I spent the first night in a newish motel on the outskirts of Madras, Oregon. This was the view. One the left there’s a glimpse of US Route 26, which runs northwest out of Madras 119 miles to Portland. Madras is locally famous as the hometown of MLB outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury. It’s located just a few miles from the Warm Springs Reservation, where Ellsbury lived until he was six when his family moved to Madras. Forty-five miles northeast of Madras lies Big Muddy Ranch, the site of Rajneeshpuram. When Ellsbury was born in 1983, Rajneeshpuram was at its height; a year later it had blown up and gone. Here in 2018 I don’t see any traces of it around Madras, no Rolls Royces at all. The days are hot and the sky is dull with haze due to smoke from wild fires hundreds of miles to the south. The nights are cool.
I planned to start by heading north on 26, but my goal wasn’t Portland. I was hunting roads, not streets. Specifically, I was looking for little secondary and tertiary roads–the old-fashioned kind that have lots of ups, lots of downs, lots of straights, lots of curves, and few other drivers. And with no trees to get in the way, you can see forever as you cross the rugged hill country and the lumpy plains. Did I mention the scarcity of other vehicles? Anyway, my plan was to drive up 26 for a few miles into the reservation. I would turn right at that point and go up through the reservation to Wapanitia, then turn east and go to Shaniko via Bakeoven, then up to Biggs on US 97. I’d cross the gorge into Washington and head north to Goldendale. From there I planned to go east on something called the Bickleton Highway. Then at some point I’d find a route back down to the gorge so I could start my return trip to Corvallis.
So it’s time to head out. Yes, sir, rarin’ to go. Well, semi-rarin’. Nothing to keep me here. The first thing I find out is that you can’t turn north onto 26 when leaving this particular motel. You have go south and find a place to turn around. Aargh.
Eventually I got turned around and drove on up to Warm Springs. I needed some gas, so I stopped at the Shell station there. I’d forgotten that unlike in the rest of Oregon, gas on the reservation is self-serve. Do I still know how to pump my own gas? Well, yeah. But I don’t get much practice, so I had to take it slow. There was an old man in a big pickup parked a few feet away in the shade. He was taking a long look at me. Well, that’s fine. I’d probably take a long look at me too. About the time the Boxster’s tank was full and the pump cut off, an old woman came out of the station building carrying a couple of paper bags, which I am thinking may have been breakfast since the station is also a store. She went around and got into the passenger side of the pickup. I got in my car, changed back into my driving glasses, and left it all behind.
I turned off of 26 at the right place, but soon after that, I missed my second turn and got pretty much lost. The signage on the reservation is accurate as far as it goes, but what I thought I remembered from the map turned out to be all wrong. I ended up going around in a circle and getting back onto the road I was on before, thus getting another chance to make the correct turn. It was kinda like making an extra circuit of a roundabout–embarrassing but not fatal. Of course this particular circle was four or five miles across, so it took a while. There were ranch houses out among the low hills and as I passed one I saw a new and mean-looking dark red Mustang coming down the long gravel drive. It pulled out behind me but didn’t try to pass, even though I was going pretty slow. The posted speed limit was 35, which seemed a little low for a rural highway with not much traffic, but presumably the local jurisdiction has its reasons. Maybe they consider it a residential district, since there were actual houses every half mile or so. Eventually I got onto the road I wanted–the one up to Wapanitia–and it turned out to be really beautiful, swooping down into canyons and rising up to cross the mesas. A lot of the land is too dry and too steep to be productive, which explains why the whites felt okay about letting the tribes have it.
In the middle section of the route to Wapanitia you can go for miles without seeing any signs of human habitation at all. Then, later on, you begin to see little flat places here and there, and eventually you start seeing ranch houses again. Pretty soon the ranches and farms come along more frequently. Then, once the landscape has changed almost completely from hills and mountains to high rolling plains, you cross an invisible line. This is where the good land starts. There’s no sign, but when you start to see older two-story houses built closer to the road and painted white, you know you’re off the reservation. I turned east onto Oregon 216 toward Maupin.
I didn’t expect much from Maupin, maybe just another tiny agricultural town on the plain, but it turned out to be a lovely place. For one thing, it’s not up on the plain. Instead it is perched on the west slope the Deschutes River gorge, a crease in the plains through which the river flows north toward the Columbia. It gets it name from someone named Commodore Perry Maupin, who established a ferry there sometime in the 1880’s. If Maupin seems more prosperous than most of the other little towns in this part of Oregon, it’s because of the money brought in by recreational visitors, who come either for the fishing or for the rafting. I noticed several rafting outfitters as I drifted through. I was looking for the road to Shaniko via Bakeoven, and sure enough as soon as I crossed the river there was a sign pointing left: Bakeoven Road.
Bakeoven Road had looked promising on the map and it did not disappoint. It’s only 26 miles long, but it’s close to ideal. At the beginning it’s very tight and twisty as it climbs steeply up out of the gorge. The pavement is narrow with no guardrails and no perceptible shoulder. As always I tried the find a good balance between speed and safety, pleasure and fear. But that little piece of road is so tight, with so little room and such a long way down, that you can’t really take any risks at all. The Boxster was competent of course, but this sort of the road was not really its favorite kind of thing. But that section was short and I was soon back up on the high desert plain. The road there was much more to the Boxster’s liking, lots of short straights and fast curves, with enough ups and downs to keep things interesting. Not much to fear here; probably the greatest risk was of getting ticketed. I rationalized a little about that, thinking to myself that you’d have to be one weird cop to decide to hang out up here where there was really nothing whatever going on. I’m not sure if I saw any other cars at all. Maybe one or two. In the last few miles the straights were longer and the visibility was excellent. Wonderful road, but it was over awfully quick. I never did find Bakeoven. Too busy.
(to be continued)