1. Coffeepot Crater
The crater is the only really accessible part of the Jordan Craters complex. The lava flow from Coffeepot Crater is the youngest in the area, at most 3,200 years old, and thus well within the period of human settlement. On the west side of the crater is a black cinder slope, while lava spilled through two breeches on the east side. I walked south along the edge of the lava flow a little way and then back along it, admiring the pahoehoe formations and the plants and lizards that have found a home here. On the northeast side of the crater, a lava runway issues down towards a couple of collapse pits. On the west side, a low ridge of maybe eight or nine spatter cones run along a fissure into the balsamroot hillside.
2. Chalk Basin
On this one I assiduously followed William L. Sullivan’s directions in his Eastern Oregon guidebook. I camped the night here at Sullivan’s X-shaped junction. On the drive in, I saw two big clouds of dust and thought there must be others driving out, but they turned out to be two herds of mustangs cantering with the wind. On the drive back out, it was small groups of antelope that would race me (not such a challenge, since I was averaging about 20 mph) and then suddenly turn across the road.
The next day, I hiked down into Chalk Basin, a large sagebrush bowl with tuff cliffs that look something like the Pillars of Rome, but without the pillars. Down by a wash, there were the remains of a teardrop trailer and a bed, perhaps some old trapper’s retreat when out here harvesting coyotes during the winter. [Edit: Actually probably from the Desert Sunrise claim of the 1980s, which gathered banded "decorative rock" from the area.] Sullivan tells you to walk down the wash, which was running water in places, until you get to the top of a substantial dry waterfall.
I then took a ridge up and over to a tributary wash and followed this out of Chalk Basin to a rim overlooking an unnamed canyon that opens up to the Owyhee River across from Lambert Rocks.
This is the real destination of this cross-country loop. There are two white-topped domes on the rim that offer views down and across to an array of hoodoos and columns, many capped by a hard thin tuff layer. From the lower dome, you can see more formations to the north above the river itself. A marvelous vista and, like all my outings in the Owyhee except for those in Leslie Gulch, I had it to myself.
Then it was a question of hiking back to my car, which I could see from a high point, across the sagebrush. Steens Mountain was low on the horizon and still displaying substantial snow. A couple of leopard lizards froze in portrait pose. The day was still quite young when I, with a little regret that I hadn’t planned a longer trip, motored back to the highway.
