Camping At An 8500 ft Mountain Peak
Camping on a mountain top, Finding cabins in the woods, Lookout towers on national forest land, 50 million years of geology.
Camping At An 8500 ft Mountain Peak
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
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153 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown Camping at an 8500 ft mountain peak
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast recorded for the second or almost coming up to the third week of August 2020. Made a cup of coffee this morning, and I’m out at that peak of the mountain out in Eastern Oregon.
Pretty cool spot up here that I was able to get to. I was looking around on the map. And I was able to find some spots that were old lookout towers like I guess they were like old like fire lookout towers for when there would be lightning strikes or other starts of fires for forest fires in the area. I have driven to a couple of them before, seven in Northern California. I’ll talk about those in a few. But yeah, it’s cool that you can find where these cabins are here if you look around. And I guess many of them now I use this as lookout towers for the fire department or federal forest department or whatever it would be.
But now, many of them have been kind of retrofitted to be overnight cabins that you can or other people in public can rent out and get for like a night or two nights or, or a part of a week or something is pretty cool. I guess they book pretty far out in advance. But it’s pretty cool. So, yeah, I was looking around at some of those. And I’ve been on a trip for a couple of days now, driving around in some BLM and national forest land. It’s out here in Eastern Oregon. And there’s a lot of it, it’s cool, a lot of space, a lot of open space in this part of the country.
It’s a bit of a difference between them between west of the Cascades and east of the Cascades. A lot of the national forest land is on the west coast. Well, yeah, I’m trying to think of it a little. But as good as I can tell, a lot of the national forest land on the west coast is mountainous with many ridges, and a lot of thick timber too, a lot of thick evergreen forests wonderful area. But it’s hard to traverse that kind of terrain; many of them have had roads that are pretty well maintained, they go through some of those areas.
But still, even with that, there’s not a lot of open expanses and the kind of tight quarters sometimes. So it’s kind of cool getting out over here in Eastern Oregon, where it sort of flattens out a bit opens up a bit. And even though there are still quite a few trees in the area that I’m looking out at, like I’m looking at, South of me here, miles and miles and miles of forest land, and mountains that go out 20 miles, 30 miles or so. But it’s cool. It goes out for a while. But there are changes in the land to the lookout. Like I was saying, I made it at the top of the peak of a mountain here. So I can see out to the east over here, I look over, and I see like a few ridges, a few bluffs, and it seems like it goes on forever. But it’s pretty cool.
And this area here, looking out west to me here, I can see the lights of one of the cities last night that’s out here, or you know, one of the small towns it’s in the area, he can kind of see the little dots of those. Those farms and ranches and some concentration in downtown are out over in the valley to the west of me. But it’s pretty cool. So, yeah, you can kind of see the changes and ripples in the landscape up here. But yeah, there’s a lookout tower up here in this area. And you can rat them out. There are a few others in a couple of other spots I was at yesterday, too. So I was traveling down these Forest Service roads, and then you can pull off and then go up. It’s pretty high.
It’s like you’re driving up on the rim. You kind of like already made most of your way up the elevation. But then you can take these little side roads off that the main road, and then it’ll cut up to a cabin that’s put up with, you know, a forest service money, and it’s been there for a long time. And yeah, hang out at their picnic tables in a bathroom and stuff. It’s one of the more well serviced high altitude areas that you know, you can kind of pop into, but it’s cool. They maintain the roads pretty well.
So you can drive right up to the summit of it. And then check it out and then drive right back down, which is a nice feature of it. But I’m not at the lookout tower right now. I’m actually a half-mile away over on another peak that’s just a bit higher in elevation. There’s no Lookout Tower. Over here, but there’s like a couple Geological Survey markers up here that they’ve got pinned down to the top of the summit, which is cool.
I should check them a little they read a bit more accurately what my altitude is. I think that it’s around 8500 feet right now, which is cool. It’s pretty high up here. It seems like it’s one of the highest things Around can lookout. I can see one of the mountains in the Cascades. I can see Mount Shasta from here yesterday. I was in a spot where I could see Mount Thiessen and Mount McLoughlin, which was cool. Kind of getting to spot that in the evening time. You can see the cracked kind of crackled rock of the Horn of mouthfeel sent over, and what is it like South?
The southern section of the Cascades in Oregon. I can look out into California waves, and I can see Mount Shasta from here. I can’t see anything like a blast. And that’s probably way too far. I can’t really see anything that goes North either. But, yeah, probably they got something if it was a little clear. There seems like some smoke in the air. Probably smoke. Not really quite sure which fire it’s coming from. But yeah, there’s like some good bands of smoke in the air. And it’s a little hazy.
