Be extremely cautious if you drive through SE Oregon... I almost ran out of gas. Dropped reception and a good 100 miles without a gas station on the route Google gave me. Made it to Burns on fumes. My brakes also had issues, no one in town had the correct rotors. I was told 2 days if I waited in town so I chanced it all the way to Winnemucka... Seattle area to Las Vegas.
I live in rural southern Oregon right on the outskirts of this area, and it's a big reason I live here. It's difficult to describe just how vast it is, and staggeringly beautiful. I've had days exploring and driving hundreds of miles without seeing another person. I love it.
@@ThunderTheBlackShadowKittywell then I feel sorry for you. I pity any individual who fails to see the beauty in solitude within nature, something the vast majority of Americans rarely get to experience. My life is rich, full, and peaceful because of it. And I still get to live in a mid-size town with community and big city amenities. Open your mind.
@@koncretekahunask8 Complete nonsense. I've been to these kinds of areas before. I was born in one. They are boring, lifeless, and the rednecks living in them are insufferable. I'd much rather live in a large city.
@@ThunderTheBlackShadowKitty to each their own. I'm from Oregon and live in Texas now for work. Texas cities are my personal hell - way crowded and driving is a warzone, plus you need to drive hours to see some real nature. Rural Oregon is a different kind of peace
@@ElleixGaming I always tell people to stay away from Texas until they build trains. I want to see the Katy freeway demolished. A 26 lane monstrosity that still clogs during rush hour. High speed rail would fix that overnight.
He is right about the low population. I drove from Bend, OR, through Lakeview, and then on to Winnemucca, NV. I was amazed by the emptiness of this region. I expected very little population, but there are basically no real towns, even very few houses. The land is barren, but also strikingly beautiful. Make sure you have a good amount of fuel and water, plus survival supplies, if you make this trip. No joke.
Winnemucca! I haven't heard that word since I was a kid living in Elko. The area's probably more populated now, but I can remember being driven 30 minutes away through desert just to play another tee ball team in Carlin.
I went out that way just to check out Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge. It's pretty awesome if you really want to go out to the wilderness. Virgin Valley is a must stop if you have the time.
Fun fact: Owyhee is a spelling variant of Hawai'i, used early in the European settlement of the islands. Several Hawai'ian natives somehow were members of an exploration and mapping party in this region in the 1800's and that's how the name got there. Imagine going from tropical islands surrounded by the Pacific to very, very dry inland PNW.
If I remember right, the Idahoans heard how Hawaii was pronounced by the Hawaiians, but hadn't seen the way it was written and that's why its spelled that
Not sure if there's any correlation, but as someone who grew up on the Big Island, much of Hawai`i's ranch land is almost identical to the areas portrayed in this video. Maybe they named it after Hawai`i because of the resemblance.
as a Dutchman I was totally not used to the population sparsity of the American countryside. driving over American roads between states made me feel inverse claustrophobia. the sense that you could be completely forgotten if you got lost there was something I was not mentally prepared for.
I love it though. It gives you a sense that there’s still places that are “wild” and off the grid. As opposed to urban/ populated areas where everything feels touched, like you can’t “escape” from it all and actually be in the middle of nowhere
I feel this. We Dutch people often don't realize just how insanely densely populated our country is, even the sparse parts. A country like France or Germany, which is still rather densely populated if you look at it globally, can feel like a vast place to us. I for one love my country for it, maybe because I have a severe case of FOMO. I need to be around people to stay sane.
