After the conclusion of a 5-day epic rafting trip in the wilderness and a 4-hour drive back to Bend through snow squalls in the desert, walking in the front door and heading upstairs to a hot shower, a flush toilet, and running water reminded me of how grateful we should be for these luxuries in our day-to-day lives.
Conversely, heading out into the wilderness for five days away from day-to-day stress, family drama, and total 24x7 connectivity reminded me of how grateful we should be for wonders of the natural world around us.
For a balanced life, we need both parts, civilization and wilderness, to remind us of how fantastic each part is, to not take any part for granted, to be present always, and to absorb everything that happens in our lives.
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| Happy Warm and Dry Campers, at Canyon Camp on the Lower Owyhee |
Choosing a Trip
My search for rafting possibilities was not random, however, because the river to raft was never in question. Ever since I saw the first photographs of the canyons along the Owyhee a couple of years ago, that destination went quickly on my "someday" list.
The name Owyhee is a 19th century spelling of Hawaii. The river name honors three Hawaiian trappers from the North West Company who were tasked in 1819 with exploring and trapping along the then-uncharted river. They failed to return to the rendezvous and likely died at the hands of local tribes.
I spent a couple days looking into companies who raft the Owyhee and I quickly selected Momentum River Expeditions, headquartered in Ashland, OR. I wanted a small company, a guide-owned company, and a local company as opposed to an out-of-state or national company. Moreover, I got a really good feeling that their style matches our own. Choosing Momentum is a decision that I would never regret; they are a first-class outfit.
Next, in trying to schedule the trip, I looked at historical water levels versus historical weather patterns on the Owyhee and tried to select the timing that optimized the highest water levels with the nicest weather. As a rule, as the weather gets nicer, the water level drops. As a river whose level is controlled solely by snowmelt, the realistic rafting period is April and May. I aimed for the middle and ultimately booked for the final five days of April.
My prior experience in kayaking and whitewater canoeing suggests that in general, more water flow is better. Monitoring the USGS water gauge about three miles north of the Rome boat launch in the few weeks prior to the trip, I noted really nice flows above 8000 cubic feet per second (CFS) in the first half of the month, but the levels quickly plummeted to below 5000 CFS at mid-month. Although I was worried that the level would continue to drop, it stayed in the 4750-4950 CFS range for the duration of our trip, plenty of water for fun rafting, but not for the big and somewhat dangerous hydraulics.
In the high desert, the weather in the spring is always a true crapshoot. We live here so we're not surprised by the highly variable weather patterns: cold mornings, warm afternoons or cold afternoons, and random snow or rain. A week out, NWS was predicting cold rain all day our first day with improving weather through the trip. Fortunately, most of the rain blew through the night before as we drove east. We stayed dry with the exception of a few brief sprinkles. The wind, however, was a bit crazy on certain days and we did not really expect that. Still, all in all, no rain to speak of and generally sunny to partly cloudy skies were a win.
Our drive back home through snow squalls, followed by light snow the next evening and sleet the morning after is a stark reminder of how fickle our spring weather is in the high desert and how fortunate we were to have decent weather on our trip.
Getting to the Owyhee
Let's start by recognizing that the Lower Owyhee River is located in the middle of nowhere in a part of remote Oregon that has very few services and more livestock than people. The Owyhee Canyonlands Wilderness is a true wilderness in every sense of the word.
Most rafting trips on the Lower Owyhee start at the BLM boat launch in Rome, OR in southeast Malheur County just 30 miles shy of the Idaho border. Rome, or more familiarly called Rome Station after the lone café/gas station at the river, is a wide spot on US 95 (the main route between Boise and Reno) where it crosses the Owyhee River, about 4 hours southeast of our home in Bend.
Given the early morning start of our trip, we did not want to get up at 4am to make the 4-hour drive for our 9:30am rendezvous. For the rest of us Oregonians, the time zone is always an issue because the majority of Malheur County keeps to Idaho time, Mountain Time, the sole Oregon County not in Pacific Time. This is historical in that this part of Oregon is tied financially and culturally to Idaho and to Boise in particular. In any case, 9:30am in Rome is 8:30am by our clocks in the rest of Oregon.
The time zone change would also come into play in an unexpected way after the trip. When I document our trips, I often shoot photos on both my camera and my phone. Back home, I sort them by time to get them in rough order. My phone managed to get itself on MDT before I put it in airplane mode for the duration; however, my camera has no concept of time zones and stayed on PDT. This made for some interesting sequencing issues when I sorted the photos by time. We also noticed that the sun was setting after 9pm on the river, while it would be just after 8pm back home.
