Steens Mountain offers peaceful scenery for fall hikes
Oregon’s eighth tallest mountain, a 50-mile-long scarp in the desert, makes for a delightful getaway in fall when the starry nights are crisp and the quaking aspen shiver golden leaves.
Just don’t expect to visit Steens Mountain in a weekend. Even if you push the speed limit on the lonely highway across the sagebrush flats from Bend to Burns, it’s still a seven-hour drive from the Willamette Valley.
So here’s my suggestion for a five-day trip. We’ll visit birding sites, cattle barons’ barns and the summit itself, with a view of five states. Even if you’ve seen those highlights before, I’ll show you a brand new trailhead to an overlooked canyon.
Where to stay
Where will you stay? Campgrounds at the Steens charge less than $10 and don’t take reservations because there’s almost always room. The remote hotels near the mountain are among the most historic in Oregon, dating to the 1890s. Rooms run about $100. They don’t take online reservations because there’s no internet, so you simply call them up and ask.
Start your tour at Frenchglen, a frontier hamlet with a few dozen buildings and even fewer inhabitants. To get there, drive 1.7 miles east of Burns on state Highway 78 toward Crane and turn right on paved state Highway 205 for 61 miles. The 1916 Frenchglen Hotel (541-493-2825) has been restored by the Oregon State Parks, but still has no public telephone or television. Dinners are served family style at two large tables.
If you’re camping, turn left at the Frenchglen Hotel onto the Steens Mountain Loop Road for 3 miles to the Page Springs Campground. On the Donner und Blitzen River, this oasis is famous for mosquitoes in June, but all is quiet in fall. A trail from the campground explores upriver 4 miles.
While you’re in the area, visit the P Ranch. Halfway between Frenchglen and Page Springs, turn north on a gravel road for 0.2 mile to the headquarters once used by cattle baron Pete French. Here you’ll find a 200-foot-long horse barn built with juniper trunks. A square winch once hoisted cattle carcasses. Nearby, a glassy section of the Donner und Blitzen River has redwing blackbirds and ducks.
Exploring the mountain's summit
On your second day at the Steens, drive the 56-mile loop road from Page Springs up to the mountain’s summit. This gravel road was once notorious for breaking axles, but now is passable for all but the largest RVs. Because this is the highest road in Oregon, cresting at 9,550 feet, it’s closed by snow gates from November through June.
As you near the top of the loop road, take short gravel spurs to the left to see the overlooks of Kiger Gorge and the East Rim. Here you gaze down gigantic cliffs at a cross-section of the mountain.
Every rock at Steens Mountain is volcanic, dating to lava floods that buried this corner of Oregon 20 million years ago. About 6 million years ago, North America’s shearing collision with the Pacific crustal plate stretched Oregon diagonally, lifting Steens Mountain above the plain. Ice Age glaciers then gouged seven gigantic canyons into the tilted upland, including Kiger Gorge.
At the highest point of the loop road you’ll reach a four-way junction. The East Rim viewpoint is to the left. The loop road back toward Frenchglen is to the right. But first you should drive straight ahead past a Wildhorse Lake pointer for 1.9 miles to a parking lot at road’s end. From there, hike up the gated, steep, rocky roadbed to the mountain’s 9,733-foot summit.
From the top of Steens Mountain, the Alvord Desert shimmers faintly more than a vertical mile below, a mirage in the void. On a clear day, the ghostly peaks far to the east are the Teton Range in Wyoming.
Things to see and do
If you don’t like steep mountain roads, you will not enjoy driving the next, amazingly scenic section of the Steens Mountain Loop Road that descends past the Rooster Comb down to the South Steens Campground.
If you need a hotel, Frenchglen would be your goal, but otherwise this roomy campground among the junipers is a great destination for the night.
Last year when I camped at South Steens it rained an inch, which is pretty unusual. I wrote a haiku poem in my journal.
Sunset on wet socks
Let them dry in desert air
Tomorrow they’re fresh
There’s a lot more to do near the South Steens Campground than just dry your socks. You could backpack up Little Blitzen Gorge. You could hike up Big Indian Gorge. You could tour the preserved ranch houses of the Riddle Brothers, three bachelor cowboys who settled along the Little Blitzen River just west of the campground. You could watch for the wild horses that roam this area.
