This past weekend Zach & I took a 4-night trip to Pendleton, Oregon. We went to visit a family member of mine. This post won't be about that. Instead this will be a small tribute to Pendleton.
Having grown up half in the Willamette Valley, in what is considered a temperate rain-forest, and half in the Bend/Redmond/La Pine area, known as the high desert, I have a strong appreciation for various faces of Oregon's terrain. I've always loved the lush greenery the Valley offered and while the rain could be dreary at times I have loved it for the life it brings. In recent years, however, I've found myself turning more and more to the sweeping expanses, the vast skies, and the towering mountains and plateaus that only eastern Oregon can provide. As I've explore and discover it through my now-adult eyes I find it just as lush, plentiful, and providing as the Valley can be, in it's own unique way.
I'm lucky that my father is an outdoorsman and though I am his daughter he has never treated me as if there was anything I wasn't capable of. He taught me the same tracking, fishing, hunting, camping, and safety practices that he would go on to teach my younger brothers many years later. Even when I insisted on bringing my full makeup bag to a remote lake it didn't lessen my firewood cutting duties. In the course of teaching me everything he could about the land my father gave me a deep love for the natural world and a view at many of Oregon's most beautiful & iconic landscapes that I'm still only fully realizing the breadth of space we covered.
Pendleton is nestled in northeastern Oregon near the Columbia and Umatilla Rivers. The town itself sits in the crook of a small valley with the residential areas expanding up the surrounding hillsides and spilling outwards now into the southern plains. The Umatilla River herself winds softly through the downtown area with beautiful walking/biking trails running alongside. Nearby McKay Creek, which feeds into the Umatilla, has been dammed to form McKay Reservoir which is a short 15 minute drive from town but accessible only via a somewhat washed out gravel road. It hosts banks for fishing & lounging and a put-in spot for boating & jet skiing. Northwards you will find the Columbia in all her glory as she cuts through the basalt cliffs and creates the division between Oregon & Washington.
The area was originally settled by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation made up of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla peoples. After the tribes were driven off the majority of their ancestral lands by settlers they were granted a small reservation for the tribes to share, which is located east of present-day Pendleton. To give an idea of the scale of the land lost in 1855 with the Treaty of Walla Walla the tribes ceded 6.4 million acres in exchanged for a reservation that has now dwindled to just over 173,000 acres with half of that reservation still being owned by non-Native Americans.
A historic town, Pendleton sits along the route of the Oregon Trail and is one of the sites that some settlers chose to make their home starting officially in nearby McKay in the year 1851. Being near to two rivers and the open eastern Oregon farm & grazing land made Pendleton and early economic & business center. As railroads were built to service the area thousands of Chinese immigrant workers were hired as laborers and moved to the area. Known as a "sundown town", in a clearly racist practice these Chinese laborers were not to be seen on town streets after sundown and it is said many lived in the Pendleton Underground which is still in existence and available for tour.
With a clear Western history, it's no surprise that Pendleton is host to one of the nation's most well-known outdoor rodeos, the Pendleton Round-Up. Started in 1910 it is by far the largest event in the city and brings a whopping 50,000 people annually to the small town of roughly 16,000. As it is both a major source of pride and revenue for the town it commemorates all things rodeo in the Pendleton Round-Up and Happy Canyon Hall of Fame as well as with many bronze-cast statues of a famous & diverse cast of cowboys and girls.
Despite knowing a lot about it, the history of Pendleton and the surrounding area isn't what I love most about it. It's the feelings of safety and smallness that I find the most reassuring. Safety in that I've never felt unsafe walking the streets or river paths of Pendleton by myself. I've explored near abandoned buildings and areas that, had I seen them in a larger town, I would likely have steered clear of. The city is easily traversed by foot so that's what I most frequently do when I'm in the downtown area and the most jarring thing that's ever happened to me is when a man I hadn't noticed some ways behind me on the river path asked if I was enjoying my joint from KindLeaf that I thought I was smoking in privacy. Then he walked away, that was it. In the grand scheme of life it was a pretty inane happening.
The sense of smallness comes both from the size & pace of the town itself and also from the landscapes surrounding it. When you're staring down miles of dark plains and star dotted skies listening to coyotes yip excitedly in the distance you can't help but feel a part of something larger. When the sun is rising on rolling, golden fields of wheat & barley, when a deer dashes across the vast expanse behind your backyard, when the rising cliffs remind you of the vast volcanic explosions that formed the land you walk on - those things give me the utmost peace. As a person who deals with anxiety I can get so wrapped up in my own mind that I start to think the problems I'm having or even the problem's human society has are all-encompassing, the be-all-end-all. When I look across the huge blue expanse that is the Columbia and think of the many thousands of fish surely swimming in the waters before me, the hundreds of thousands that visit each year, the millions and billions of creatures that have walked this land before me in the not-so-distant-past I remember that in the grand scheme of things I am just a small part of something enormous. I can make some small, perhaps even large, contributions but I cannot be the sole savior or destroyer of our planet. It's history will continue until everything we now know is space dust once again.
As a dust devil forms in a farmer's field and a tumbleweed rolls by in the breeze it's easy to imagine this barren landscape as space-like. But get to know the land and she will reveal to you many of her secrets, as she has to me.
A Note: The photos included in this post were all taken with my new phone and none of them have been edited, though I am pretty sure my phone does some sort of automatic saturation or balancing as you can likely tell. I took just as many, if not more, photos with my camera on this trip. A few of those I will be releasing when the time for my Limited Edition Fall Print Collection. If you haven't seen my Limited Edition Midsummer Collection be sure to check that out while they're still available. The rest of the photos from the trip I will likely be archiving in the hopes of creating a coffee table photography book (tentative title 'Eastern Oregon As I Love Her').