We awakened to a magnificent dawn light show but ended up falling back to sleep until about 7:30 when Peg got up followed by me starting to rustle around at about 8:00. Peggy made some fortified coffee and cereal for breakfast and soon we were on our way to look at the town of Burns and check out the Harney County Museum.
After cruising through town both ways, which takes about 6 minutes, we stopped in at the Doughnut Hole Bakery for a heart=plugging assortment of cinnamon rolls and maple bars. They were quite tasty and dirt cheap. It is fortunate that this business is not down the street from my house or I would be long dead from eating too many circles of death.
From the bakery we started to cruise back toward our park but were waylaid by the sight of seven deer browsing on some folks’ lawns and a side trip to the Harney County Museum which was neat but they didn’t allow photography inside. We then drove just south of Burns and turned parallel with US-20 but about 2 miles south of town. There was a truly amazing selection of birds feeding on the bugs and fish of the flooded grasslands on this side of town. Peggy didn’t agree with my names of the birds we spotted choosing instead to look up their real names in the Peterson Western Birds guide. She identified red-winged blackbirds, yellow-headed blackbirds, Brewer’s blackbirds, sandhill cranes, Canadian geese, white-faced ibises, great blue herons, American avocets, northern harriers along with some fat robins, a considerable assortment of ducks, coots, and a couple of jackrabbits.
After about an hour driving up and back on a 2 mile long road, we turned south on OR-205 and headed into the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Although the maps we have show this area as a few big lakes, in actuality the landscape is thousands of little ponds widely scattered across the valley floors between the colossal lava and basalt mesas. A couple months ago, there was a big kerfuffle here between the BLM and some ranchers over “over-reaching” by the BLM and government insistence that arson, sedition, inciting to engage in insurrection and not paying for grazing on government land are bad. Because of this little dust-up, the Malheur NWR headquarters building is shut down for renovations left over from the mini-war. The gravel road from the closed headquarters to the south is indicated on maps as being the auto tour route but about a mile from H.Q. the gravel became caltrop-shaped and we elected not to do the 48 remaining miles on this particular route.
We chose instead to drive southeast toward Steens Mountain, the biggest thing on the horizon around here. Most of this country is at about 4500′ elevation but Steens sticks up another 5000′ and was completely snow covered. There is spectacular country around here with amazing lava and basalt mesas and cap rocks along with mountain ranges in all directions. After about 20 miles we turned east toward the town of Diamond. We did not get to Diamond but did take the road for about 8 miles and were rewarded with views of Trumpeter swans, what we suspect were cinnamon teals, some northern shoveler ducks and three very chubby marmots lurking in the big piles of broken lava.
We finally cut it off here and returned the 30 miles or so back to our campground. It was a great day of wildlife viewing and we figured we had seen enough for one day.
There is a dozen and a quarter photos we took today if you click here

We were all picked up and out of TT Bend / Sunriver RV Resort by 10:45 this morning. We got back on 97 northbound headed the 15 miles or so to Bend where we got off on Business 97 for a while. After numerous red lights, we turned east on US-20 into the Great Basin area.
US-20 from Bend has a few curves and is mostly long, straight sections of highway that rise over long peninsulas of lava that crisscross this high desert terrain. The Ponderosa pines in Bend give way to Juniper forests as you head east. Some of the Junipers are very old and have twisted trunks that give them an almost alien appearance. As we progressed east, the Junipers petered out to sage brush terrain bordered on the horizons with massive lava and basalt mesas that stood several hundred to thousands of feet above us as we passed by on US-20. Recent rains have made almost everything green and the scenery was pretty spectacular.
Just before Burns, we turned south on some back roads until we finally made it to OR-205 which runs mostly south through flooded grasslands adjacent to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. There were birds everywhere. I told Peggy that I spotted yellow-headed snot whistles, triple-toed buxomboobs and purple-kneed phalaropes but she expressed some skepticism about the accuracy of the names for the magnificent birds we saw. She elected instead to look up the names someone else believes they should have in our Peterson Western Birds book.
After about 25 miles going south on OR-205, we turned off into Narrows RV Resort at the intersection of Sodhouse Lane. The park has a big store, propane for sale, free cable TV and wi-fi, sewer hookups, 30 amp electrical service and, most importantly, a bar. As Passport America members, our cost for 3 nights stay was $13.13 per night for a grand total of $39.39. It was about 45 degrees outside and the wind was blowing at about 25 knots so we did a minimal setup and climbed inside to enjoy the benefits of electric heat. Just outside our trailer we spotted a couple yellow warblers who seemed offended about our presence in their ‘hood. They initially showed their dissatisfaction by bashing their heads on our trailer windows but they gave up after a very short time and decided to allow peaceful co-existence between their noggins and our pricey tinted glazing.
The cloud cover started to break up about 5:00 PM and by 7:00 we were outside again getting some shots of the stunning cloud formations and a pink and orange sunset. The wi-fi at the park was so fast and clear that we were able to stream videos on Netflix and we spent most of the evening enjoying a few episodes of Sherlock.
We took a few pix today which you can see if you click here