaches fringed by swaying coconut palms and rich turquoise reefs. Few of us would automatically envision a sun-baked, heat-cracked flat pan of desert, yet this is nature too, albeit an extreme. There’s an energy about deserts, a mysterious, unseen force. To me, it’s magnetic. There’s also a paradox: they’re often so quiet and still, yet something this big and dramatic and hot – and sometimes so downright dangerous – should really introduce itself with a deafening roar. When I first set eyes on a desert and am hit by a stunning panorama, I almost expect a hidden orchestra to play a triumphant ‘ta-da!!’ from behind a rocky outcrop but instead there’s often silence. Sometimes you can only hear the wind but if it’s a still day then there’s no sound at all.
Deserts are, for me, some of the most serene and beautiful places on Earth. I feel this calm as I lie down face-first on the bleached, dusty surface, or ‘playa’, of the Alvord Desert. It’s a dry lakebed in the American state of Oregon, a place much better known for its Redwood and Douglas Fir forests, lush valleys and waterfalls. But those are almost exclusively found in its western part, along the wet Pacific coast. The Alvord is in the far southeast corner of the state and has much more in common with similarly arid Nevada, just to the south.
Oregon’s hidden gem
Comparatively few people venture east of Oregon’s interior to reach this place, so for once the old cliché ‘hidden gem’ is true. The Alvord covers 84 square miles (or 217 square kilometres) and marks the northwestern extreme of the much larger Great Basin Desert, one of the Big Four in the US. It’s also quite high, sitting at about 4,000 feet, or 1,200 metres. So don’t be fooled into thinking this is a hot desert year round; it gets chilly here in winter. But today is late summer and the mercury is pushing up towards 95 degrees Fahrenheit or 35 degrees Celsius.
I’ve come here partly because it’s a desert I don’t know but also to look for a snowy plover and ask why on earth this bird chooses to hang out here, scrabbling for what must be incredibly rare food scraps, when it could be with its mates on the Pacific beaches, gorging on a daily oceanic feast washed in by the tide. Natural hot springs flow onto the playa at certain points, spreading as much as a mile out across the surface. This, my birding friends tell me, is why the plovers are here. I find it hard to imagine they can get anything but very slim pickings from the shallow and fast evaporating waters. But nature knows best, so who am I to question the wisdom of its creatures. These Alvord plovers know something their beach brethren do not. But today, however, they must be hiding from the sun.
Sunbathing with the devil
As I lie on the baking playa and scan the horizon with my telephoto lens for a glimpse of one, all I see is a lifeless white and beige vista crinkled by a heat haze. Into view comes a dancing spinning funnel, lurching and prancing across the flat salt pan. A dust devil – a mini tornado whirling like a top as it floats across the landscape before exploding in a puff of smoke. Taking my eye away from the camera, I see several of them out on the horizon. They are reverse silhouetted, white on black, against the backdrop of the remote Pueblo mountain range that runs over the border into Nevada.
Lying on a flat salt-hardened desert floor might sound uncomfortable but in fact I’m finding it quite relaxing. Maybe it’s the heat of the playa under me acting a bit like a soothing electric blanket. I feel I’m not too far away from a nap. But a surprise dust devil changes all that, coming out of nowhere and hitting me side on. My eyes, ears, hair and camera lens are coated with white dust and I cough to get it out of my throat and lungs. So much for the nap.
By 6pm the first evening shadows seep across the playa, turning it from blisteringly white-hot to a cooler milky blue. The temperature falls, the breeze picks up, blowing down from the adjacent Steens Mountains, bringing faint whiffs of desert plants – sagebrush mainly, I think.
Moonrise over the Alvord
I dust myself off, set up my tripod and point my lens vaguely eastwards to prepare for the last nature event of the day. The sky turns a bruised purple and beyond the low hills at the eastern edge of the playa a glow begins. Out of this emerges the forehead of the full moon, rising majestically. It’s fat and orange, like a Halloween pumpkin that’s seen better days. But as it climbs it shakes off its coating of sleep, becoming cleaner and whiter and more and more brilliant, while slimming down to the shape we know and love.
By the time I’m packing up my car to leave, it’s riding high in the desert sky, turning the playa into a lake of molten platinum. In the distance I hear a haunting howl: a coyote is beginning its nightly prowl along the edges of this lonely desert place.
© copyright Matthew Brace
