From May 19 to May 23, my friend Estelle and I took her camper van to the Malheur national wildlife reserve and the Alvord Desert. I have never been to either one of these places and was really looking forward to this experience. I have just been completely blown away by this area. There’s something very special about it. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to take really good pictures of the area using a cell phone. The first set of photos are from the Malheur visitor center.

On January 2, 2016, an armed group of right-wing militants seized and occupied the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon, and continued to occupy it until law enforcement made a final arrest on February 11, 2016. Today, there seems to be no evidence of this awful occupation.

The next set of pictures were taken from the visitor center.

From the visitor center, you can take a dirt road through the main part of the refuge that consist of incredible wetlands. I have never seen so many different species of birds in my life. We were really lucky because there was so much water and the sun was out. It was a spectacular day.  Unfortunately I don’t know the names a lot of the birds and again some of the pictures are fairly grainy. I’m really mad at myself that I left my bird guidebook at home. 

Along the route, we drove to the top of a Mesa for a beautiful vista of the surrounding area. Here are the pictures from there.

Our next stop was the community of Fields. The general store/restaurant is famous for its milkshakes. I had a coffee milkshake and it was excellent.

We drove north along the east side of the Steen Mountains heading to the Alvord Desert Hot Springs.

The following pictures were taken at the Alvord Desert resort. 

Pictures taken around our campsite and at the hot tubs.

In the afternoon, we took some chairs out onto the playa of the Alvord Desert and just sat and enjoyed how blessed we were to be in such a unique place.

Here are some more pictures taken of the desert and the Steens. 

We took two days to drive back to Portland. We drove south into Nevada before turning west and looping back into Oregon. We drove through a number of little towns that I’ve never been to before, including Paisley, Summer Lake and Silver Lake. Here are two pictures taken in the town of Adel.

We spent the night in the parking lot of the café in Silver Lake. The owner of the café let you park in the lot if you eat at the café. We went in for breakfast. We had a really good country breakfast which included a stack of hashbrowns with gravy on top, an egg on top of that with bacon on the side. We got to chatting with the owner who at 55 retired from a job in Portland and bought this café. She had grown up in the area and actually graduated from Paisley high school. She cooked a lot of variety of foods and experimented with recipes. I was really impressed to find a restaurant in the middle of nowhere with that kind of quality of food. She was a very interesting lady.