Message on postcard:
Hello Todd! This is Mike, reporting from near the end of my roadtrip at Steens Mountain, Oregon. It’s a good day. I got up before dawn and watched the sunrise from near the 9,700-foot summit of Steens Mountain. In the east the sky went from black to dark purple to orange, and once the sun peeked over the horizon I watched the mountain’s long shadow recede across Catlow Valley.

Steens Mountain stands about 5,000 feet above the surrounding desert, and out near the western horizon is Hart Mountain, maybe fifty miles off, although the Abert Rim is visible beyond it. The shadow receded across the valley at probably sixty miles per hour or so. Just uphill from me is the very top of Steens Mountain; it’s a rocky outcropping with some small radio towers on it. (Incidentally, I get great cell reception up here.)

I heard a rock crash while watching the sun come up, and that’s when I saw a huge bighorn sheep staring over the ledge. Pretty soon he was joined by another, and eventually I was looking at five or six bighorn sheep — they were far enough off that my photos of them look more like bigfoot than a sheep, and they blend in surprisingly well among the rocks.

One was a baby — or at least young — sheep, and two of the adults briefly locked horns at one point. I watched them for about an hour while they descended through the rocks and grazed on vegetation too sparse to see. This is a neat place. Yesterday, while overlooking a gorge on the mountain, I met a guy who told me about his fighter pilot nephew, who supposedly enjoyed doing inverted fly-throughs of said gorge on training flights. Wow.

Message on postcard:
Hello Ehren! I hope you had a good summer. I sure did. My summer stretched into October. I saw some impressive wildlife this last month of my travels. Back in July I was attacked by a wild pig. I’ve avoided writing much about it, because I’m not yet sure how to tell the story, and thinking back on it causes me no small amount of anxiety. In fact, large quadrupeds in general now cause me to tense up.

So my time at Hart Mountain National Antelope Reserve was interesting. My first full day there I saw a herd at a distance, cresting over a ridge and then disappearing into a valley. It was neat. My last day there I hiked out to a place called Petroglyph Lake, where there were maybe fifty antelope milling around the lake, grazing and drinking water. I kept my distance.

On the hike back, a group of about five antelope sped past me on the right, then crossed the path about a hundred meters in front of me. They joined up with another couple antelope ahead and to my left, and together the seven of them took off. The whole time I was envisioning the antelope getting territorial and aggressive, which wasn’t really a reasonable fear, so I tried to relax and enjoy the scene for what it was, even if I did have my hand on my knife while the dogs freaked out.

Message on postcard:
Hello Rachel! Here’s the story:

It’s near sunset at Hart Mountain National Antelope Reserve, and I need a shower. I got pretty good at the sponge bath method of personal hygiene while traveling this summer, but by the time October rolled around it was getting too cold for me to stand around in the wind, sopping myself down with a wet rag. So I decide that a soak in the hot springs is the next best thing to a hot shower.

I had spent the past couple of days wandering cross country, exploring the area. There aren’t many established trails at Hart Mountain, but the country is open enough that you can just pick a direction and tramp through the brush. This is a good way to see zillions of antelope, experience your maximum sweat gland potential, and smell bad.

So I walk down to the hot springs. There’s a primitive pool — just a hot-water filled hole in the ground — and a slightly more developed pool with a cement walkway and a wall around it. I decide to go with the primitive springs. But when I get there, there are a couple of naked older gentlemen soaking in the pool, with pants and cowboy hats piled up off to one side.

“How’s the water?” I ask.

“Depends on where you sit,” says one of the soaking cowboys. “Hotter here, colder there.”

The other cowboy adds his assessment: “Careful, he says, “it will scald your ass.”

I’ve made a few mistakes in my life, but one mistake I’m not keen on making is to experience a backcountry ass scalding after being explicitly warned about it. So I make my tactful exit: “Thanks for the report. I’ll use the other tub.”

The two cowboys have Oregon’s most neutral dispositions, and I can’t tell if my decision pleases or offends them. Regardless, I’m off to the other tub.

The hot water feels good after all the hiking, and I express my sentiments by vocalizing a few profanity-suffixed affirmatives. And then I realize that not only does the stone wall hide me from other people, it also hides them from me — which means that I would have been completely unaware of anybody who was passing by and heard me swearing to myself. Overall it was a good soak, even if I was plagued by a self-conscious feeling that a third-party observer might have identified me as the weirdest person there.