You can kind of Yeah, pretty good visibility for miles, but right on the brim of the horizon is sort of a murky, kind of smoke toned cloud that sort of stretches all the surrounding way. It’s cool. That was about a quarter-mile away from this Lookout Tower up at the top of this little rise. And it’s cool, there’s this little two-track road that just kind of meanders right up the side of this hill, and then you just sort of pop up onto the summit. And then you’ve got something that’s about now would that be maybe 10 yards 15 yards across by, say 50 yards long, the sort of the flat enough spot of the summit that you can kind of walk around on before it starts to dip off. So really, only an area of about probably 100 by 100 feet is really flat enough to park a vehicle.
But yeah, the area kind of stretches on a bit out from there. And there are many kinds of outcrops of rock, I think like I’m looking down over to my two o’clock. There’s an outcrop of rock that sticks up as I look out over to my was it probably 10 o’clock over to the other side and drops off pretty quickly as it kind of pulls into a ravine before it pops up to the peak of another hill over to the east of me. But, there’s like a little another little two-track row that kind of carries on quite steeply. I might add that it just kind of drops down that hill. Lord knows where it goes. I don’t think I’m going to take that one.
I think I was looking at a camper that I passed yesterday at a spot in like a more setup campground. They have their fifth wheel set up, but they have like that for ATVs out there, and I see it. Man having a quad out here would be pretty cool. They’re just, you know, the kind of train and stuff you can travel over. And just kind of the ability to take some of these roads take some of these steep little tracks and stuff would be kind of fun.
But yeah, I think it probably isn’t good for my mid-sized highway-ready truck to be jumping on. But beautiful spot up here. Really cool. I was spending the night up here last night. It’s just right at the peak of the summit; I was thinking I was going to get a ton of wind, like that’s what I ran into yesterday when I went up to the edge of a bluff where I was at, at the high elevation point where they had their lookout towers down from it a bit at a set of picnic tables in an area that set up really beautiful.
You can see that the land kind of slopes off to the west gradually in the forest land. But to the east, there’s just a real steep, probably 800-foot drop off that goes down to a lake bed valley floor out to the east of me. So it was really cool kind of getting up there and seeing it, but when I got up to that spot where it had been in the trees in the more moderate elevations of it to the west side, there hadn’t really been any wind or any inclement weather or anything like that. But when I got up near the peak, there are two fronts of weather as the sun was going down.
We’re just kind of mixing weirdly, and you got a ton of wind blowing each and every different way. So I was just getting blown around a lot up in that area, and there were some people up there that seemed like they wanted me to go, so I took off and found another campsite, but beautiful spot up in that area is really kind of just to be out when you get up to this. This peaks you kind of figure you’d be running into a lot of wind or as It was just going to be blowing me out for a while. So is that really the best place to camp, and can I go seen as sort of small area and claustrophobic enough that it sort of feels weird just being up here by yourself barking on the tippy top of a mountain hanging out all night?
It was kind of weird when it got dark. You know, like after, after the sun went down, and it’s nighttime, and you can just sort of see darkness really all around you but for the city lights out to the distance from where I’m at. And yeah, it’s just kind of a small area. It’s kind of freaky walking around and sort of uneven ground and stuff. You’re like, man, where am I right now? But it’s cool. It’s a beautiful spot; get kind of used to it after a bit. It seems like other people are kind of used to it too.
I see other trucks kind of driving around in different areas, or yesterday I did. I saw a couple trucks moving around and stuff. Yeah, I was up here last night, trying to make some photographs of a guy here a couple of hours before sunset. And I try to start to take some photos of the sunset and photos of the surrounding landscape, which is pretty cool. Stunning spots up here. So yeah, like when I was looking south, I think I’m looking at over into the over into Nevada from how far south I am right now. So I think I’m in the Fremont, and I was shot filing this out the Fremont Winema National Forest.
And I think last time I said a Winona, kind of American Oregonian pronunciation of something that was probably I have a sense Well, I don’t know. I should look up who when emo was. I’m not really sure. But yeah, over in this Fremont NEMA national forest area. It’s pretty cool. And I think it stretches out into a section of the border. Well, I’m not sure really where the border is. But I think we’re right about at the border of Northern California, Southern Oregon.
And a bat-like over deeper east to me is a lot of Nevada too, which is cool. So yeah, I was looking out south to me, and I could see a lightning strike. Oh, yeah, I can see lightning, probably six or seven. Good flashes of it seem like hundreds of miles to the South. And he never heard anything, you know, but you could just see like a little or a big bright pop of light, way deep into the South, where they’re having some kind of lightning storm. You know, it’s probably by Reno or something. But, but it’s a school up here. Yeah, it’s a nice kind of clear night, hot too. Everybody in the southwest is talking about this heatwave coming through, like Arizona will hit 115. And probably everywhere around everywhere in Nevada and Vegas, and Los Angeles will be or east of Los Angeles into the Palm Desert over by Joshua Tree is just going to be begun during this period of August right now.
