The Oregon Desert

The Oregon Desert
Author: Edwin Russell Jackman
Publisher: Caxton Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 1964
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780870044342

Historical, biographical and geological information and practical desert folk lore on a 24,000 square-mile area of the Pacific Northwest.

Steens Mountain in Oregon's High Desert Country

Steens Mountain in Oregon's High Desert Country
Author: Edwin Russell Jackman
Publisher: Caxton Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1967
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780870040283

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Award winning photography and lithography sets this "coffee table" book apart from others of its type.

Oregon Desert Guide

Oregon Desert Guide
Author: Andy Kerr
Publisher: The Mountaineers Books
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2000
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9780898866025

It is some of the wildest and most remote land left in Oregon and the object of a 40-year love affair for conservationist Andy Kerr. In 70 hikes through snow- capped mountain ranges, deep river canyons, sagebrush- covered flats, dry lake playas, moonlike lava fields, and juniper-covered hillsides, he will seduce you, too, with the spare and mysterious beauty of the desert. Kerr explains how you can help protect these lands forever.

The Meek Cutoff

The Meek Cutoff
Author: Brooks Geer Ragen
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2017-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295806869

In 1845, an estimated 2,500 emigrants left Independence and St. Joseph, Missouri, for the Willamette Valley in what was soon to become the Oregon Territory. It was general knowledge that the route of the Oregon Trail through the Blue Mountains and down the Columbia River to The Dalles was grueling and dangerous. About 1,200 men, women, and children in over two hundred wagons accepted fur trapper and guide Stephen Meek's offer to lead them on a shortcut across the trackless high desert of eastern Oregon. Those who followed Meek experienced a terrible ordeal when his memory of the terrain apparently failed. Lost for weeks with little or no water and a shortage of food, the Overlanders encountered deep dust, alkali lakes, and steep, rocky terrain. Many became ill and some died in the forty days it took to travel from the Snake River in present-day Idaho to the Deschutes River near Bend, Oregon. Stories persist that children in the group found gold nuggets in a small, dry creek bed along the way. From 2006 to 2011, Brooks Ragan and a team of specialists in history, geology, global positioning, metal detecting, and aerial photography spent weeks every spring and summer tracing the Meek Cutoff. They located wagon ruts, gravesites, and other physical evidence from the most difficult part of the trail, from Vale, Oregon, to the upper reaches of the Crooked River and to a location near Redmond where a section of the train reached the Deschutes. The Meek Cutoff moves readers back and forth in time, using surviving journals from members of the 1845 party, detailed day-to-day maps, aerial photographs, and descriptions of the modern-day exploration to document an extraordinary story of the Oregon Trail.

Can You Survive the Desert?

Can You Survive the Desert?
Author: Matt Doeden
Publisher: Raintree
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2014-10-09
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1406286397

The burning sun beats down on your skin. Endless hills of sand surround you. You are trying to survive in one of the most dangerous areas in the world - the desert. Will you: struggle to find help in Africa's Sahara Desert after an aeroplane crash? Attempt to get out of the Sonoran Desert in Mexico after a disastrous hike? Fight for life in Asia's Gobi Desert after your dirt bike breaks down? YOU CHOOSE what you'll do next. The choices you make will either lead you to safety - or to doom.

Where the Crooked River Rises

Where the Crooked River Rises
Author: Ellen Waterston
Publisher:
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780870715921

"Ellen Waterston's new book is a slug of juniper air, a breath-taking view of a rough-edged land, as bracing and taut as October morningsùpart celebration, part elegy all love and the wisdom that grows from deep roots in basalt rock. Like Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig, Waterston writes masterfully about what it meansùwhat it really means -to live in the West."-Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort There is an otherness to the high desert, something momentous and sacred in the purity of the silence. In this compelling collection of personal essays, award winning poet and author Ellen Waterston illuminates the people, places, and landscapes of central Oregon's vast high desert. In Where the Crooked River Rises, Waterston reveals the blessings and challenges of decades spent as a rancher and town resident in a place that has been, and remains, her touchstone and crucible. The high desert is Waterston's teacher, and she describes its lessons with grace and care, inviting readers to look at their own lives through a lens of wide-open spaces, sagebrush and juniper, pumice and rabbit blush.

Landscapes of Promise

Landscapes of Promise
Author: William G. Robbins
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2009-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295989696

Landscapes of Promise is the first comprehensive environmental history of the early years of a state that has long been associated with environmental protection. Covering the period from early human habitation to the end of World War II, William Robbins shows that the reality of Oregon's environmental history involves far more than a discussion of timber cutting and land-use planning. Robbins demonstrates that ecological change is not only a creation of modern industrial society. Native Americans altered their environment in a number of ways, including the planned annual burning of grasslands and light-burning of understory forest debris. Early Euro-American settlers who thought they were taming a virgin wilderness were merely imposing a new set of alterations on an already modified landscape. Beginning with the first 18th-century traders on the Pacific Coast, alterations to Oregon's landscape were closely linked to the interests of global market forces. Robbins uses period speeches and publications to document the increasing commodification of the landscape and its products. "Environment melts before the man who is in earnest," wrote one Oregon booster in 1905, reflecting prevailing ways of thinking. In an impressive synthesis of primary sources and historical analysis, Robbins traces the transformation of the Oregon landscape and the evolution of our attitudes toward the natural world.

The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail
Author: Rinker Buck
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2015-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1451659164

A new American journey.