I bet! I had the fortune to recently visit the Netherlands, and we took the bus through Haarlem and then down to Hillegom to see the flowers. Up on the train platform, I got the sense that you would meet someone every km or 2 no matter which direction you went . It felt cozy haha
WOW. You placed the dot at the start of this video damn near on top of my old house. I lived maybe 40 miles northeast of there, in Malhuer county. It's usually not worth your time to travel TO here, but traveling THROUGH here might be the most underrated road trip you could take in the lower 48. I would discourage most people from spending even a single night in Southeast Oregon. But going THROUGH it is a totally different story. There may be no other drive on earth that compares to Highway 20. Highway 20 is one of the most geographically diverse and breathtaking road trips you will ever, ever take. It is SPECTACULAR. It's about an eight hour drive from Boise to Sweet Home, OR, and the best time to go is between April and July. If eight hours is too much to drive in one day, spend a night in Bend (and check out the High Desert Museum while you're there!) There may be no other place on earth where you can drive from barren and featurless desert to cascading mountain rainforest in the span of a day. It will blow your mind. But unless you're on the hunt for a very specific type of obsidian, there is almost nothing to see in Southeast Oregon, besides the stars. Break down, get lost or injured, and no one's coming for hours. If you're unlucky in the winter, it's possible you won't even be able to call for help. If you wanted to disappear out here without a trace, never to be found, you could. There is NOTHING out there. I've spent most of my life living in the desert, and even for a desert, it's barren. The town of Brothers, I swear to god, is literally just a rest stop. No gas, no convience stores, just a parking lot with four public toilet stalls and no running water. Across the street, three or four abandoned buildings. There are no farms, no livestock, no industry, no businesses, no natural resources, no birds, no trees, no water, not even mountains, as far as the eye can see, for over a hundred and fifty miles of road. At most, during the warm months, there is grass. In winter, the landscape is so unremarkable and colorless that traveling through it can be almost physically painful. The seemingly endless stretch of nothingness is what makes the drive west on Highway 20 so totally, completely surreal. It gives you a raw appreciation for the tremendous meteorological power of a few dozen mountains. Do not EVER go TO Southeast Oregon, but if you can, go THROUGH it.
@nomadben idk, it's not in a bad way or because I'm depressed or anything like that, just ever since I was a little dude I've always wanted to go run off Into the wilderness.... idk if it's because of were I grew up in the rural south, boy scouts, army, or somthing else but there's always been this tug on my sould to go off into the wilderness and just kind of "disappear"
Woah I seriously assumed this had at least 10,000 views. As someone from Boise who loves exploring the pacific northwest, I thank you for this super interesting and well put together video.
I drove through here on a road trip between Portland and Vegas. Absolutely stunning. At one point I drove well over 100 miles without seeing a single other car. Or building. Or gas station. Crossing into Nevada is great. The Toiyabe mountains and Carver NV are pretty cool spots as well.
I've spent a lot of time in this region camping and exploring. The whole area is littered with agate, jasper, and petrified wood. One very interesting geologic highlight is the McDermitt caldera in the Trout Creek Mountains region. The caldera is the first eruptive center of the Yellowstone hotspot on the continent, around 11Ma. Now there's a trail of calderas that go from McDermitt all the way to modern day Yellowstone due to the continent moving slowly over the stationary hotspot. Nice job on the video. You've highlighted one of the truly great regions for explorers who demand the freedom of extreme desolation and seclusion. September is the best time to visit in order to avoid spring mud and summer heat
The McDermitt Caldera is also home to the largest lithium reserves in the United States. However the lithium is within a clay form which makes it extraction an innovative process and which is largely untested in the economic sense.
Yup, I've driven through this area a time or two and it is soooo empty and fascinating to travel through. One of those times I turned onto Christmas Valley Road off Highway 395 near sunset with less than half a tank of gas and nearly didn't make it to the end. It was so unsettling watching the sun, and my gas gauge, slowly dip down as I glanced out at my surroundings and realized how far out I was away from anything or anyone. I have NEVER been so happy to see a Chevron.
I bet you any money the algorithm will pick this up like a leaf on the wind. Amazing work! I instantly subscribed. As someone else said, this has the quality of a much larger channel. Thank you for making such an interesting video on a topic I would not have known about otherwise.
@@themcbobgorgeI know you probably won't see this, but malhuer is pronounced Mal, like maltreatment, huer, is like here, with a sort of h/hu sound as you transition into the h. Take care and God bless
I used to drive over the road (local now), I would take 395 from Victorville, CA and take other little highways to get to Oregon and Idaho. It was very and I mean very desolate on some of those highways, driving late at night into the early morning I wouldn’t see a single car or truck for hours.