Probably fortunate that they’re not running Burning Man. I mean, I guess everybody’s used to 115 120 degree days with if you had not into Burning Man, Black Rock desert area every summer. But yeah, I feel like the COVID-19 pandemic stuff, all live events in Nevada, are shut down. I think everybody in California is kind of spooked about some of those mass gatherings of people as well. So doesn’t look like there’s going to be a burn this year. Fine with me, I suppose. But I’m sure there’s a bunch of people missing out, which is too bad.
But as you’re taking photos, in the evening time of sunset, and trying to photograph some contours and changes in the land, you can kind of see some landmarks. And just sort of the way that these bluffs rise up from, or you have a rise up over the land. And then I have the steep drop-offs. So it’s kind of trying to get some images of that. And the perspective that I have from up here on top of this mountain. Pretty cool. It’s kind of interesting looking out, and you’re like looking down at a ridge that I’ve only really seen from the valley floor of it before.
The valley floor of it looks huge. Like when you’re down there, you lookout, and then you look up at this massive table, you know, Mesa of Iraq, it’s just kind of built-up in front of Yeah, but then outside that all around it is, you know, just kind of flat and low in those areas. But yeah, appears just seems like the tippy top of it. So you can kind of look down into the forest. And then you can look at where the forest ends and where the ridge begins. And it just kind of has a steep drop off into a lower Valley. But pretty cool up here. So I was taking photos of that.
Taking photos of some kind of Well, I guess it’s where, like creeks and water have run off the mountains over the millennia and have created these deep ours, that cut through this desert landscape out here, and how they kind of pull through this sort of tidy Canyon area and then open up into a wider area that was, I don’t know, eroded by some Lakes or something like that back in the Pleistocene era, and probably, probably a few ice ages, a few Ice Age cycles before that, too. So I’m not really sure how old this landscape is. I mean, looking at some other stuff, I kind of have, like, some perspective on 15,000 years. But man, if you talk about 100,000 years, I don’t really know, I can’t really tell you, or I’m not really very good at that. I know a lot of people do, where they have like a pretty good kind of mental picture in their head of what the changes in the landscape over the last 15 million years were, but it’s kind of cool like to see like the geological research that they have out there for some different stuff.
I was up in northern Oregon a few weeks ago, I think when I was talking about being near the john de area, and I was reading some information about the geology in that region and how it was formed. Like way back, I guess they find a lot of fossils up in that area. I think there’s a town called a fossil. I remember being a kid up there, go into the high school in the back, pass the football field, and you can just dig away at some shale. And if you kind of crack that shale open, you’re going to see these Fern leaves or these, you know, just this full pattern leaf in the rock. And I guess they’ve also found, like, a lot of like animal fossils out there. Part of the laws that you can’t pick up vertebrate fossils is, I think, what I understand thinking to get seashells. I’m not totally sure I think you can get a fossilized seashell.
But maybe they even ask you not to that I’m not really sure. But I guess the vertebrate for fossilized vertebrates there are requested to be remaining in place. But the researchers have gone through and found a lot of that stuff and tried to collect evidence of the geological formations and changes over the years. And I think with that, they’re able to kind of make a pretty clear map of the way that the Oregon landscape was constituted back then. I was reading some information before the Quaternary period, where we’re in right now.
This is the last couple of 100,000 years that we’ve had these cycles of ice ages that come on and off. But before that, there was a period where the Earth’s climate was, I guess, a lot wetter and a lot warmer. So even in an area like northern Oregon, which is now sort of a dry, kind of high plains’ grassland area as you get up into the Columbia River area over in Eastern Oregon, like as you go from, I don’t know, somewhere, somewhere around Pendleton that Kennewick, you know, something like that landscape. There’s just a bunch of kind of dry flat grassland now, but apparently, 15 million years ago, it was something like palm trees and a more like a way wetter. Rainfall or not rain forest but the way more wet, forested area that was more tropical in its nature. And I guess that kind of reflected with a lot of the animals that were there. Like they talk about camels being there.
