Finding true solitude in the way-outback of Oregon

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You want to get away from the noise and bustle of the city? I have just the campsite for you. It's called Coyote Lake, a dry mini-desert in southeastern Oregon.

The nearest dwelling, as far as I can tell, is at Burns Junction, 20 miles northeast. Whitehorse Ranch is the same distance southwest, and 20 miles to the west is the Alvord Ranch, on the west side of the huge Alvord Desert, Oregon's largest airport. The nearest asphalt pavement is a lonely stretch of Oregon Highway 95, 13 miles to the east. The nearest towns are Fields, 35 miles southwest, and Rome, 31 miles northeast.

I'm a 72-year-old private pilot, and I fly a 53-year-old Piper Pacer, one of the post-WWII, family-oriented aircraft, with the third wheel put back under the tail where it belongs.

It's a four-place family aircraft only if Dad weighs 170 pounds or less, mom's at 120, and Dick and Jane are 60 pounds each. It best serves me as a single place when I load it up with my camping gear.

I fly out of Prospect, and my favorite heading is east.

On Sept. 10, well before sunrise, I departed Prospect and flew east up the Middle Fork Canyon, over Seven Lakes Basin, past Devil's Peak and down to Chiloquin for breakfast.

The greatest attraction at the Chiloquin airport is Melita's Restaurant, 100 yards from the tie-downs, across Highway 97. I left Melita's around sunrise, and flew southeast along the Sprague River highway and Highway 140, passed over Bly, and noted that Drews Reservoir is about bone-dry. A few more minutes later I was at the Lake County Airport.

Lakeview is a handy refueling stop and jumping-off place for points east. Nine gallons to top-off will give me more than an hour's extra flying time out on the desert.

I set Alvord Desert in the GPS and flew nearly direct, passing close to Beatty's Butte and a relic airstrip, V Lake, on the southerly reaches of Steens Mountain that my wife and I visited almost 20 years ago. When I break over the rim of the Steens Mountain escarpment, the drop-off to the Alvord Desert, almost 6,000 feet below, is breathtaking, even when you anticipate it. It's seven miles wide and 12 miles long, as flat as one of Melita's pancakes. There are no cross-wind landings required here, you have 360 degrees of choices for runway bearings.

I have camped on the Alvord several times, along the east edge where dead sagebrush for a campfire is plentiful. I noted on the flight chart that a smaller dry lake, Coyote Lake, was situated about 20 miles farther east. The heavy traffic on the Fields-Burns Road (maybe one car per hour, and seven miles away) always interrupted my solitude, so another 12 minutes to Coyote Lake seemed like a good idea.

It appeared to be a perfect substitute for the Alvord, even smoother and more blemish-free. This surface complexion almost got me in trouble, it was so smooth. When I was turning to final approach, I had a brief depth-perception problem which became apparent when I noticed the shadow of my plane much larger and closer than it should have been. A quick correction and I was safely on the ground, rolling as smoothly as if I were on a huge billiard table. I found a niche among the sage hummocks on the west side of the lake, and shut down.

The solitude out there is unbelievable. There is zero man-made noise, excluding jet aircraft seven miles above. Other than contrails, there is nothing new to be seen since John C. Fremont and Peter Skene Ogden were in this country. The desert pavement has a white, glistening glaze that reflects the sun's rays much too efficiently. I expected it to be about 15 degrees cooler than the 92 degrees I found.

A few short hikes among the sagebrush hummocks and along the white lakebed convinced me to set up my camp chair in the shade of the Piper's wing and reduce my activities.

The only thing I saw on the ground that wasn't natural was a .50-caliber bullet, presumably fired from a training aircraft during the 1940s or '50s.

The desert glaze was quite fragile. Anything that was set on it would turn it to a thin layer of white talcum powder, so I was careful to keep the bottom side of my tent down. A one-burner propane stove was adequate to heat my ancient "spaghetti-in-meat-sauce" MRE (meal-ready-to-eat). The pouch didn't have a green-label pack of Lucky Strikes in it, but I wouldn't have been surprised if it did.

I was prepared for a 35-degree night on the desert, but it didn't happen, probably in the low 50s. The Milky Way was outrageous, the background stars looked like cumulus clouds. I saw both the space station and the shuttle go over, about 17 minutes apart. Amazing to realize humans are riding in those things. A little later, I saw another unexpected sight, vehicle headlights, moving almost imperceptably slow near the southern horizon.

A check of the map indicated they must have been traveling east from Whitehorse Ranch, and were around 15 miles away when I saw them. Oh, well, so much for solitude. I climbed into my sleeping bag, hoping for no further distractions.

Early in the morning, I saw Venus rise as brightly as I'd ever seen it. Between that and the three-quarters moon I had plenty of light to fold my tent, load the plane and brew a cup of Taster's Choice from the MRE pouch.

I had a couple of miles or more available for my take-off run, and as soon as I had a few hundred feet of altitude, I set an easterly course for Rome Station, by Highway 95, near the Owyhee River Bridge. In 20 minutes I was there, circling the very white airstrip. The landing was smooth as could be, but I noticed some rolling resistance during taxiing, so I added a bit of power to get to the Rome Station Cafe tiedown area. Looking back up the strip, it appeared as though a nuclear explosion had taken place. It turned out there was about four inches of very fine dust on the runway, and my prop-wash had blasted a considerable portion of it high into the air. It happens all the time, according to the waiter/cook in the cafe. Nothing to be concerned about, he said. So, I dug into my ham-n-cheese omlette, my only concern being whether I could eat it all in one sitting.

My return trip to Prospect included a flight down the Owyhee River, past the Pillars of Rome and the Owyhee Canyon, to the Pelican Point State Airport on the Owyhee Reservoir. This is another of my favorite "can't-drive-there" campsites. It's by an 1,800-foot, rough, rocky runway. After a brief look-around, I continued another half-dozen miles down-reservoir before turning west toward Burns, my last fuel stop. Strange, the same gas I bought at Lakeview cost 42 cents more per gallon than at Burns. Anyway, I flew on west to Odell Lake in the Cascades near Willamette Pass before turning south and looking for Prospect. A low pass over my place above Lost Creek Lake assured my wife that, if I didn't crash on landing, I had completed another adventure safely.

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