Eyy, some of my earliest childhood memories involve being in our old minivan while being thoroughly lost on the outskirts of this region. My grandma lived northeast of sisters at the time (she's like a cool 90 year old nomad now, living in a trailer and bouncing around the west coast and nevada, moving with the seasons and staying at her friends' houses occasionally), so sometime in the mid 2000s (sometime between 05 and 07) we went to visit her for thanksgiving. My only memory of being actually at her old house is a very brief flash of dinner, and then my memory abruptly ends because my body had a very bad reaction to her water(?) and the rest of my stay would either be on the toilet or in transit between the toilet and the guest bedroom. And then the plans for our return trip were thoroughly thwarted. First, the mountain roads had been snowed over during our stay, and our pathetic should-have-been-retired-in-the-90s little blue minivan had no chance of safely heading back the way we came So my dad and my at the time teenaged brother talked my mom into trying to navigate a route we've literally never taken to find our way back west. The fact I started my story with saying we ended up in the southeast region should tell you how well that went. Neither my mom nor my dad had a good sense of direction on a good day back then, and they were both sleep deprived because I was running too and fro the bathroom all night. And so there we were. A minivan packed with two grumpy parents with like 6 years of their marriage left, a smug and annoying teenaged boy, two preteen twin girls who hate everyone else only slightly less than they hate eachother, and me, a small, very tired child, who was still suffering from diarrhea. This is, unfortunately, where my memories come back, because I remember our doomed voyage through the arid wastes of eastern oregon very vividly, because of how awful I felt asking to stop and go to the bathroom like once every hour. The mood was horrible, the sights were beautiful, I would be instilled an eternal love for american deserts and arid climates, and we would wind up heading through parts of both Nevada _and_ California, to make our way back back to the Willamette valley. Time spent at grandma's house for thanksgiving: Less than 24 hours. Time spent trying to get back home without a map or much of any clue where we were half the time and countless missed turns: A little over two days We never went to thanksgiving in eastern oregon ever again :)
I'm very happy you made a video on this area, I went through it all the time growing up on the west coast. I have nobody to talk to about it because nobody else can relate.
I know that feeling, there’s amazing remote places out there in the west that can’t be related to anything most people have seen, I live in the Portland area and even people here don’t know anything about the crazy places like Death Valley and the Mojave desert and Southern Utah red rock country they practically think I’m talking about a different country and it’s hard to relate to people how seriously cool these places are in the remote west, I try to take good quality pictures so I can pass the magic on to friends that way
As a European, I never knew Oregon had dry parts and even a desert. I always think of the state as rainy and covered in dense forest, but that seems to only be the western part.
Truth. If all you have to go on is the travel brochures, it's not terribly obvious that Oregon has some VERY isolated areas. Same with California - people who've never been there think the entire state is beaches & Disneyland. They tend to miss things like Mt. Whitney, the dormant volcanoes in the Mojave Desert/Owens Valley, Death Valley, and the list goes on & on.
Same with Washington. The Cascade mountain range marks a massive divide in both culture and ecosystem. And driving through, the change happens so quickly it feels almost like you went through some sort of portal...
McDermitt Crater on the Nevada Oregon border is the old Yellowstone hot spot and has huge lithium deposits. Jarbidge Nevada where Oregon, Idaho and Nevada meet is the farthest town from any other town in the lower 48. SE Oregon has some of the largest ranches in the US like Roaring Springs, Whitehorse and XL. Pretty sure Steens is the largest fault block. Alvord desert a few thousand years ago was a 100 mile long lake. Great rodeo in Jordan Valley the Big Loop. Near Crack in the Ground is Whole in the Ground, a huge Crater. Old Perpetual geyser near Lakeview. Huge Antelope herds, the famous Kiger wild horses, SE Oregon is awesome.
I cycled through this land on my way to the Oregon coast from the east coast. I had one flat tire (in Wyoming) over the course of 3500 miles, until I got west of Vale, Oregon… It was almost impassible due to flats from goatheads. I improvised a solution to continue. I remember it was late fall and quite cold every day, water was sourced from snow, food resupply occurred every 4-5 days, but damn was it a gorgeous place to set up camp every night in the wilderness.