They talk about a predecessor to the modern horse, like a kind of small horse. It was probably more like a deer-sized animal sort of this kind of fat nose like predecessors to what would be something more like a bear have been found out there. A lot of different animals were found out there. Which is really cool. I think rhinoceroses john big beaver Sloths few things like that that might have been later collections of animals. But yeah, at some of those early collections, it’s interesting to hear about the kind of landscape that it must have been. Still, apparently through some kind of geologic activity, a bit like a really quick or fast-acting mudslide came through and just buried everything in that region all at once. So I think hard in there and then fossilized many of those animals trapped in that mud slider. I don’t know, that mud event that came through pretty swiftly. And yeah, I just kind of encapsulated all those things, including the trees to I guess there are some areas where you can see some spires that they kind of are now part of what’s been eroded away from the creeks and the rivers that are flowing through that area Ever since then, you know, over the last few, many million years.
They’ve washed away, and now we have some river canyons and Creek canyons that we see through the area now, and that’s where we see some exposed rim rock and stuff that kind of falls along with that with the canyon as it flows out toward the bigger Columbia River Lake river area over there in Eastern Oregon. So it’s really cool to get a bit of a perspective on the kinds of things that have changed out here over the years. But yeah, I guess you can. They’ve made out that those spires are old, old tree trunks that had been encapsulated in mud and then had fossilized over the years. And then now as they’re being exposed, again, through erosion, there’s really just sort of spiral shape on the edge of a cliff face, but I guess they’ve been identified as fossilized tree trunks. It’s pretty cool. So out here in this area, as I’m thinking about the types of changes that have happened over the past, I don’t know 100,000 years or so, which is what I have just a tiny bit better handle on, at least in this region, you can kind of see some different erosion patterns that have happened to the landscape out here. Like when I look out to the west, northwest to me, I see, I see like another huge bluff that runs across from miles. And then below that, there’s a big depression in the land that runs really flat and smoothly for miles and miles and miles, it goes up to the North.
And apparently, as you find out more information about it, what now is really just dry desert sagebrush used to be back in the Pleistocene era, a pretty significant lake that stretched on that was probably I think, they marked it on the rimrock of the bluff to be like, 500 feet deep. You know, now that lake will dry out in the summer, if it’s, if it’s a dry year, there won’t be any water in, in, in two of the five lakes that are sort of just little puddles that seem to be left of what once was a huge, massive body of water that was out here probably changed the way this landscape felt 30,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, this sort of things would oscillate on and off between the ice ages, I think, what is it a 30,000-year period? Mix or to some sense? Well, so what it was about 15,000 years ago from now that we were coming into a period where the Ice Age was starting to end. And as we were kind of coming into what we are, we now have as the Holocene. But before that? Well, I think they kind of marked that out like 11 or 12,000 years or something like that. But some of the earliest human artifacts are, I think they’re coprolites. They’ve been found in Mesa Vera de Chile, way down in South US, recorded proven out to be human remains. But yeah, 15,000 years ago is what they are carbon data too. So really interested to kind of think about human exploration in some of these areas. If you follow the land bridge hypothesis, they came over Beringia, from Asia to Alaska, and then it traveled down into the Americas. That must have been something like 15,000 years ago that that had, I guess, started well. I don’t know how that goes. It would have been there or maybe before that to some ideas or that it might have been before them. But it seems like some of the earliest things that we’ve ever found are from about that 15,000-year mark.
They had some ideas, like, kind of rudimentary can new technology, where they could sort of skirt along what would have been the much lower coastline of the Pacific. I think they say it was somewhere around 400 feet lower in elevation to where it is now. But they were able to kind of skirt around the coast and traveled a little more quickly. To get down towards South US. We do expeditions as you can to do some little jumps out in the ocean travel on the coast pullover. Have a camp. It probably took a long time to figure all that stuff out. Or, you know, for them to maneuver through all the landscape and survive and build and gain resources and stuff. I don’t think it was just one guy. Or maybe it was just sort of an interesting thing, how there are outliers, where I think when they track different animals to that, that normally have kind of a home range of 50 miles or something like that. I think they’ve been tracking. I think it was wolves. I think coupe sometimes too, but yeah, I think the wolf was one that I had heard or reported that like traveled like 1500 miles, you know, it was just like on the run, or you know, just took off but, but really like a lot of them have sort of a more localized home range. And then, for whatever reason, one of them has the Explorer gene as a dog would, whatever that would be. But, still, for whatever kind of urge your drive it has or whatever type of pressures are put on it by its environment, it ends up making a really significant amount of distance all in one go.
