CHAPTER IX
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.