Outdoors
Rec
SUMMIT
FEVER
Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald
This image, taken from a drone on June 19, 2021, shows Twin Lakes and, at right, Rock Creek Butte.
Scrambling to the top of Elkhorn
Peak west of Baker City
JAYSON
JACOBY
ON THE TRAIL
I
wedged my right hand into a
crevice in the sedimentary stone
and hauled myself up the fi nal
few feet to the summit of the great
peak.
And there I dropped to my
knees.
But not in triumph or elation.
This was vertigo.
Several years had passed since I
last stood atop Elkhorn Peak, and it
seems I had forgotten how exposed
this aerie is.
My knees had forgotten, anyway.
They refused to be still and support
my weight as they’re supposed to.
My wife, Lisa, and our son, Max,
clambered up the last pitch behind
me.
Max, who’s 10 and was making
his fi rst visit to this second-highest
point in the Elkhorn Mountains
west of Baker City, reacted much as
I did when he saw the void off the
east side of the peak.
He hunkered down beside the
conical rock cairn that adds a few
feet to the mountain’s offi cial eleva-
tion of 8,931 feet.
I fall, so to speak, around the
middle on the acrophobia scale,
and I regained my equilibrium in a
couple minutes.
And then promptly went all
woozy again when I launched our
drone.
Many people, of course, can
feel a trifl e dizzy when they are
standing on an exposed perch and
then look up.
I’m prone to the condition
myself.
But adding a small fl ying object
to the scene accentuated the eff ect
to an extent that surprised me. It
was as if my subconscious insisted
that I wasn’t standing on solid rock
but was instead up there with the
drone.
It was disconcerting. I had to
return to a kneeling position for the
rest of the brief fl ight, which at least
yielded a compelling piece of video
and several photographs from van-
tage points otherwise inaccessible.
Although Elkhorn Peak falls
175 short of Rock Creek Butte, its
neighbor across Twin Lakes basin,
as the apex of the Elkhorns, the
former summit has an unsurpassed
view.
From most places in Baker City,
Elkhorn Peak is the highest point
visible in the range. Its bulk hides
Rock Creek Butte, which is a bit
west of Elkhorn Ridge, the spine
of high ground that dominates the
western horizon from town.
Among the signifi cant summits
in the area, Elkhorn Peak is com-
paratively easy to reach.
Depending on how you go, the
drive to the trailhead might be the
most punishing, and possibly the
slowest, part of the trip.
The least taxing option, and the
one we chose on June 19, is by way
of Marble Creek Pass and the Elk-
horn Crest National Recreation
Trail.
There are two routes to the pass,
one from the Baker Valley side, the
other from Sumpter Valley. The
road is steep and rocky on both
sides, but the Sumpter Valley route
is marginally less awful.
The Elkhorn Crest Trail, by con-
trast, is a pleasure.
Few if any trails in Oregon
reward hikers with such grand
vistas for so little physical eff ort.
The trail, as its name suggests, fol-
lows the crest of the Elkhorns.
And although it’s not quite fl at, the
grade is so gentle as to be all but
imperceptible.
Marble Creek Pass is the
southern terminus of the trail,
which runs north for 23 miles to
Anthony Lakes.
The trail stays on the west side
of Elkhorn Ridge for the fi rst three
miles, so the most expansive view
is in that direction. A blue fi nger of
drought-depleted Phillips Reservoir
is visible due south, and all major
peaks and ranges in the southern
Blue Mountains are arrayed,
including Table Rock and Monu-
Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald
A whitebark pine snag along the Elkhorn
Crest Trail on June 19, 2021.
Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald
ment Peak, Strawberry Mountain,
Dixie Butte, Vinegar Hill and the
rest of the Greenhorn Range, Des-
olation Butte and, nearer than any
others, Mount Ireland.
But the trail also veers into
a couple of notches in the crest,
and from there the view of Baker
City and Baker Valley is reminis-
cent of what you might see from an
airplane.
The Wallowas dominate the
northeast skyline, and due east the
view extends well into Idaho.
The Elkhorn Crest Trail runs
through a quintessential alpine land-
scape, the slopes brightened by a
palette-spanning selection of wild-
fl owers, including purple lupine and
penstemon, orange Indian paint-
brush, white phlox and blue fl ax.
Just two conifers grow in this
harsh country, where snow lies for
more than half the year and the
wind is nearly constant — subalpine
fi r and whitebark pine.
The latter species is my favorite.
Whitebarks rarely exceed 40
feet in height — those incessant
gusts discourage tall vegetation —
but they can live for many centu-
ries, and over those vast spans their
trunks can grow thicker than an ele-
phant’s leg.
Whitebarks are if anything more
attractive in death than in life —
their limbs contorted into fanciful
shapes, the wood weathered to a
sheen that can look as though it
had been sanded and polished by a
skilled hand.
A snowdrift fi lls a notch in the Elkhorn Ridge, with Goodrich Lake about 2,000 feet be-
low, on June 19, 2021.
See, Summit/Page B6
B
Saturday, June 26, 2021
The Observer & Baker City Herald
‘Nemefi sh’:
The species
that long
eluded me
LUKE
OVGARD
CAUGHT OVGARD
DOWNEY, Calif.— Dojo
loach.
Amur weatherfi sh.
Pond loach.
Oriental weatherfi sh.
Japanese weatherfi sh.
Luke’s nemefi sh.