So there’s sort of a gradualism perspective where things happen pretty gradually and families, we got families, we got families that would kind of slowly traverse a bit of distance South at a time to make its way down to South US. And then there’s the other idea of what it would be like punctuated equilibrium, where just about everything is almost the same all the time. But one person does a lot more, or a small group of people does a lot more all at once, which is another idea out there for some ways things spread. I think it’s sort of a universal idea of what is it? I think it was the idea of uniformitarianism. And, and punctuated equilibrium where I think there’s still kind of a concept and evolution that is talked about, I think for a while, it was considered that like uniformitarianism was what was taking place where everything was about the same and just sort of gradually evolving over time with slow incremental changes that had happened since the beginning of time. Well, uniformitarianism, I think, is more of like a religious perspective that came from the Catholic Church where everything has to be the same because God made it that way a bit. But if you kind of relax that a bit into some of the things that we’re trying to tie it to later in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. And then I guess on to the 19th century, where there are you know, the 18 hundreds from when scientific method naturalist researchers, geological surveys were going on in the last year, they’re able to kind of put some of those ideas together. But I guess there’s always been a debate between those sides of things, you know, even trained scientists sort of disagree about which side of the line to come down on. So assuming the idea is also called the well, this is a different idea, but it’s attached.
But there’s the idea of lumpers and splitters where, as you’re categorizing things, certain people train people to sort of select to lump very similar things together and identify in the same category while others split those small differences. And when identify something that might be similar into two different categories. Which is kind of an interesting idea. I think that happens in biology a lot when they’re trying to classify an animal. You know, you have many catfish or something, but you have a catfish with these features. And that’s like maybe a different species. Is it a different species or a different subspecies? But it’s kind of interesting how they come into those delineations between those decisions. Yes, it’s got to be a person that decides what it is. And so those who would want it to be the same, those are lumpers, those who’d want it to be identified selectively different. Those are splitters. And I guess that’s sort of a conversation that’s ongoing in the scientific community even still. It makes sense, you know, because it’s about human categorization, categorization, which I think goes medicine, right. But I think that’s sort of the intent of it, you know, it’s like, it’s a human endeavor that we’re involved in, by trying to survey and categorize these different things that we’re experiencing in the world. And it’s to better have a context of what those are to ourselves. So we can explain them to ourselves. But we don’t have to, you know, it’s not actually definitive, if it’s, if it’s lumped, or if it’s split, it’s just sort of a natural occurrence. And it is different. Each individual, you know, unit of that species is probably a little different. You know if you can imagine, if anyone specific individual the species, or any two, I suppose, were Noah’s Ark style, were the only remaining members of that species to procreate and then have offspring. You’d have kind of a genetic bottleneck of those inheritable traits of that animal, and it might not be representative of every trait that was expressed in that animal for a long time.
So I guess that’s kind of to say that it’s just, there are some things we see and some things we don’t and there’s a lot of genetic expressions that we could have if there’s different pressures, environmental pressures, or different I guess, different circumstances that those creatures were involved in during the evolution of their lifespan, or you know, the species span but yeah, it’s got cool thinking about some of that stuff and thinking about some of the past environments that must have been out here. You know, I think about what it was like when the great bass in your area here. It was more full of water. I guess like I was saying, sort of during the ice age or during the Pleistocene era where you were kind of coming in and out of ice ages over 200,000 years, 2 million years. 5 million years. I don’t know, they say something like that. But so yeah, like the ice age that we just got out of, I think is part of a cyclical period that the Earth has been in for, for a long time now, where you kind of have an ice age and then rolls off, and there’s not as much ice, but there’s still ice caps, and then it rolls on, again, where there’s ice, and then rolls off where there’s not as much ice. And then I guess, for a significant time, but you know, way back in the dinosaurs, and for a significant time for the millions of years that followed that was it like that 68 million years ago, Mark, where we, we lost we had that big extinction event, there was a significant period after that to where there were no ice caps, you know, there’s no ice on the South Pole, no ice on the North Pole.
It was like low Earth or something. And I have heard the well. I’ve heard some reasons for it. I probably won’t speculate too much on it now. But you guys should look it up. It’s kind of interesting. There are some interesting ideas about how the environment used to be. But, still, yeah, it’s kind of a trip to think that there had only been really a couple periods in Earth’s history and development over the last 4 billion years when there’s been a snowball Earth, I think, is what they call it. The period where there’s like a significant amount of ice and snow across the land and held up in glaciers over high elevation areas, either at the poles or even on the mountaintop areas of the North, like the high Northern and low southern regions of the Earth.
