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The Pillars of Rome and Milky Way

I just got back from a week-long roadtrip around southeastern Oregon with my family. We had a great time despite breathing a lot of desert dust, doing a little damage to both our car and our tiny camping trailer (southeastern Oregon is not kind to people or vehicles in general), and getting skunked (photographically speaking) for the first half of the trip.

One of our stops put us in Rome, Oregon, a tiny valley hamlet along the Owyhee River. There wasn’t much to the place, really. There’s a boat put-in for the river, a general store with gas and some camping (and one of the top-5 worst cups of coffee I’ve ever sipped), and a chunk of land north of town called “The Pillars of Rome,” where surprisingly unique and interesting rock formations erupt from the ground and tower over the dusty landscape, which is mostly filled with scrub brush and cows. The crumbly clay structures have a number of fossils embedded in them and apparently were a landmark to pioneers, who likely paused for a moment to admire their grandeur before deciding that there was no way they were going to homestead anywhere near there.

Because our gazetteer had a tiny camping symbol at the BLM’s boat put-in, we assumed we could trailer-camp there, although a gate at the gravel road’s entrance and a sign near a grassy spot stating “Do not place tents on grass – Day Use Only” hinted that maybe our gazetteer was wrong. The only other option was camping at the general store half a mile down the road. We decided to roll the dice and camp at the boat put-in anyway, knowing full well that there was a chance that I would return from shooting in the middle of the night with the car and find that the gate would be closed, thereby preventing me from getting back to our camp trailer and my family. It wouldn’t have been the first time I would’ve slept in my car, but luckily it never came to that, as the gate was still open when I got back.

And this was a good thing, as the general store, for some reason, had lit their camp area to near-daylight proportions with the use of two extremely bright sodium-vapor lights. The lights were so bright, actually, that when they turned on a little past sunset, I thought the BLM’s boat put-in had lights in its parking lot. But no, these were lights from the general store. Half a mile away. I’m not sure how anyone in the general store’s RV park got any sleep without blackout curtains and sleep masks.

Despite the obnoxious lighting practices of the general store, Rome has some extremely dark skies, which is great for photographers like me who enjoy photographing the night sky. The result of one of my photos is below.

Technical details: This is two exposures, one for the sky and one for the foreground, taken back to back, and blended carefully in Photoshop. This is the true position of the Milky Way at the moment in time in which the photos were taken.

 

The Milky Way over Rome, Oregon.
The spring Milky Way wheels through the dark skies of tiny Rome, Oregon, where just north of town the rock formations “The Pillars of Rome” impose on the dry landscape. Prints available here.

 

Early the next morning, I got the panorama below after finding this location the previous day. 

 

The Milky Way arches over a rock at Pillars of Rome, Oregon.
Moments away from becoming washed out by the dawning of a new day, the Milky Way arches over a sphinx-like rock formation at the Pillars of Rome, Oregon.

 

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I dropped my camera (bag) in the water in…

Rocks sit beneath a waterfall in Oneonta Gorge
Lower Oneonta Falls, in Oneonta Gorge. Prints available (contact me for details).

 

I first heard of Oneonta Gorge shortly after I moved to the Portland area four years ago. The place is like catnip to local photographers. A non-photographer had billed it as a “fun hike,” a designation that doesn’t even come close to describing just how amazing the scenery is and how immersive (no pun intended) the Oneonta hiking experience is.

 

With its storybook (or, more likely nowadays, epic fantasy film) setting, Oneonta gives off an in media res vibe as soon as you’re between its tall walls. Except that Oneonta itself is the star of the show, and you’re simply a hiker-photographer sent from central casting.

 

At mid-day, sunlight sets the mossy walls aglow, salamanders can be seen crawling near shadowy pools, and a cool oxygen-rich breeze blows through the canyon–and all of this is set to the echoing score of an endlessly cascading waterfall.

 

Although Oneonta can be crowded in the summertime, particularly on warm weekends, there’s usually not a lot of foot traffic in there. Part of this is the barrier to entry: a large, oddly stacked logjam. At 10-12 feet high and 30 or more feet deep, the logjam is not to be taken lightly. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see how dangerous a slip and fall could be here: One good clunk of your head on the way down, and you’re unconscious in ten-feet-deep water, with no way for anyone who witnesses the accident to give you a hand, much less recover your body. But in the summertime, when water levels are low, the rest of the hike is easy–save for “the deep part.”

 

About halfway back to the falls is “the deep part,” an area about 20 feet long where the water gets, well, deep. In the summertime this area rarely requires a swim, even for short adults. This place can be tricky for photographers like me, though, who ford this area while carrying thousands of dollars of gear over their head. On all my trips into and out of this area, I had never really had problems going through this part. Until recently.

 

On my way back from the back-area waterfall, while carrying my pack and all my gear over my head in armpit-deep water, I bumped into a rock with my foot as I was stepping. Unfortunately my momentum continued carrying my upper body forward, and I attempted to take one more step to correct my balance, again encountering the same rock that impeded me the first time. Apparently it was a much larger rock than I realized. Despite frantically kick-starting a large underwater rock in an effort to catch my balance, my entire gear bag (water-resistant but NOT waterproof), which was safely overhead, ended up going in the water. Somehow, against all odds, this 20-pound-bag managed to float long enough for me to quickly retrieve it after resetting my feet.

 

As I lifted the dripping bag over my head I was doing a mental tally of the cost of replacement, the photographic equivalent of your life flashing before your eyes, and I noted how much heavier my bag was now that it had taken on water. As soon as I had the opportunity I got to a semi-dry place (not easy to find in Oneonta), and unzippered the bag so that I could check the contents and begin properly weeping. To my surprise, even though the entire outer nylon shell was soaked with water, only a few drops of water had actually made it in, probably through the zipper itself.

 

To say I was relieved was an understatement.

 

Anyway, the rest of the hike out was uneventful, and I’ll be rethinking my no-drybag-needed policy for future outings in that gorge. If you live in the Portland area and haven’t checked out Oneonta (and have good enough balance to climb over the logjam unassisted), I urge you to do so before the autumn rains begin. You won’t regret it. Unless you drop your electronics in “the deep part.”

 

A pile of rocks sits at the edge of Oneonta Gorge, with the waterfall Lower Oneonta Falls in the background.
A pile of rocks sits at the edge of Oneonta Gorge, with the waterfall Lower Oneonta Falls in the background.
Hikers make their way through the creek in Onenta Gorge.
Hikers make their way through the creek in Oneonta Gorge.
Piles of rocks with a waterfall in the background
Rock cairns sit at the edge of Oneonta Gorge, with a waterfall in the background.

 

 

 

 

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