A Canoe on the Deschutes
HERE are larger rivers than the Deschutes, and wilder, and some better for the canoe; many shelter more ducks, and a few more trout than does Oregon's "River of Falls." But if there are any more beautiful or varied I have yet to make their acquaintance.
The Columbia is, of course, a continental stream whose very mightiness prevents any adequate comprehension of its entity; it must be enjoyed by sections, in small potions. The Willamette is almost pastoral, a sterner Western edition of the English Thames, with a score of rollicking tributaries, rough as the mountains that breed them. The Sacramento, like linked sweetness, is long drawn out, and the boisterous brooks of the Sierras seem rather upland freshets than substantial rivers. Superlatives are risky tools on the Pacific Slope where they appear appropriate so often, but even so, with no apologies to the Pitt, the Snake, the Williamson, the Rogue, and other neighbors, greater and lesser, the Deschutes appeals to me as the richest of them all in scenery and pleasurable attractions. From the snow banks of its birth to the Columbia I have played companion to its waters on horseback, in canoe, in automobile, driving, afoot, and on a train, and with familiarity has come no contempt, but ever-increasing admiration.
The Deschutes is a river of many rôles: it roars and rushes in white-watered cascades, it sparkles gently in a myriad rippling rapids, it is sedate as a mill pond; sometimes its banks are fields flanked with flowers, sometimes steep slopes with black pools below and great trees above, sometimes lined with alders or with the needle-carpeted forest marching out to the very water's edge. Such it is for the first hundred miles. Below, leaving the land of trees and meadows, it plunges for a second century of miles through a spectacular canyon, walled in by cliffs and abrupt hillsides, often rising almost sheer a thousand feet. "The Grand Canyon of the Northwest," those who know it call this stretch of the Deschutes. Above, billowing back from the rim, is a great golden-brown land of wheat fields, with a marvelous mountain westerly skyline.
On the river's western flank, between it and the Cascade Range, is a playland of beautiful pine timber, crystal lakes, and mountained meadows, bounded on one hand by snow-capped peaks and on the other by the broad plains that sweep eastward to Idaho.
One August we foregathered in this happy hunting ground with our canoe and our grub, near the headwaters of the Deschutes, in the heart of a region of sunshine, mountain prairie, glorious trees, and laughing water. One hundred miles of liquid highway lay before us, and we envied no one.
Crane Prairie is a broad mountain meadow, hemmed in by timbered foothills that climb to the snow mountains, glimpsed here and there from the prairie land. The Deschutes divides into three streams, each meandering down from little lakes tucked away in the timber at the base of the snow slopes that feed them. All around the prairie is a delightful region intersected by trails, dotted with lakes and meadows; altogether a pleasant place for ramblings, either on foot or horseback, with fishing, hunting, and mountain climbing as tangible objectives.
Canoeing and duck shooting may be combined on the Deschutes
On a backwater of the Deschutes
The first stage of our outing was a stationary one, so far as the canoe was concerned, for a week was devoted to expeditioning here and there upon and around Crane Prairie. There was excellent fishing, and we saw just enough of the trails and the mountains to realize something of their possibilities.
Then one morning, before the sunlight had filtered over the hills and down through the pine boughs, we launched the Long Green, our canoe which had made the transcontinental trip from Oldtown, Maine, and started it upon a more venturesome, if less lengthy trip. Ours, by the way, was an equal suffrage outing. Its feminine better-half paddled as strenuously, cast a fly as optimistically, and "flipped" hot cakes as diligently as did the male member. Altogether, she demonstrated beyond a doubt that the enjoyment of an Oregon canoe trip need not depend upon one's sex or previous condition of servitude.
Comfortable canoeing is the most entirely satisfying method of travel extant. It is noiseless, it is easy, and there is enough uncertainty and risk about it to lend a special charm. Just as the best of fishing is the unknown possibility of the next cast—your biggest trout may rise to the fly!—so it is when you drift down stream in a canoe, for every turn discloses a fresh vista and behind every bend lurks some rare surprise. It may be an unsuspected rapid, requiring prompt action; perhaps a tree has fallen across the river, necessitating a flanking portage or a hazardous scurry beneath it; mayhap a particularly inviting pool will appear, when one must "put on the brakes" and "full speed astern" ever so hastily before a fatal shadow spoils the fishing chances. There are other possibilities without number, some of them realities for us, as when we came face to face with a deer, to our vast mutual astonishment, or, quietly drifting down upon a madam duck and her fluffy feathered family, gave them all violent hysterics. The little birds were unable to fly, and the mother, who would not desert them and lacked courage to hide along the bank, herded her family down stream for many miles with heartbreaking squawks and much splashing of wings.