But yeah, and I guess when there is ice on the Earth, that’s what an ice age is, is a bit of what I’ve been learning. So kind of a trip to learn some of that stuff. But thinking about some Pleistocene stuff here in the Great Basin, where these giant lakes like a kind of like almost inland seas, had existed for a while, it really must have been quite different. What was it like, Lake Lahontan out in? Nevada? I guess there’s like the Great Salt Lake that we see now. It’s just a big giant salt flat, and apparently, that used to be, you know, an inland body of water developed. And then yeah, out here, I think they talked about I think they talk about areas of like, what would it be? I guess it’s the northern great bass and region of probably like Silver Lake summer-like. And then as you travel south to Abraham Lake, and then whatever, whatever is out there, I’m not really sure what this area would have been called before that. But apparently, all those were just connected as one enormous lake that sort of stretched on for a long time, or there are some breakups in mountains and stuff. But there were just really massive bodies of water that carried on out here, and then it just started to dry up over the years.
I guessed even like 500 years ago, there were are more significant lakes out here like that would probably like more or less resemble something closer to Klamath Lake like we have in Oregon now than what we see out like in the Alvord, like I’ve talked about the Alvord Desert before earlier in the podcast, I was talking about the Black Rock desert, Black Rock desert, that playa is made, you know from the silt that settled flatly across a lake bed that had been out in that region. And it’s now dried and no longer there. And so it’s just interesting to kind of perceive some of this Nevada landscape deep southeastern Oregon landscape is something that had really been occupied by a lot of water at once and now is a significant desert region that really doesn’t receive any water. So it’s just kind of perplexing to sort of pondering like, Oh, I wonder why to like that those kinds of changes have happened in the landscape. But yeah, kind of cool stuff. So over this trip, I’ve been checking out some of these, these Forest Service towers, which has been pretty cool. I’ve been having a good time kind of figuring it out a bit. I was driving around some Forest Service roads up in the Fremont minima National Forest. I was trying to find some campsites that I’ve never been to before and try to find some spots to check out, but yeah, along with a couple lookout towers and cabins that are sort of nestled away up in the mountains there. So yeah, pretty. Pretty cool. Being up here.
I’ve seen a few animals. That’s been kind of fun. I think I saw my first badger. I need to look this up, but I don’t think I’ve seen a badger out in person, yet I should probably hold my tongue before speaking too much about it. But yeah, I was able to pull it up in my binoculars it was out on the road, hundreds of feet in front of me. And it kind of hurt my car, and then it was just sort of take-off and run further down the road. And then I was, you know, kind of putting along and making my way, and they would stop and then turn its body so that it was kind of facing me, and then I could kind of see its face and body. And it was pretty low to the ground, and sort of like a little wobbly look to it didn’t look like a fox, or you know, the way a fox would move or the way that a little coyote would move or something.
But yeah, I just look like a little wobbly critter that kind of scooted down the road a bit with stop, turn post up, look back at me. That’s why I was able to pull up binoculars and try and get it on it. And it looks really quite a bit like a little badger that was wobbling around out there. So we’re just kind of fine. And then, as I made it a little way out further closer to it. And I finally got the good sense to Duke to the left and cut off into the forest. So didn’t see it after that. But this coyote cut across the land over there. I think I’ve seen a couple coyotes, one of them was quite a bit further away. I heard a bunch of them suddenly kind of winning and call them, you know, making those little coyote hoots that they do. But yeah, I was camped out, I think, two nights ago. And there was a little pack of coyotes that were all calling out to each other.
Somewhere to the North of me seemed like, like a half-mile or a mile away or so. But it seemed like they were still, you know, pretty close. They’re probably checking me out. But a lot of cows out there. So a lot of cows like cattle that’s been, I think you put up on some of that public land through a permanent to sort of range round and graze and see a bunch of little cows out there kind of run around with their mom cow. And they’re blocking the road. I mean pretty good a couple of times, like 3030, big old black cows and a bunch of little baby calves, or you know, little guys. We’re all sort of posted up in the middle of a road and have to get close to them. They just look at, yet they start to moo, moo, moo. And then they sort of start to scatter, and then they get scared, and then they all run, and then they definitely scatter, and then I kind of put my truck through and then take up take off on that Forest Service road just a little further. A few deer really only, as I think, dos most of the time-out here. So a couple cottontails that’s kind of fun. I don’t know. Gobble of critters. But not anything too crazy or too big out here. I haven’t seen any antelope. I haven’t. I don’t think I’ve really gone East enough to get into the antelope country. I think if I cut just a bit more to the east, I would get closer to some areas where I’ve seen antelope before.