To make the early start time in Rome, we could have camped at the boat launch or stayed at the lone motel in Jordan Valley, OR (population less than 200) right on the Idaho border. But I knew that Ann's preference would be a larger hotel and the two largest places with hotels are Burns, OR and Boise, ID. Although we have friends in Boise with whom we could have stayed (Tim, thanks for the kind offer!), staying in Boise would have required an additional 4-5 hours of driving for the entire trip. We decided to stay in Burns.
We left Bend about 4pm on Thursday afternoon and the delightful April spring day quickly gave way to a cloudy, damp, rainy kind of yucky day as we made the 2-hour slog through the desert to Burns. We've made this trip a bunch, so there's just not much novel to see along the way through the desert. The highlight of the drive to Burns was sighting a male Yellow-headed Blackbird in full breeding plumage on a fence in a low, wet spot just west of Burns. In this same location, we saw three Northern Harriers, two of which pounced on prey while we were looking, not a sight you see every day.
We arrived in Burns about 6pm and promptly filled up our gas tank (gas being a huge consideration before heading out to the boonies) before checking in to our room at the Best Western. For dinner and breakfast the following morning, I made four smoked salmon, caper, and cream cheese bagels. We ate a bagel in our room rather than try to find something eat in tiny Burns, population maybe 2750. If push comes to shove, the best eats are probably at the deli counter in the Safeway. In any case, staying the night in Burns cut our drive the next morning in half, leaving only a couple of hours to Rome.
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| Smoked Salmon, Caper, and Cream Cheese Bagels |
As we drove east out of Burns on OR 78, we ate another bagel, while keeping an eye on all the bird life around us. As we crossed Silvies River and bent southeast around the infamous Malheur Wildlife Refuge, the ditches and low, marshy fields were crawling with ducks, overflown by skeins of geese, and covered with flocks of foraging gulls. Every now and again, I would see smaller shorebirds, such as plovers, but we were going too fast to sort them out.
The further we went south, the drier the land became. On this part of the drive, we saw many fence posts topped with either Western Meadowlarks or California Quail, as well as Black-Billed Magpies flitting across the road. As is usual when driving along any irrigated land out west, we saw many raptors perched on the irrigation rigs.
Ultimately, OR 78 tees into US 95, the main route between Boise and Reno, and we headed left, north towards the river. We arrived in Rome just at 9:00am MDT. After parking in the big lot at the boat launch on the southeast corner of the junction of US 95 and the Owyhee River, we did a quick reconnoiter of the parking lot and boat launch and found our guide, Amanda, as we walked back to the car. The remainder of this tale is covered in the Day 1 post.
Our Rafting Route
Our 5-day route would take us from the boat launch at Rome in a generally northeast direction to the Leslie Gulch boat launch on the Owyhee Reservoir, some 68 river miles north, just under 37 miles as the crow flies. I thought pre-trip that we might have taken out at Birch Creek, but that bumpy dirt road is a difficult slog for raft trailers.
Our trip is highlighted on the map sections below, shown from north to south. Because of the northerly direction of our travel, our starting point, the most southerly point, is on the last map below. Each day of travel is in alternating colors, fuchsia for one day and green for the next. The final day included a 12-mile tow on the Owyhee Reservoir behind a motorboat. I would have hated to have paddled all that flatwater in a raft. That route is shown in dashed purple.
I took on the order of 1500 photos of which I selected roughly 325 of the best that are included in the following posts:
Day 1, Rome Boat Launch to Hackberry Camp, 15 miles
Day 2, Hackberry Camp to Middle Ryegrass Camp, 8.5 miles
Day 4, Canyon Camp to Pothole Camp, 14 miles
Day 5, Pothole Camp to Leslie Gulch Boat Launch, 19.5 miles (12 under tow)
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| Day 5 - Tow from Mile 56 to Leslie Gulch Boat Ramp, Mile 68 |
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| Day 4 - to Pothole Camp, part 2 (green) Day 5- Pothole to Mile 56 (fuchsia) |
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| Day 3 - to Canyon Camp, part 2 (fuchsia) Day 4 - Canyon to Pothole Camp, part 1 (green) |
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| Day 2 - to Middle Ryegrass, part 2 (green) Day 3 - Middle Ryegrass to Canyon Camp, part 1 (fuchsia) |
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| Day 1 - to Hackberry Camp, part 2 (fuchsia) Day 2 - Hackberry Camp to Middle Ryegrass Camp, part 1 (green) |
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| Day 1 - Rome Boat Launch to Hackberry Camp, part 1 |
The Owyhee Experience
I had never been rafting before, so I was not really sure what to expect. Sure, I've been whitewater kayaking and canoeing before, mainly on rivers in the Southeast, so I had a good clue about being on the water. However, kayaking is an active experience in a nimble craft whereas rafting is a more passive experience in a more sluggish vehicle, albeit great for photography.
