They’d called it a desert. And it was. Sage brush abounded as we left Jordan Valley travelling east. But it was still spring on Thursday, over cast and chill—perfect for a bike ride. We felt the desert heat on Monday driving home. Summer had arrived.

We weren’t in wilderness exactly. Working ranches lined the road with irrigation ditches and cattle. Open range country made finding a campsite without evidence of previous cattle occupation impossible. Under wilderness rules open range grazing rights will be bought up by the government.

Our first campsite on Current Creek was really just pasturage. We camped in a marshy area jumping across two small branches of the stream to get back and forth from tent to camp central. Willows and bushes lined the stream. Everything seemed damp that first night after running from the rain all afternoon.

Scrub brush and small twisted trees struggled for survival in small groups Doug insisted were forests.

Black basalt columns protruded up from the soil everywhere calving boulders and rubble across dry slopes still covered in a light green. A John Wayne western landscape for sure.

On the second morning we skirted the edge of the eastern Owyhee desert, flat, sullen and uninviting. Doug and Scott had ridden through some of it on hard cow-hoof pocked trails a year or so earlier. They insisted that haze in the distance was a mountain range with snow.

Turning up Antelope Ridge, the world opened up. Now we could see for miles rather than a few hundred feet. The cameras came out to capture a sweeping landscape falling down and away from us in graceful sweeping arcs and behind it all the snow capped peaks of the Owyhee mountain range.

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