Like, I’ve been over to like heart mountain before and over to the Steens. And in those areas, that scene impacts antelope or the little herd’s antelope running around and gathering out there. And they’re exciting watching this, this pronghorn antelope kind of cruising across the landscape over there. I was learning that those are one of like what is it? Are they like? They’re actually a separate animal from the African antelope. And they’re like one of the oldest evolved species in North US. Yeah, the antelope. I guess the pronghorn is sort of more accurate with what it’s called by some folks now. Well, yeah, when you see a pronghorn antelope out here in Eastern Oregon, you apparently like their speed and their ability to kind of book it across this. This landscape was sort of evolved at a time when they had to. They had outrun what they consider to be like a North American Cheetah Lake animal. I think it was slightly different from the mountain lions we have now or the Jaguars that you find in, like, what was it like northern? Well, I guess I think New Mexico is maybe the furthest North that you’ll find or that they’ve spotted or seen something like that as part of like, their natural range now. And then like south into Mexico, and then and then Central US. And then up here, we have mountain lions, but yeah, apparently, there used to be some now-extinct form of a cat. That was really fast like they talked about cheetahs being fast. Still, I guess the eyesight and the speed of the antelope sort of signals that for some period of its evolutionary history, it had had a spot thing really far away and then move really fast when I found him.
I think that kind of leads to the idea that there was some predator competition for that the for you know, for those antelope that would have put that kind of pressure on him to evolve that kind of binocular eyesight and that kind of speed when they’re moving around. So it’s kind of interesting kind of coloring about and seeing some of these different animals and stuff out here. But that’s pretty cool. Camped out here up in my truck, had the little Mr. heater going yesterday keeping me warm in the evening, and got my sleeping mat and a sleeping bag laid out here in the back of my truck, as I was doing a couple nights out away from home. But it’s cool. Yeah, I got my little podcast rig. And the rest of my stuff up here got my layers, you know, really, like I was saying, it’s just like super hot like with that heat wave coming through like they were talking about so even here. And I think that’s about 8500 feet above sea level.
It was still warm almost all night. I think I had to take a layer off yesterday up in the forest mountains are in the forested area mountains I was at to the west of me, I got real cold at night, I think I’ve got like a 15-degree sleeping bag. And I think it’s like 15 degrees is where you’ll survive, but I don’t think it’s where you’re going to be comfortable. You know. So I think a lot of people have talked about that before. So a lot of times, when I’m going to bed with that 15-degree bag, I have to wear a couple extra layers. Like just like clothes you know, like I’ll wear like I got this, I’ve got like a wall layer that I keep on, and I’ve got like some like a wool pair of leggings I’ll keep on that. They kind of keep me a bit warmer at night, and then sometimes, you know what’s colder, I’ve had to throw on a couple sweaters to try and stay warm. The nice trick, though, is that I’ve learned it is I’m so cold that I wake up from being cold I can kick on that propane heater even here in the back of the cab of my truck. There’s enough ventilation of it, but even in the back of the cab of my truck, I can kick that propane heater on for 10 minutes and heat the cab of the truck up to some reasonably comfortable 70 degrees, and then shut it off. So have enough time to be warm to fall back asleep in somewhat of a position to comfort, so they worked out pretty good but yeah.
This morning at about 630, I saw the sun popping up over what is it this Mesa Ridge over to the west to me and then really only after just a couple of minutes it kind of turned from that soft, warm orange light to what would be sort of that more rugged flat daylight look like the shadows there’s you know there’s really not like a lot of forest or mountains or anything else. You know I’m at the top of the mountain, so right as soon as it came over the horizon, it was just up. And then I was watching the shadows from this mountain cast to the west fade away and turn into what would be regular old daylight pretty quickly; it seemed like 15 minutes or something like that interesting works out here. And in areas where you got a lot of horizon line around, yeah, but yeah, beautiful morning, really cool to be up here in this area. I was kind of freaked out by this area like As mentioned earlier, but it worked out pretty good. I was thinking about maybe I should take some pictures up there and then flip the truck around I back down before it gets dark, but it worked out pretty well hanging out a pier because I wouldn’t put a tent up here, that’s for sure. But yeah, being in a little spot spending the night out, setting up the tripod taking some star photos. That was cool. You got Jupiter and Saturn out to the do south through a good bit of the night right now. Up in the constellation of Sagittarius. And then somewhere around 11 o’clock. 1130 probably midnight most areas where you don’t have a great view of the eastern horizon. I was able to see Mars coming up this morning. It was beautiful. I saw the Moon and Mars or spice pardon me, the moon and like a crescent moon and Venus rising.
