13 October 2016, Sunday
A steady light rain begins about 2 am. We sleep well, and by 7:15 our wet tent is packed and we are on the road. We stop at the town of Klamath Falls for breakfast at a restaurant called Nibbley’s. We have 385 miles to drive in order to get to Ontario, Oregon on the state’s eastern border with Idaho. We are expecting an ordinary drive through high desert-like plateau, but we find ourselves in the middle of a geology textbook! We pass miles of sharp high cliffs rising to our right as we drive northeast along Route 395. To our left is windswept Abert Lake, an alkali lake whose shores are part of a wildlife refuge, though what creature would want refuge in such a forbidding place escapes me!
We stop to take photographs. The wind is blowing so hard, I have to apply my full weight to the car door to keep it from flying violently open. There is white alkali spray blowing off the lake far below. Even up here the spray stings our eyes and makes our lips taste salty. It is difficult to steady my camera in the wind. We see a young man standing at the lookout without a car and we wonder how he got to such a desolate place on foot. Then he points to his vehicle mired in the salt flats below. He drove down there last night in the dark, thinking the shore line was solid. Much to his dismay, he found that it was not. As we take photos of Abert Lake a tow truck comes to his rescue. O and I take refuge from the wind in Jazz and drive on down the road.
The geology of central Oregon is fascinating. We are driving over the northern part of basin and range. Here the convection of magma beneath the earth’s crust is contributing to its thinning and stretching. Faults develop and the crust drops in blocks at some locations (graben) while at others it is lifted and tilted (hurst.) The cliffs past which we are driving are where earth’s crust has been fractured and tilted upwards while the adjacent blocks have dropped. We can see layers of old lava flows in the exposed rock. Lakes such as Abert Lake develop where the crust has fallen. As I drive, O reads some of the geology book pertaining to our exact location. Fascinating to think how tenuous the crust of this seemingly solid earth actually is!
On we drive through wind and occasional rain showers We leave the Pacific time zone behind and arrive in Ontario, Oregon at 6:45 mountain time.