ASKING WHAT THE WALLOWA RIVER NEEDS
If you have never woken up to the overnight plummet of a Wallowa County, OR, fall night and found your wading boots sheathed in diamond dust and just as hard, hit them together and heard their hollowness echo in the still morning of your heart; if you have never driven a caliche or ice-slick Flora, Rattlesnake or Wildcat grade with dreams of steelhead driving you onward, only to find the Grande Ronde River a sheet of ice chunks from bank to bank; if you have never woken up to the feeling that you live in a country full of ghosts, impossible not to acknowledge, as theirs are all the best places for catching winter sun, rings of rocks set into the earth, rock shards left in their wake—then welcome.
The creeks and rivers in Wallowa County drop from the Eagle Cap Wilderness into various canyons, the steepest descent being 7,993 feet ending in Hell’s Canyon, the deepest river gorge in North America. These tributaries and rivers also make this county middle of nowhere, center of the universe, for those of us who live here, including Ian and Heidi Wilson of the Wilson-Haun Ranch. Located on a gentle gradient of the Wallowa River, the ranch sits just north of Lostine, OR. The reclaimed river bottom is a wide, spread-out tangle of chest-high grass, willows, red osier, beaver-chewed trees fallen across the river, and life, so much life, broken up between two, three, four, sometimes five different channels of water and ponds. The floodplain is a hummocky world of water and life. White-tailed deer startle and dash away, mule deer walk the sagebrush basalt steppes above. Signs of bobcats, coyotes and herons are left in the mud. Songbirds cut loose. The smell of skunks or foxes drifts in the air. For the entirety of the mile-long stretch of the Wilson-Haun Ranch, there is life. In this once-channelized section of river set wild again, there are no barren, 6-inch-deep, 200-yard, pin-straight riffles. Instead it is a cacophony of pools and deep undercuts, mysterious root wads leading into fathomless depths. But the river wasn’t always this way.
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