Probably around 3:30am 3am 4am somewhere in there. And yeah, looks just awesome. It’s incredible to see. See, Venus looks really bright in the morning sky. Looks like it’s pretty far away from the horizon line right now. And yeah, nice crescent moon or kind of near crescent shape of a moon right up next to it along the ecliptic line there, so that was pretty cool to see this morning. And then yeah, somewhere around 630, the sun popped up, and now we’re back into daylight. So beautiful to see some stuff up here. Oh, and also the purse. He is probably talked about the proceeds a few other times on this podcast in the past, but yeah, the purse he had meteor showers. That thing comes around once a year during this time in late July and August, and I guess he has a peak right around the 10th, 11th 12th of August. So every year, I figure, and I think some years that kind of predicted to be stronger and some Time’s like, a bit less strong. But it was cool during this last couple of days when the moon has been sort of more at that crescent shape, rise and really late into the night, you get these really dark skies. I’m sure you can. You can still see quite a bit of the sky. But then, for the last couple of days, it’s just been a really dark and intense sky, especially up here in these higher elevations.
Like once, you get to 4040 500 feet now I’m at 8500 feet, it’s like, it’s just a really crisp air and really dark sky where you can see a lot of stuff as I mean, I could easily make out the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye last night as I was looking up toward the cast come to Perseus and yeah, just really cool to Well, I guess, man, the constellation of Andromeda. But that’s always been, I guess, generally as a constellation, this one I’ve never really seen the shape of. But yeah, looking at you can just see like, Wow, look at that. That’s the Andromeda Galaxy right there, naked-eye observation of it, and it looks good. You can see it a lot of times in a dark sky. But the man is apparent to see, like looking south into the constellation of Sagittarius, you see that some of those points in the Milky Way that are part of the Galactic Center really clearly just some of those, like clusters of stars that are out there. Real distant, real faint, or you know, in magnitude, but as they’re so close to together as you kind of looked down to the center of the galaxy. As we get those really thick and bright plumes of the kind of dirty look at the Milky Way, it cuts across the sky. But yeah, really beautiful to see from an area like this up here, on one of these summer nights, that has that kind of crisp summer, warm air up here. Nice night to see some of those summer constellations and a nice night to observe some meteor showers even still, I think what is like a couple of days after the peak of to proceed meteor shower, I was able to count probably like 10 or 15, that were really pretty good ones, you know, there are some spitters that I probably didn’t count, but there’s a number of them that had like that bright, kind of lasting plasma trail that sort of runs behind it.
I guess that as the rock enters the atmosphere, it’ll kind of, wow, I don’t know if I can really explain to it that well, but it’ll leave like a tube behind it. That is illuminated as it’s kind of burned its way through that area and then dissipated, you know, to whatever fine point that it ended. But that tube that existed as a tail behind it will stay visible for a couple of seconds after that. After that, big shooting stars already passed. So really cool to kind of get to see some of that stuff from out here. Seeing a couple good ones like that before, but yeah, pretty fun stuff being out here, man. It was a good time.
I’m probably gonna head back toward the five corridors today and then make my way back home. But yeah, it’s been a nice time being camped out here over in Eastern Oregon, but trying to get some more time of it in the summer. Well, while I’ve had the time, also, man, some of these little lake towns out here in Eastern Oregon. I don’t even think they’ve heard of COVID-19 Yeah, you know, I’m fine with it, I suppose. But yeah, I walked into Safeway yesterday. Only a few people that are, you know, some have masks on, but not everybody likes a couple of guys I saw their look like just younger. I wouldn’t even really rant, you know, I want to kind of put some cool name to them. But I think they were just goofy dude that lives out here in the country. They didn’t even bring a mask into the store. You know, they didn’t have it around their neck, or they weren’t even trying to play it off. Like oh, well, I mean, I’m more than six feet away. So I’m not going to wear my mask right now. I’d probably try and pull that move. But yeah, these guys just walked around like it was 2019.
What’s the deal? I don’t know. Nice way to live, I suppose. But it has got funny. I guess there’s no Coronavirus out here. So I guess other stuff worried about, probably Me too, I suppose. But I hope to strike that repeat. I hope everybody’s doing well out there. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. I’m going to try and wrap it up here. And if you guys want, you can go to Billy Newman photo.com to see more information about the photos I’ve taken and check out some of the other work I’ve been up to. Oh, you can also check out Billy Newman’s photo comm forward-slash support if you want to throw some support toward the podcast. It’s always appreciated toward the photo chips towards aping and stuff. And yeah, the goal is to kind of try and continue some travel stuff over here in Eastern Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, if they don’t lock all the states down, but at least as it is through these sections of public land in Oregon that I’m able to travel around and still through the end August into September and October while the weather is still in season for it. So looking forward to the next few weeks of it, getting to travel around, take some photos and stuff. It’s been a nice time getting out and traveling and stuff. So hope everybody’s doing good. Thanks for listening to this episode of the building human photo podcast. Always check out more stuff if you want to online, but until next time, I’ll talk to you later.