OPINION: A curiously damp drive through an arid land

Jun. 17—This spring has been so soggy it even defied one of the world's great rain shadows.

On one day, anyway.

It was June 12. This happened to be the day I was driving from Mill City across the Cascade Mountains and back to Baker City. I had been in Mill City for the weekend to watch my nephew, Jonathan Pennick, graduate from Santiam High School, and to visit my parents, who live in Mill City.

In common with quite a lot of days over the past two months, June 12, a Sunday, was decidedly damp.

This was not surprising — and not only because so many recent days were also moist.

The National Weather Service — besides the Defense Department the most vital federal agency, in my estimation — had, or so it seemed to me, been implying for the preceding week or so that the construction of an ark might be a reasonable precaution against the impending storm.

I was traveling by more conventional, landbound means — an eight-year-old Mazda 6 sedan that, though far from seaworthy, can go about 40 miles on a gallon of gas.

My route followed Highway 20 over Santiam Pass, one of the major gaps in the volcanic crest of the Cascades, which span Oregon.

Although the Cascades are a middling range by the elevated standards of the Andes or the Alps, they create one of the world's most formidable barriers against precipitation.

Which is to say, a rain shadow.

(Also, for about half the year, an equally effective snow shadow.)

The way in which the crest of the Cascades cleaves Oregon's climate is dramatic, and in more than one way.

The difference in the amount of rain and snow that falls at the summit of Santiam Pass and at, say, Redmond, in the lee of the Cascades, is significant. The pass frequently gets more than 100 inches of total precipitation in a year, while Redmond rarely reaches even a dozen inches.

But even more noteworthy, I think, is that this transition from rainforest to desert happens over such a short distance. Redmond, as the crow flies, is only about 45 miles from the summit.

Yet even that figure understates the rapidity of the change. The shift from moss-draped firs and hemlocks to ponderosa pines and junipers happens in just a mile or so as the highway descends from the 4,817-foot summit.

The weather, too, frequently undergoes a similarly sudden change. Several times I've driven through a squall of rain or snow on the west side of the pass, windshield wipers frantically skimming the glass as I tried to peer through the gloom, only to have sunshine dry the pavement while liquid still dripped from my fenders as I started down the east slope.

These effects of the Cascades, botanically and climatologically, are so efficient that I have come to expect that however nasty the conditions on the west side or at the pass itself, I can rely on relief before I've had my first view of Suttle Lake, just four miles or so east of the summit.

I was anticipating just such an experience on June 12.

Rain fell almost incessantly after my daughter, Olivia, and I left Mill City. Sometimes it slackened to a sprinkle, and sometimes the rain sluiced down, prompting me to tinker frequently with the interval switch for the wipers. But there wasn't even a brief stretch of dry asphalt.

As we crested the pass and began the long downgrade, I waited for the rain to subside.

Perversely, or so it seemed to me given my expectations, the steady rain turned torrential. Water filled lane ruts I wouldn't otherwise have noticed. I noticed them when they were inundated; noticed them all too well. I gripped the steering wheel more tightly and concentrated on detecting the telltale sensation — a sort of floating feeling which is quite unpleasant at 55 mph — that betrays incipient hydroplaning.

The windshield wipers struggled to clear the glass. Each encounter with an oncoming vehicle — and especially when it was a commercial truck — was akin to the rinse cycle at a drive-thru car wash. Except without fragrant suds.

It was a curious experience.

I've driven this route, a corridor between stands of thick-trunked ponderosa pines, dozens of times, and almost always in fair weather, no matter the season.

But I don't recall ever making the trip during a downpour. It felt passing strange to see a deluge in a forest that epitomizes the arid east side of the Cascades. I suspect I would feel much the same if I saw snow falling in a tropical rainforest or something similarly incongruent.

The rain dissipated to the lightest of showers near Redmond. There were sections of dry pavement between Redmond and Prineville, although the highway shoulders, strewn with the ubiquitous red cinders of Central Oregon, were speckled with frequent puddles.

The respite was brief.

As we climbed into the Ochocos east of Prineville the rain resumed. It wasn't quite so copious as through the Cascades, and there were a few interludes when I switched off the wipers. The Ochocos cast a much more modest rain shadow compared with the Cascades, but the effect is noticeable around Mitchell, where I've rarely seen water streaming off Highway 26.

(Which is not to suggest Mitchell doesn't know of high water. Bridge Creek, the usually placid stream that flows through town, has spawned damaging flash floods multiple times, the result of cloudbursts upstream.)

Heavy rain returned as we ascended to Keyes Creek Summit east of Mitchell, and it continued through the meadows and into Picture Gorge, where both Mountain Creek and the John Day River barrelled down their channels, the water the approximate shade of chocolate milk.

We stopped for lunch in John Day and saw there the first patches of blue sky all day. I braced for a damp conclusion to the trip — it looked as though storm clouds had congealed over the Blue Mountains northeast of Prairie City. But the final 80 miles were by a wide margin the most tranquil, with only a couple spatterings of rain.

It was altogether a queer journey.

I don't believe I've seen so much precipitation along the familiar route, and especially in places, such as the lee of the Cascades and the juniper country of Wheeler and western Grant counties, where rain is exceedingly rare.

The moisture, of course, is welcome in this drought year. And as I pondered the drive, in that slightly hallucinogenic state that follows a long trip by car (a sort of junior varsity version of jet lag), I recalled not only the rain pounding against the windshield and the malevolent pools in the ruts, but also the soft green of the meadows, the splashes of color from the balsamroot and the lupine, the sudden and strange lushness in a land where moisture is conspicuous by its absence.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.