I've spent months out here doing geophysical exploration near Adel, Denio, and Steens Mountain. I think it's worth mentioning that to the south of your drawn circle, the Massacre Rim Dark Sky Sanctuary has some of the best astrophotography in the country. The whole northern border of Nevada is pretty remote, and Jarbidge usually gets all the coverage when it comes to "isolated towns" in the lower 48 states. Highway 140 between Adel and the highway 95 junction north of Winnemucca has my vote for the "loneliest road in America" - I've driven the whole thing (~180 miles) and seen only 5 cars.
i love the editing style and brief overview of the local geography of the area! these seemingly little history topics are my favorite. also ive been looking to go camping and hiking somewhere super remote, so...
10:22 There is two active volcanoes in this part of Oregon. Newberry Volcano right next to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge & the Jordans Craters near the Idaho Border.
16:23 i think most mountains in Nevada’s part of the basin and range were originally fault blocks like steens but have been uplifted/tilted/eroded more since then. But they are considered ranges not single mountains so they probably don’t count
This is such an interesting video. I live in the PNW and have spent a few years living on the eastern side of Washington. There was Spokane and Wenatchee and a few other cities but it was still so barren. It's difficult for me to imagine a similar region with similar culture that has even less people.
Aweseome video and great insights into the area, I especially like the rare books that you noted. However, using the map tool I did notice that the Ruby Mountains area south of I-80 in central Nevada is even less populated, as long as you exclude Ely to the East and Carson City/Reno area to the West.
There's definitely some pockets of Central Nevada that are less densely populated, but I haven't been able to match the size of the radius of the southeast Oregon circle anywhere in Nevada
Cool! I hiked about 40 miles of the Owyhee canyon a few years ago. Hardest hike I’ve ever done. Brutal bushwhacking, swimming with packs, and super dry if you leave the river for the canyon rim. Beautiful though.
This reminds me of the outback of Australia so much, even the spot where you're recording feels like the edge of the desert and I've rafted in places that look just like those rivers
My family drove from SLC to Eugene through SE OR, and I vividly remember turning off a north south highway to head west. Immediately after taking the turnoff, we encountered a ‘road construction’ sign. 163 miles ahead. It was a cool trip.
I’ve lived in Eugene OR for roughly 9 years now. Came here from Tucson AZ and Las Cruces before that. I love it here. It’s green, beautiful and alive in Oregon. I’ve slowly been exploring the full breath of the state. And the south east corner of the state is the last place for me to get to. I’m so excited for whenever I finally do!
the grand tetons, the wasatch range, and mount whitney (tallest mountain in the contiguous united states) are a part/peak of a fault block range so there are some bigger ones in the lower 48 but steen's does look like it's the tallest in oregon. Other notable examples are the black forest and harz mountins in germany, the vosges in france, the great rift valley in africa, and the satpura and vindhya in india
Fantastic video man. I feel like we'd be friends! I'm from Portland but live in SC now, and I remember my dad saying how easy it was to find dinosaur bones in East Oregon deserts. I wanted to visit this area so bad!
The town of Fields is a good place to stay if you want to visit the Alvord. On my bucket list: To lie on my back on that playa on a clear, moonless night and see the Milky Way in amazing clarity.
I've spent enjoyable times hiking and camping in the Owyhee mountains and Steens Mountain. I've floated the Owyhee. The Hawaiian trappers this area was named after detached from David Mackenzie's Northwest Company trapping expedition in 1819 to trap the area, and disappeared. Great place to disappear, and get a little piece and quiet. Makes a lot of people nervous these days, 'cause you can't play with your phone.
When I drove through this region we drove through Jordan Valley. Talk about a small town in the middle of nowhere. The closest town to that place was what felt like 100s of miles away.
My dad used to work on a ranch in Southeast Oregon back in the 90's. He took me out there a year ago and it is the most baron/desolate landscape i've ever seen. Very beautiful but very quiet and lonely, and when it get's dark... it gets dark.
For the past 5-6 years I drive from Sacramento to Moses lake in Washington . I was shocked how empty it was after bend , (went to the last blockbuster in the world). Now I know where to go when the zombie apocalypse happens. Thanks for the info.
