The Frosty Badlands

I began my trip early, heading into the Columbia Gorge under cover of darkness. As I approached the eastern portal, the sun rose, and lit the fogs downriver to the west.

Unhappy with the direct sunlight in my eyes, and having seen Google suggest that I could make the trip to Nampa in eight hours without using the freeway, I turned south at The Dalles, pausing only to glance at its ludicrously rectilinear dam, before plunging uphill into Deschutes country on 197.

I was able to find gas at the one, tiny off-brand service station in Maupin, where a rotund chihauha trundled out from behind the counter to greet me, before I struck out toward Fossil and John Day, and into the badlands of eastern Oregon. This part of the drive was phenomenally stunning, and I didn’t have to deal with anyone riding my bumper - there wasn’t a car to be seen for miles. Maybe that should have disconcerted me more than it did.

I arrived at John Day in the mid-afternoon. At this point I began to realize that the road ahead went over a higher pass than I had anticipated, and I began to think about finding an alternate route. But I was already too committed to the southern road; every way out of John Day, except the road I had come by, led over a pass. So I went ahead on Route 26, over Austin Summit.

This is where I broke out my universal chains, which were supposed to work with any tires. As the sun set, I pulled over in the ice near the summit, expecting trouble on the downhill, and knelt to thread them through my wheels - only to realize that the type of wheels my car uses makes this threading impossible.

I was stuck. Well, not quite. I could still go forward, although for a few moments of spinning out I wondered if that would even be possible.

I crested the first of three summits, engaged my flashers, slowed to a crawl, and began the long descent over a surface of packed snow and ice. Just at that moment, the sun went down, and it began to snow.

I have no pictures of this section of the road.

It took over two and a half hours to go the fifty miles from John Day to Unity, where I arrived mercifully at a convenience store with a bathroom ten minutes before they closed. The entire way I had clung to the wheel, expecting to lose control and go sliding down the slope, yet in point of fact my Toyota performed admirably and never lost traction. The bigger enemy, it turned out, was drowsiness - it was exhausting to remain so tense at the wheel at such slow speeds.

Once I got to Unity and the convenience store closed its doors onto a parking lot of slippery sheet ice, I consulted my highway map, only to find that I was now well and truly entrapped - Unity was surrounded by five-thousand foot passes on all sides. There was no low road out whatsoever. So I had to go on, voluntarily entering another pass after I had just found relief from the last - and this time it was fully dark, past six p.m. in December.

Well, I got over, and I got to Nampa, bleary-eyed but living, and vowing to always take the low road from here on out.