Alvord Hot Springs
Our travel took place on the ancestral lands of the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla, Nüümü (Northern Paiute), Yahooskin, Modoc, Klamath, Cow Creek Umpqua, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and Tolowa Dee-ni’ peoples who have stewarded those lands since time immemorial.
The winter high holidays can be pretty tough for people who are estranged from, or in conflict with, their biological or adopted families. I had been talking to a friend of mine who was also estranged from her family about spending Christmas week together, and when she told me we should drive across Oregon and camp at a remote hot spring on the East side of the Steens Mountains I said yes immediately. I was so excited to get away from the drippy and grey Seattle winter, and the fraught relationship I had with the high holidays, that running away to the middle of the desert with no reception and a car full of booze felt like just the ticket.
I bought a flight to Eugene and landed early on December 23rd. When I got to the house, the car was stuffed with winter gear and food for the three other women and a puppy. We brought a very decadent Christmas dinner of steaks and mashed potatoes, eggs and bacon, and enough alcohol for a football team.
It was an eight-hour drive through the Willamette Forest, over the mountains in Bend, and then we turned South at Burns toward lands stewarded by the Confederated Tribes of Warms Springs and Numu. One we crossed the mountains, the desert scrub of Eastern Oregon started. It is so desolate, peaceful, spooky, and awesome all at once. The desert is dotted with huge invasive junipers, and every so often we drove by small log cabins. Jacky told me they were old homesteads from the late 19th century. Many of them were perfectly preserved!
We rented one of the desert survival units that seemed to be army surplus. You can learn more about the springs and rent tent sites and these units on the Alvord Hot Springs website. It was flipping freezing out there, and super dry with a light dusting of snow on the ground, but not enough to make driving or walking difficult in the lower elevations.
We were drinking mimosas and soaking in the pools on Christmas day and noticed that the proprietor of the springs was walking around and flying a drone. We were butt naked, but he came over to show us the drone footage, and told us that one of the other hot springs guests had driven out to the center of the playa and gotten stuck in the mud. We had noticed there was a lake in the middle of the playa when we drove out there earlier in the day, but had stayed away because we knew the mud would be really deep.
He called somebody and about twenty minutes later a huge truck with two people and four very hardy-looking farm dogs pulled up. He said that tourists got stuck out in that same spot about once a month.
Our last day we went on a little hike up a nearby peak which gave us a pretty cool view of the lake bed from above, and was a fun opportunity to scramble around in snowy bushes because we couldn’t really see a trail.
