B
Saturday, March 27, 2021
The Observer & Baker City Herald
Spring Hiking
In The Sage
Country East
Of Baker City
Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald
Looking northeast down the west fork of Ritter Creek and across Keating Valley to the Wallowas.
B UGS AND B UTTERCUPS
T
he buttercup
and the tick are
cousins.
Not literally, of course.
A wildfl ower and an
arachnid stand about as far
apart, on the spectrum of
living things, as, say, the sala-
mander and the Sitka spruce.
Nor is taxonomy the only
area in which this pair makes
for an odd couple.
Buttercups are beloved.
Their glossy yellow blos-
soms, beaming from the scant
shelter of a sagebrush, herald
spring’s arrival as surely as
the frigid north wind and The
Masters golf tournament (al-
most always, anyway, with the
latter bellwether; we’ll give
Augusta a mulligan for 2020).
Ticks, by contrast, are
despised.
In common with most sorts
of bloodsucking organisms —
leeches, vampires, head lice —
ticks provoke in many people
a deep revulsion, a loathing
that overrides their normal
attitudes.
My 10-year-old son Max, for
instance, hates to see almost
anything suffer, including
insects and other “lesser”
creatures. Max was disgusted
with me when I accidentally
hit a small bird while we were
driving, and he was not
persuaded by my argument
— compelling though I believe
it was — that it was purely
an accident and besides, our
sedan isn’t nearly so nimble as
a bird in fl ight.
Yet when Max found a tick
on his neck the other day —
still crawling, not embedded
— he exhorted me to take it
outside and burn it, as I had
done one other time. Flush-
ing the bug down the toilet
ON THE TRAIL
JAYSON JACOBY
was not suffi ciently harsh, by
Max’s way of thinking.
The tick had hitched a ride
on Max earlier in the day
while we were hiking in the
sagelands east of Baker City.
I picked the place not only
because it’s just a 20-minute
drive from our home, but
because I was pretty sure we
would see some new butter-
cups.
Which we did.
Along with clumps of
another yellow denizen of dry
places, the desert parsley.
This intersection of the
buttercup and the tick, the
potential to both revel in
nature’s beauty and to be
infested with vermin, is only
one of the tradeoffs inherent
to early spring hiking in our
elevated corner of Oregon.
There is the matter of mud.
The gumbo common to the
sage steppe is a particularly
foul concoction, a viscous
stew of soil and gravel that
can thwart even knobby off-
road tires and cling to boots
with a disturbing tenacity.
In the worst conditions, one
stride can saddle each boot
with a pound or so of slippery
muck.
Desert roads are most
prone to turning into quag-
mires when the frost is going
out of the ground, usually
sometime in March depend-
ing on elevation and slope
aspect. I’ve been turned back,
by roads the approximate
consistency of half-congealed
oatmeal, on many otherwise
fi ne spring days.
east of Baker City.
From Interstate 84 at Exit
302, drive east on Highway
86, toward Richland, Halfway
and Hells Canyon, for about 5
miles. Just beyond the turnoff
to the Oregon Trail Interpre-
tive Center (north), turn right
(south) onto Ruckles Creek
Loop, a well-maintained gravel
road.
Drive east for about
6.7 miles. For much of the
distance the Bureau of Land
Management’s Virtue Flat
Off-Highway Vehicle Area
borders the road on its left
side. Just beyond a ranch
with a distinctive horse corral
made of old tires, turn right
onto Love Reservoir Road,
marked by a small white sign
(distinguished from the more
offi cial, and larger, green sign
for Ruckles Creek Loop).
Love Reservoir Road is
rougher, with ankle-deep
ruts in places that betray its
sometimes muddy condition.
This is a road to avoid when
it’s not dry.
Follow the road about 2.9
Lisa Britton/For the Baker City Herald miles. Just before the road
Sure signs of spring: buttercups (left) and desert parsley.
drops into a canyon, a narrow
track bears off to the right, to-
Which are themselves
fi xture hereabouts. Skies tend mountain ranges — the Wal- ward the ridge that forms the
relatively rare.
to clear in the front’s wake.
lowas and the Elkhorns — in a divide between the Powder
That chilly north wind I
But as the low atmospheric
more fetching perspective. The and Burnt River drainages.
mentioned earlier is another
pressure slinks southeast into topography is relatively gentle, The Oregon Trail crossed this
occasional spring irritant —
Idaho and Utah, hauling off
but even the modest knolls
ridge a mile or so farther west.
especially to eyes, like mine,
the clouds and precipitation,
have the sort of vista that real
We hiked this road, which
burdened by rigid contact
the wind — which is just air
estate developers covet.
climbs very gently, for about
lenses.
moving from high pressure
Fortunately there’s little
a mile and a half, to a locked
It’s nefarious, that wind.
toward low — freshens.
chance that these minor
gate at the fence that marks
The most blustery days,
Yet for all the potential
summits will ever be capped
the boundary between public
perversely, also tend to be the impediments — bugs and
by mansions — a goodly por-
and private land. The creek
sunny days that entice us
mud and gusts — the allure of tion of the ground is publicly
just to the east is a fork of
outdoors after the long months snow-free ground is powerful. owned.
Ritter Creek.
of ice and snow.
The area east of Baker City
Our destination on the day
For a better view, climb
This meteorological phe-
beckons for reasons other than of Max’s tick encounter is
the unnamed butte that rises
nomenon results from the pas- buttercups.
between Virtue Flat and Love west of the road and is also
sage of cold fronts, a seasonal
Few places put our great
Reservoir, about a dozen miles publicly owned.
A scratched airplane flight prompts column about air guns
I got up on a
and herded us
recent morning
into a long line
BASE CAMP
at 4 o’clock, ran
for rebooking.
TOM CLAYCOMB
to the airport
Five hours later
and jumped on
I’m back home
a plane heading
where I started.
to the inaugural Shooting Sports
The plan was to meet Fred
Showcase in Alabama. We boarded Rielhl, a good buddy of mine and
and it quickly became apparent
the publisher of AmmolandShoot-
that something was wrong. An hour ingSportsNews, in Atlanta. From
and a half later they deboarded
there we’d run over to Alabama a
day early. There’s a park where you
can shoot howitzer cannons and
drive tanks. Scratch that item from
the agenda.
Oh well, I got to go home and be
with Katy one more day. I was going
to write my article for the next week
on the four-hour fl ight so I’ll also get
that done while at home. I sat down
to plan what topic to cover and sud-
denly it hit me. I’ve never written
a series of air gun articles for the
papers! Wow, how did I let that one
slip by me? I’m big time into air
guns. I’ve tested air guns for a lot of
the major air gun companies, been
on Prostaff with one of the major
ones, hunted big game with the big
Umarex .50 cal. Hammer, etc. etc.
So I’d like to encourage you to check
out some of the modern air guns.
I won’t be able to do air guns
justice in one small article so I’m go-
ing to do a two-part or maybe even a
four-part series to pique your inter-
est. (That is unless some other hot
topic pops up in the meantime, like
whistle pigs attacking school kids
at their bus stop, in which case I’ll
have to do my civic duty and write
about that).
See Air Guns/Page 6B