Customer Reviews

Oregon Desert Guide

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Having the privelege and good fortune to live in the northwest part of the country, I submit that in total, the Oregon High Desert may well be the most spectacular of all, in a region of superlative land and seascapes. It's certainly the most remote and unknown to the general public, in any case.

Andy Kerr has done a thorough job with this book. First, even natives of the region (well, the west side of the Cascades, anyway), know virtually nothing about the High Desert country of Eastern and Central Oregon. Or of Idaho, either, for that matter. It helps to have an expert describe a new place for you first, and Kerr does a great job in this regard. He helps the neophyte and the veteran desert rat alike in describing how to get to where you want to go, and possibly most important, what map (US Geo quad) to use. When one gets remote -- and in this country you can get seriously remote -- one needs a good map. This is country where it's highly likely that your cellphone won't work, where off pavement, dragon tooth rocks are ready to flatten your tires, and where gas stations are a long way apart.

Kerr breaks the book down into several sections, which include the Basics, natural and unnatural history, political happenings (a big deal! politics about land use in this part of the West is very contentious), descriptions of the various ecoregions covered, appendices, a reading list and plenty of maps, tables and pictures. The photos in the book are by Sandy Lonsdale. My only complaint here is that the photography didn't include some color shots. The Basics covers alot of ground, talking about everything from maps and getting around to things to be aware of like heatstroke, lightning, bugs, etc. There's even a table detailing services available in the local communities that are in the region. If you like your coffee just plain and in a cup, or are an "expresso" diletante, Kerr tells you where you can find what you need. Ditto for beer and eats as well. My personal favorite is at the cafe at Fields, a tiny hamlet in far SE Oregon. The milkshakes there after a long day in the field are a spiritual experience and the cheeseburgers ain't half bad, either. It's a great place to hear the local banter, too. Some of it's just local gossip and some of it's damned informative. For example, the owner of the Fields gas station/cafe (it was for sale last year), will open up after hours if you need gas. The locals (neighbors), gossip about the same things city folks gossip with their neighbors about. Often, though, they live many miles apart, and many of them have to travel more than two hundred miles round-trip, just to go to the grocery store, so you get an idea of how remote this place really is. Speaking of interacting with the locals, it's just fine to shoot the breeze, but it'd be smart to avoid politics, unless you find out that you're on the same political wavelength.....

This is a very concise book about a part of the United States that will stun you with it's remoteness and rugged beauty. As I stated early on, this country is virtually unknown, even to many Northwest natives, but is worth every mile you drive to get to your chosen hike/backpack adventure. Having been fortunate enough to have explored a fair sampling of the territory Kerr writes about, I must say that this is an region that will blow away the first time visitor and veteran alike. I make three or four trips there every year, and every time, I'm awed by the sheer vastness and silence of the high desert. It's big, empty and just plain magnificent. Let's face it, there are few places left that one can truly find solitude, and you'll find many such places to be found in this book. So buy the guide, read it, gather your gear, gas up your car (put that SUV to work besides commuting!)and pick a hike. And don't forget your copy of the book to read on the trip, either.

Having made a trip and discovered what I'm talking about, join a grassroots organization, like the Oregon Natural Desert Association, The Sierra Club (they have a High Desert Committee in the Portland office), or one of many other groups that help to protect this great, vast, natural landscape that we love.

One more thing: Reading the other "review" about this book, I had to laugh at the ignorance of the writer. Did I say land use issues in the Great Basin are contentious? Organizations such as Oregon Natural Desert Association, the High Desert Committee of the Sierra Club and the Oregon Natural Resources Council, along with Kerr and thousands of other "desert rats" are committed to keeping this great landscape wild and free -- as it should be. And ending welfare ranching is a damned good start.
Try reading Lynn Jacobs "Waste of the West" or George Wuerthner's "Welfare Ranching," and you'll see what I'm talking about and why I feel so strongly about this place.

The main thing, though, is to pick a hike in Andy Kerr's book, get your gear together and go find out for yourself!

First off, this book is not a hiking guide (like Sullivan's are). It's designed to introduce the reader to the fragile ecosystem of eastern Oregon, and the efforts protect it. In doing so, for each ecoregion it describes, it lists hikes for one to go out and explore. The hike descriptions are (purposely) vague, as there usually aren't trails out there, and the author is encouraging you to go out and explore it yourself.

I like the book. It's not the only guide you'll want, but it's certainly worth reading. It's seems like it's designed to read cover-to-cover at home, to help you plan your trip. My two critiques are 1) the maps within the book do not have any of the hikes on them, and 2) since hikes are grouped by conservation areas, some hikes that are physically next to each other are in different sections of the book. But all in all, I'm glad I got it. I do recommend, however, you pair this up with Sullivan's 100 Hikes in Eastern Oregon, and John's Oregon's Dry Side (great read).Oregon's Dry Side: Exploring East of the Cascade Crest100 Hikes: Travel Guide Eastern Oregon (100 Hikes Travel Guides)

Tim Withee's review already said most of what I would have, but I thought I'd add a couple of things.

First, the wilderness advocacy of the book strongly constrains the hiking choices of the author. In particular, only unprotected public land is discussed here, which means that nothing of the Hart Mountain refuge is included. That's a shame, because it's an area that's well worth anyone's time to explore, and gives a terrific example of what high desert vegetation should look like (it's been cattle-free for decades, and is now almost completely free of barbed wire).

The other thing to know is that this is not a "hiking guide" in the usual sense that westerners expect that term: there are no trail routes (there are very few trails out there, anyway) and none of the mileage detail that one finds in the books by William Sullivan, Douglas Lorain, and others. Rather it is a collection of ideas for exploration, more in the spirit of Sullivan's "Exploring Oregon's Wild Areas", though with much better specifics. You need to have your own maps, and you need to be able to use them. Much of this is not easy country to walk in.

That being said, there is, literally, nothing else in print that provides even a fraction of the information on these precious and unprotected areas. The closest is the long-out-of print "Unobscured Horizons, Untravelled [sic] Trails", by Bruce Hayse, which was almost impossible to find even in the 1970s. Of books in print, Barbara Bond's "75 Scrambles in Oregon" also has some excellent high desert hikes, but it is a much more "statewide" reference, and the hikes are strictly for non-technical peak ascents.

I have probably visited about half of the hikes recommended in the book and have been inspired to several others on my own. I owe much of that to this book, which showed me where to look. It is truly a work that changed my life for the better.

Thank God for libraries. If I had paid money for this book I'd be returning it for a refund.

As a hiking guide this book is a dismal failure. There are no maps of either road directions to the trailheads or of the hikes themselves. Driving and hiking directions are vague and contain several errors. Descriptions of the hikes seldom top 30 words and contain little useful or interesting information. I seriously doubt the authors have been on most of these hikes.

Describing this as a hiking guide is dishonest. As a previous reviewer stated, it is a political manifesto. If you go for that sort of thing, you may like the book. If you're looking for a hiking book get one of the Falcon guides or one o the excellent books by William L. Sullivan (100 hikes in Eastern Oregon, 100 Hikes in the Central Oregon Cascades, 100 Hikes in Southern Oregon, etc.).

I thought I was buying a guide book to Eastern Oregon's wild country. Instead, I received a book filled with "green propaganda", superficial information, misguided objectivety, and a warped perspective into what the "Eco Terrorists" agenda truly is for Eastern Oregon.