Misgurnus anguillicaudatus,
a resilient, eel-like fi sh goes by
many names. The latter is just
what I call them. Well, called
them until this month.
Native to east Asia, the fi sh
has been introduced all over the
world by aquarists desiring to
send it “back to nature” after
deciding it’s not the pet for
them. As these fi sh can sur-
vive in heavily polluted waters,
a wide array of temperatures
and even barely oxygenated
puddles until the next rain,
they’ve taken a foothold — fi n-
hold? — almost everywhere
they’ve been released. The
name “weatherfi sh” allegedly
comes from the fi sh’s increased
feeding activity before storms,
though I wouldn’t know
because prior to this month, I’d
never seen one in the wild.
They’re supposed to exist all
over the place, and I’ve investi-
gated almost a dozen locations
purported to have populations
from marshlands of Astoria to
sloughs of Portland to agricul-
tural ditches in Ontario. The
one thing all of these locations
have in common? I couldn’t
fi nd weatherfi sh.
Last year, I expanded my
search beyond Oregon and tried
a pond outside of Salt Lake
City where a friend had video-
taped several of them feeding
during the day. Nope. I tried
a ditch in Florida purported
to have them. Nada. I even
checked the Weather app on
my phone. Nothing. So, just as
I’ve done with dating during
the pandemic, I resigned myself
to failure and hoped I’d get
another shot sometime before I
began to lose my hair.
Enter Peter Chang.
Peter
I met Peter in the old-fash-
ioned way: when he shouted
my name from a passing car
as I walked down the side of a
California road.
“Luke?”
“Luke!”
“Luke Ovgard!?”
The shock of someone fi ve
hours from home in a car I
didn’t recognize shouting my
name as I skirted the edge of a
boujee Californian waterfront
would’ve killed someone with
a weaker heart. Fortunately,
repeated heartbreak has made
the beating scar tissue in my
chest resilient.
Unsure who the guy (or the
three others in his car) were,
I followed him to the nearby
parking lot. It was broad day-
light, and there were people
everywhere, so I fi gured at
least there would be witnesses
to my murder.
Out of the car popped some
guy I’d never seen before in
my life.
In the passenger seat, a
woman (I’d later learn this was
his wife, Julie), seemed a bit
embarrassed and kept apolo-
gizing profusely. Figuring this
wasn’t the typical behavior of
a Bonnie and Clyde-type duo
on a murderous rampage, I
went up.
He introduced himself as
Peter Chang, and told me he’d
started reading my blog and
then my column years before
when he fi rst got into fi shing. I
was fl oored.
It’s not uncommon for me
to get recognized in my home-
town by people I’ve never
met who read my column,
but I’ve been writing there
for seven years. This seemed
almost unreal.
I’m horrible with names but
Luke Ovgard/Contributed Photo
After years and years of hunting for
them, Peter Chang helped Luke Ov-
gard fi nd and catch his “nemefi sh.”
great with faces. Here, I was
drawing a blank.
He told me as I tried not
to visibly sigh in relief, “You
wouldn’t know me, but I’m a
fan of your writing!”
I was humbled to rare
speechlessness for a moment.
We talked for a few minutes,
grabbed a picture together, and
we parted ways.
I followed him on Instagram
that day, and a few months
later, I saw he’d caught my
nemefi sh ...
Shame
As I planned this year’s
summer trip, I arranged to meet
up with Peter and try for these
weatherfi sh on one of my fi rst
days on the road. We planned
to visit a spot our mutual
acquaintance, Ben Cantrell,
had discovered. Peter and Julie
graciously invited me to stay
with them.
Peter and I met up in the
early evening and walked to
a remote creek on the out-
skirts of Los Angeles. After
catching my fi rst arroyo chub,
another fi sh I’d tried and failed
to catch a few times, I fi nally
hooked my weatherfi sh — and
promptly dropped it.
It’s OK because I caught
another one. And dropped it.
This repeated, comically,
for at least half an hour. I lifted
no fewer than eight Oriental
weatherfi sh/dojo loach/Luke’s
nemefi sh out of the water but
failed to get one in hand for a
picture. I touched several, even
got one on land before seeing
its snake-like movements
propel it from the muddy shore-
line into the stream and out of
my life forever.
Peter was remarkably
helpful, spotting the abundant
fi sh for me and stifl ing most
of his laughs as I dropped fi sh
after fi sh.
Daylight faded with my
patience, and he informed me
we had about 15 minutes left
before we had to move the cars
out of the park.
In the wan light, I hooked
my ninth? Tenth? Eleventh fi sh?
I landed it, walked an unnec-
essary distance from the water
and snapped a quick picture as
Peter looked on approvingly.
I owed him so much; I
could barely contain my joy.
He helped me close a long,
embarrassing chapter of failure
in my fi shing career, but the
good news is that I was exper-
imenting with my GoPro that
night, so I immortalized 20
or 30 minutes of that repeated
failure on fi lm for future
generations.
Though I hadn’t released the
video, I’m pretty sure his ador-
able infant daughter, Hailey,
must’ve heard about my fail-
ings because she seemed pretty
uncertain about me when I met
her the next morning. Eventu-
ally, I won her over the same
way I won over the weather-
fi sh: with Peter’s help. Grapes
admittedly helped, too.
After years of repeated
failure, Peter helped me solve
that problem. So the next step,
it would seem, is to have Peter
take a look at my online dating
profi les, right?
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