Without a doubt we had a blast on the water, especially hitting a huge hole and wave coming out of Whistling Bird that I hope you'll read about on Day 3. But the rafting, at least for me, was a smaller part of our overall experience and was the vehicle by which we could experience the highly varied geology and scenery of the Owyhee, the true highlight of the trip. There is no disrespect to Momentum in saying that the sights of the wilderness were the highlight.
As a first-time visitor to the Owyhee, with everything in the experience being new to me, I find it nearly impossible to express the overwhelming sense of being awestruck by our surroundings in a way that no photographs can adequately capture. The character of the river changed in amazing ways with each river mile such that we were seeing something new all the time. I went from one jaw-drop moment to another constantly. My camera, except in the hairiest whitewater, was never far from my eye.
I've seen a lot of canyons and rivers in my life, but none like the Owyhee. Compared to the big canyons along the Snake or the Grand Canyon along the Colorado, the Owyhee is much more intimate. It is one thing to be at the bottom of one of those towering but wide canyons; it is wholly another experience to be deep in a narrow canyon whose vertical walls you can touch, whose dizzying heights mesmerize you even from the bottom.
The breadth of scenery was unparalleled in my experience. Our route started in relatively flat farm country, on top of an old lake bed. The river quickly ate into that lake bed, becoming eroded and exposed, as we drifted north. From there, a section of steep rhyolite cliffs gave way to more sedimentary hills punctuated with rhyolite spires and basaltic cap rock. Then it was on to more intrusive magma structures, gabbro or granite, vertically grained towers and higher and higher canyon walls.
From there, we went through the Chalk Basin with its astounding layers of linen-colored sedimentary soil and chocolate-colored lava flows. As we worked our way into the heart of the trip, the river narrowed and we found ourselves on rapid water with vertical walls extending up over a thousand feet in places, a sight that you might imagine from reading the Anduin scenes in "The Lord of the Rings."
After the super deep and impressively vertical canyon section that some call The Grand Canyon of Oregon, the walls started to lower gradually until the riversides morphed to grassy, rolling hills. The further north we went, the more that the riverside became dotted with impressive rock spires jutting far skyward.
And then far too soon, we hit the flatwater of Owyhee Reservoir which we transited in tow behind a motorboat, letting us look all we wanted at the massive rock formations along the reservoir. Each time we looked, we saw something else as beautiful as the last thing that we had seen. Even the drive out of Leslie Gulch was mind-blowingly beautiful. I don't really have words to adequately describe the colors and textures of the land in this part of Oregon.
This overwhelming scenery coupled with the incredibly hard work and phenomenal attentiveness of our crew made for an epic trip. I have rarely seen people work as hard as our girl-power trio of Amanda, Sara, and Elena to the point where I almost felt obligated to help them with their workload. Being in the service industry for much of my life, I thoroughly appreciate all their efforts and I totally understand why they insisted that I be the guest and let them do their jobs.
As a lightweight backpacker, I would bring along perhaps 25 pounds of gear for a 5-day jaunt and that would include 2 pounds of water and 10 pounds of food. I was constantly amazed at the amount of gear that the ladies packed, unpacked, and schlepped each day, to include grills, stoves, propane, fire wood, fire pan, portable toilet, tarps, tables, pots and pans, china, silverware, coolers and much more gear that you will see in the daily photo-essays from the trip. I still remain amazed at how cheerful they remained through it all. All three of them spanned the ages of our own children, mid-20s to early-30s and caused me to wonder if our own kids would ever work this hard.
For obvious reasons, my hat is off to our trip guides, but equally importantly, I want to recognize all the people at Momentum unseen behind the scenes who were instrumental in handling the complicated logistics of our trip to a true wilderness. Like a restaurant where your contact is only with the service staff, there is always a big crew toiling away in the back of the house. Kudos to all.
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| Delightful Food |
Finally, I experienced a few firsts on this trip beyond it being my first (but not last: we have already booked on the Rogue for August) rafting experience. I have long desired to find a Bitterroot in bloom which I did on the flats above Ryegrass near Pruitt's Castle. And as many times as I have been to the desert, I have never heard or seen a Chukar. They were so common on this trip. And you may find it hard to believe that I have managed to attain 62 years of age without ever having a 'smore. No more; that box is now checked off!
Although Canyon Wrens live within a couple hundred yards of our house, I am going to miss their special calls cascading down the canyon walls to the beat of the clucking of the ubiquitous Chukars. This and the sound of water rushing over the rocks is the song of the Owyhee. I miss it already.
I believe that I speak for both Ann and me in summing up our experience with Momentum on the Owyhee quite simply: minds blown!
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