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