Threemile Canyon hike
If you’ve done all this before, here’s something new: Hike up Threemile Canyon.
The lower, western portion of the Steens Mountain Wilderness had no convenient access until 2020, when the Bureau of Land Management opened the Threemile trailhead on Highway 205, exactly halfway between Frenchglen and Fields. Two paths climb to wide-ranging views and desert canyon scenery.
To find the Threemile trailhead from the South Steens Campground, continue west on the Steens Mountain Loop Road 19 miles to paved Highway 205. This junction is 10 miles south of Frenchglen. Then turn left toward Fields for 15 miles to a gravel parking lot on the left with a trailhead signboard.
The highway has no other signs marking the trailhead, but it’s the only pullout for miles on the Steens Mountain side of the highway without a gate or a “No Trespassing” sign. If you have a GPS on your phone or in your car, the location is 42.5131 -118.9126.
From the parking area, open a wire gate and follow a relatively level trail amid sagebrush, bunchgrass and 20-foot-tall junipers. Behind you, the view extends to a small reservoir and a few green fields that fade to brown in the flat expanse of the arid Catlow Valley. When the U.S. government offered free land to homesteaders in the early 1900s, the valley filled with hopeful farmers. The ghost towns of Catlow, Blitzen and Beckley, now closed to the public, remain from those dried-up dreams.
After 0.3 mile the trail crosses an old stone wall and enters the gigantic V-shaped mouth of Threemile Canyon. The creek here is mostly dry, but the canyon bottom seems lush anyway, with willows, pink geraniums and lots of bird song. Crowding the canyon on the right is a 120-foot cliff composed of a dozen stacked layers of columnar basalt, evidence of the massive lava flows that once buried the Steens Mountain country.
At the 0.8-mile mark the trail forks, and you face a decision. The Threemile trail to the right continues up the canyon bottom for 0.9 mile, crossing the mostly dry creekbed twice before it ends.
For a longer hike, take the other fork at the junction. The Huffman Trail climbs 1.7 miles out of the canyon, steeply at times, to wider views. Rockwork banks remain along portions of this old cattle drive route. The path curves around two broad ridge-ends with views of the Catlow Valley, crosses a rockslide, and switchbacks up to its end at the edge of the Catlow Rim.
Completing your trip
Whether you hike the new Threemile Canyon trails, complete your day by driving to the tiny town of Diamond. From Frenchglen, take Highway 205 north 17 miles and turn right for 13 paved miles. The town consists primarily of the Hotel Diamond (541-493-1898), a rambling, weathered wood building with a café and eight hotel rooms.
If you’d prefer to tent, continue north to Crystal Crane Hot Springs. This commercial mini-resort is 25 miles east of Burns on Highway 78. It has a hot lake, simple cabins and $25 campsites. Reservations are at cranehotsprings.com.
Before you head home from the Steens, be sure to stop at two final attractions between Diamond and Crane. The Pete French Round Barn, 10 miles north of Diamond, is a 100-foot-diameter building with a circular stone corral inside. The cattle baron built it to train horses to pull wagons in teams on the curves of the road to the railhead at Winnemucca.
French had been sent by California ranching mogul Hugh James Glenn in 1872 to buy land in Oregon. He fulfilled his task so ruthlessly that a local homesteader shot him dead in front of witnesses, and a Harney County jury acquitted the murderer. The town of Frenchglen preserves the names of the two cattle barons, French and Glenn.
Complete your Steens Mountain tour at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge’s headquarters, the scene of an armed uprising against the U.S. government in 2016. You won’t find evidence of that militant occupation. Today, the headquarters offers a museum and nature trails to showcase the reason the refuge was established in 1908 – migrating birds and wetlands.
Watered by the snowmelt runoff from Steens Mountain, the Malheur refuge is now a quiet oasis and a delightful destination to end an autumn visit to Oregon’s arid southeast corner at Steens Mountain.
William Sullivan is the author of 22 books, including “The Ship in the Woods” and the updated “100 Hikes” series for Oregon. Learn more at oregonhiking.com.
This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Steens Mountain offers peaceful scenery for fall hikes