A portage is either one of the interesting events of a canoe trip or its most despised hardship, according to the disposition of those concerned—not to mention the length, breadth, and thickness of the portage itself! Regarded in its most pessimistic light, a portage is a necessary evil, and, like a burned bannock, is swallowed with good grace by the initiated. In Eastern Canada, the land of patois French, a portage is a portage. In Maine, and elsewhere, it is apt to be a "carry." West of the Rockies, one neither "portages" nor "carries," but "packs" the canoe, for on the Pacific Slope everything borne by man or beast is "packed," just as it is "toted" south of the Mason and Dixon line. But portage, carry, or pack, the results are the same. Reduced to their lowest equation, it usually means a sore back and a prodigious appetite—there should be a superlative for prodigious, as all camping appetites are that; dare one say "prodigiouser"?
Our hundred miles of river included but two portages of consequence, both around falls. Fortunately in each instance the packing was across a comparatively level stretch, free from underbrush, as is almost all of this great belt of yellow pine that follows the eastern slopes of the Cascades from the Columbia to California. There were minor carries, once over a low bridge, where the bands of sheep cross to the mountain summer ranges of the forest reserves, and several times an easy haul, with canoe loaded, around the end of a fallen tree or crude forest ranger's bridge made of floating logs held together for the most part with baling wire.
Now and again the river was bordered by nature-made fields, knee-deep with flowers; there were purple lupin everywhere and vermilion Indian paint-brush, and a score of other gay blossoms. Often for the pleasure of tramping through this pretty outdoor garden, we would let the canoe follow its own sweet will at the end of a rope, while we walked down the bank, perhaps intimately investigating the households of beavers or casting a royal coachman along the shadowed water close beside the edge.
The special delight of camping, as anyone knows who has tried it, is that life all at once becomes so simple away from the high-pressure world of telephones, time-tables, dinner engagements, and other necessary evils. That is the essence of outing pleasure. The fishing, the canoeing, the hunting, climbing, or what-not are really relegated to obscurity in comparison with this one great boon. When our physical system runs down, we take medicine; when our mental system gets out of gear, we crave a dose of the open, which means of simplicity.
Along the Deschutes, the "River of Falls." "It roars and rushes, in white-watered Cascades"
Copyright 1911 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
A canoe trip is simplicity personified. In the first place, you are launched into the wide world of out-of-doors with your entire household, from dining table to bed, concentrated in a couple of bundles that repose amidships in the craft which is the beginning and the end of your transportation possibilities. The rest is "up to you." If you would get somewhere, it is necessary to paddle, always exercising due diligence to keep the craft right side up and escape fatal collisions with vexatious rocks and snags. In that department—locomotion—there is just enough active responsibility to keep it thoroughly worth while, and more than enough relaxation, as the current carries the canoe along with only now and then a guiding dip of the paddle, to make it all a most pleasurable loaf.
Every stopping place was a new experience, and, it should be said, each seemed even more beautiful than its predecessor.
"There's a bully place. See—there under the big pine."
With a stroke or two of the paddles the Long Green arrived gently at the bank beneath that pine, and out would come the box of grub, the gunny sack of pots and frying pans, and the rolls of bedding. Then the canoe was drawn from the water, and, inverted, pressed into double service as a table and a rain shelter, in case of need. Our waterproof sleeping-bags were supposed to do as much for us, and on two occasions showers dampened our slumbers, if not our spirits.
The important work of camping, which is not work at all, but play, is in the commissary department. It has four stages: lighting the fire, cooking, eating, and cleaning up; the third is, by all odds, the most popular.
Concerning fire making, volumes have been written. It is quite possible to learn from these incendiary publications exactly how to prepare the proper, perfect kind of a fire under any and all circumstances. Study alone is required to master the art—on paper! But in reality, making a quick and satisfactory camp-fire, like creating frying-pan bread, is a subtle attainment that can be mastered only by practice. No two people agree; it is easier to start a dispute over the details of a camp-fire than about anything imaginable, not even excepting the "best trout fly made"—and that, every fisherman knows, is a matter of piscatorial preference that has disrupted humanity since the days of Izaak Walton.
Camp cooking is another art. There, again, place not all thy faith in books, for they are deceivers when it comes to a bit of bacon, a frying pan, some corn-meal and flour, and a pinch of baking powder. The only satisfactory rule is to have as few ingredients as possible and to have plenty of them. Flour, corn-meal, bacon, dried apples, butter, hardtack, sugar, salt, coffee, baking powder, beans—those form the essential foundation. There is an endless list of edibles that may be added, which run the gastronomic gamut from molasses to canned corn. But the way to learn real camp cooking, and by all odds the best procedure for happiness in transportation, is to take a small variety and keep each article in a cloth bag, which insures few troublesome packages and no disastrous leaks.
"Cleanin' up" is no trick at all, when there is a river full of water a dozen feet from the fire, and it is simply a matter of two pots and two tin plates. There, indeed, the joys of camp life come home to the feminine member of the expedition most forcibly of all.
"Isn't it heavenly! Only two plates to wash!" expressed the essence of her satisfaction.
Two plates to wash, two paddles to manipulate, two healthful, happy weeks of out-of-doors, all as enjoyable for a woman as for a man—that was our Deschutes River canoe trip. And there are a score or more of other Oregon outings as delightful.