Really well done man - thank you. I often find myself wandering on google maps satellite view around places like this (or even in my car as time and money permit), and this is like the ultra researched version lmao
I used to live in Medford. Often on the weekends I'd drive out to Lake and Harney Counties to soak in the beauty and feel truly alone. It definitely puts into perspective how small you really are as a person. As others have noted....pack supplies and be mindful if you are driving in this area because there truly is not a whole lot there. Additionally, if driving on Highway 140, use extreme caution on Doherty Slide. That's a sketchy part of roadway.
on my way home from roseburg, me and my partner went through southeastern Oregon. there was a stretch of road from freemont national forest to Riley, where we didn't see any signs of society for 80 miles. said society being an inn and gas station which was closed. after resting briefly, I had to drive another 26 miles to reach a real town, burns. over a hundred miles of mostly empty desert. I'm from the middle of nowhere, but that was way more remote than I was used to. I regret not having gone through during daytime, but it was still really cool.
Unfortunately it's just a footnote in history, maybe a ranch of some kind in the past or distinctly named for some event that happened there. Dickshooter is somewhere I never got to visit when I was living in Boise because it's truly in the middle of nowhere and it's not a real town
I’ve driven thru this area a few times while driving from Bend, OR to Salt Lake City or Wendover in Utah. I grew up in Portland and I’ve spent a lot of time in Central Oregon, and it’s kind of crazy how so few Oregonians will likely ever see this part of the state because of how vast and remote it is.
I drove through the Steens from Western Oregon on a trip, took about 9 hours and we stuck around for about two days exploring some salt flats and springs. The mountains are something else and being from Oregon, I'd still never experienced such a noticeable lack of people for so many miles. It just so happened that Oregon was hit with one of the worst winter storms in its history and the drive back took us two days through some real deep snow. Absolutely unforgettable experience.
Thank you for the Well done video and presentation. and thank you so much for not having annoying music or sound effects in the background😅 just subscribed
Good video. I spend time down there with some friends every year or so. Protip: get and practice with a teleprompter app. The location you chose to read the essay was great. It'd be better if you where looking at the camera though. Like the channel. Keep it up!
In the appendix, while talking about the freemaptools population finder, you use a circle of radius 80.85, which isn't the 90 miles radius you said in the beginning. Not trying to be pedantic or anything, but I thought I'd point it out. With an actual radius of 90 miles, I could still get the population of that general area to 2,050. So it's not a big difference. But I got some other places even better, using a 90 miles radius circle: - 1,871people: centered ~4 miles South of Bracket Peak in Nevada. Includes a sliver of California. It took some very minute adjustments of the circle, however. - 1,836 people: centered ~8 miles west from Worthington Peak, Nevada. Contains a small sliver of Utah. At this point, the website broke, and told me every area had zero population. Bombs got to them, it seems. In any case, I'm still curious of other areas. Mostly around Michigan's upper peninsula, if you allow large parts of the Great Lakes to be included in the circle. They are, after all, undoubtedly part of the United States. Another thought it allowing slivers of Canada, Mexico, or international waters, if the center of the circle is still on US land. That might be interesting, too.
Interesting- I'm surprised any circle including tonopah is showing under 2k population because Wikipedia shows the city as having 2100 people. The Worthington peak circle seems interesting. I'll do some more research to see if that might beat out southern Oregon.
I used to live in Lakeview. It’s a pretty bad idea to visit SE Oregon during the summer, as there’s always tons of wildfires that ravage the plains and mountains. The summer before I left, the sky was brown and thick with smoke and ash rained from the sky in fist-sized chunks. Just make sure you know what you’re getting into before you go there.
this has the quality of a huge channel; love that you are interested in the same niche areas that are just fun to investigate on google maps. awesome channel man, subscribed
I'm a geology student. My mineralogy professor has a tradition of giving away part of his rock collection to the student who gets the most answers right on the mineral identification exam every semester. And this is how I wound up with a piece of beautiful high-grade gold ore from the Owhyhee Mountains. It's worth over a hundred dollars, but I'm never going to sell it! I still have absolutely no clue how I aced that exam. I was absolutely struggling in that class. I must've really wanted the gold, I guess!
