oregon stones

I have often wondered what the first Paiute who wandered into Yosemite Valley must have felt.

I  can only assume that he felt what I did when I first drove into the valley in 1972. Towering rock faces. Cascading waterfalls. The next site more wondrous than the last.

Oregon may not have a Yosemite, but it does have a catalog of natural wonders. We visited one of them yesterday.

The year was 1860. Lincoln had not yet been elected president, and Oregon had just been admitted to the Union. In March, a 60-year old Army major -- Enoch Steen -- was assigned to survey central Oregon from Fort Dalles on the Columbia River to Harney Lake in the southeast corner of the state.

His route took him through the Ochoco Mountains -- some of the wildest beauty he had ever seen. While leading his team down the broad floodplain of what is now known as Mill Creek, he wandered across a spire of rock that towered above the surrounding forest.

He had stumbled upon one of the sacred sites of the local Shoshone. But, as so often happens in the midst of conquest, the rock took on a new name -- a name it bears to this day. Steins Pillar.

And that naming is a lesson in mid-19th century spelling. Local folk transformed Major Steen's name into "Stein" and then provided another example of the nomadic aprostrophe. What was supposed to be known as Steen's Pillar became Steins Pillar.

A similar name shift happened when Major Steen explored an area known as Snow Mountain. When it was renamed in his honor, it turned into Steens Mountain -- completely losing the apstrophe.

But the name is not as important as the sight of the unusual rock structure.

If Steen had been a geologist, he would have realized that he had been traversing a 10-mile wide volcanic caldera before he reached the pillar. A caldera that had been formed 40 million years before his expedition in a massive explosion.

When the volcano exploded, the ash was compacted into a rock known as tuff. And that is the sole composition of the pillar -- tuff. It was once a much-wider ridge, but millions of years of snow, rain, and wind eroded it into its current 350-foot form.

But the pillar is not the only evidence that the land it juts out of was once volcanically active. There are car-sized boulders everywhere. Most of them were eroded from the caldera's rim. But some of them were once volcanic projectiles.

The best way to see the pillar is on the road that follows the Mill Creek valley. But the experience can be best-enjoyed by making the 4-mile two-way hike through old-growth forest to the base of the pillar. And that is exactly what Darrel, Christy, and I set out to do.

The hike is a rather easy one. Because the trail has to gain altitude, it wanders up and down the sides of three ridges with several simple switchbacks. But the views were well worth the exertion.

We were doing well until we encountered long patches of snow that had melted and refrozen into mini-glaciers that morphed the trail into a skating rink a bit treacherous for us senior folk. It took us about a half-hour to inch our way along a 100-foot portion of the path -- along with two rather humorous falls for each of us. The Keystone Cops could not have presented a better performance.

Even though we were about a mile from our destination, we decided to turn back before we needed to visit The Broken Hip Clinic. After all, we can try it again when the weather melts the ice off of the path.

We did get close enough, though, to see the other side of the pillar. That, of course, is simply another version of what politicians say when programs fail.

It may not have been El Capitan, but it was good enough to act as a magnet for a future adventure.