I live in Boise and I have to go through this area a lot when traveling to Reno or California and it truly is like a hidden area of wonder, especially the area around Steens Mountain.
I reside in OR. And yes the south eastern part is devoid of human life. But this is also where the largest amount of cattle reside in the state. Many people won’t think of Oregon as a pork or beef producing state, but it is
Heh. Back in the day (early/mid 70s) my maternal grandfather had 50 acres in Central Point where he'd run heifers & calves. Never thought of Oregon as anything BUT cattle country until fairly recently. Grandpa's place is now apartments & condos. 😬😭
Thanks for this neat video. If there are lithium deposits then it might be a great location for a solar power station with battery construction right nearby. The only difficulty would be getting the power out of the area but that isn't insurmountable.
My folks and I passed through there when I was ten or so, back around 1958. I still have a five-pound block of obsidian glass I collected from the area. One of the few items that I still have with me after all that time...
Great video. The times that I've driven through this region, I've always had the impression that it must be some of the most remote terrain in the country. Had a girlfriend years ago who took me camping out at Three Forks Hot Springs. Unbelievably beautiful place, and you'd never know it because until you get to the canyon, you're surrounded by endless sagebrush. The desert holds secrets!
excellent video. I wish you talked more about the extremities of the circle in other states. Sheldon Antelope Refuge is an absolutely beautiful area just across the border that i visited and had a good time in.
I grew up in Jordan Valley, and it’s crazy how remote the surrounding area is. The closest thing to a traffic jam is when the local ranchers are herding cattle across highway 95.
The area of northern Nevada, southern Oregon, and Idaho that are in the owyhee desert and canyonlands of the make river plateau is super empty. The remote area you choose could have been expanded. Visited theses areas many times. Some of the most beautiful mountains with the most desolate and empty plains, and the huge beautiful canyons that would definitely be national parks if it wasn’t so remote.
As a 4th generation Oregonian, this is my heaven. I love this part of Oregon and visit as often as I can. I was born and raised in north central Oregon in the Columbia River Gorge, which has it's own beauty. But there's something about the high desert that calls me.....
Thurmond, WV is also a very deserted place with only 3 trains per week. It has a population of 3 citizens, and it is 5 hours away from Washington, D.C.
I have been dreaming to visit this part of Oregon for years. It’s even hard to find images on the internet of these places. But I’m so scared of it’s emptiness and I can’t stop thinking about scenarios where my car will break down and I would have to walk without a water for miles and eventually die from hypothermia. I wonder how many people have died over there is there any statistics on that somewhere?
Always saw this area when I was bored at work and looking at Google Maps. I work in real estate and we did a few deals in Burns and John Day, so it was cool learning more about the area!
I know I just left a comment here, but I want to add that Malhuer gets its name from a very early hunting dispute between Native Americans and French trappers. Mal = bad, huer = time. You can probably guess how well things ended for the french trappers. Both Silver City and Roaring Springs have theme parks named after them. Roaring Springs water park in Boise, and Silverwood theme park in Athol. Both are great! Additionally, Malhuer Wildlife Refuge was recently the site of an armed standoff between the Bundy ranching family and federal law enforcement. The Bundys wanted to graze their cattle on land in the area that, iirc, is technically still owned by native Americans. One of those ranchers, the absolute nutcase Amon Bundy, who had to be zip-tied to an office chair during his arrest at the Idaho State Captiol, RAN FOR GOVERNOR of Idaho in 2022. He got 17% of the vote.
The only part of the US I’ve been to where you can drive for fucking hours without seeing any sign of civilization other than the road you’re on is SE Oregon.
I’ve driven through this part of Oregon many times. The stretch from the Nevada border to Burns or Jordan Valley Oregon (if you are going to Boise) it’s probably about a 150 mile stretch. There are areas with no cell service. But it’s a lot better than it was 10 years ago.
Did you look into the possible fatalities if the bomb were dropped at the Salmon Challis national forest area? Its 100 miles wide of wilderness and probably like 250 miles from North to south. Probably a lot of campers and park visitors though.
Yeah I looked in that area, around the frank. Enough little settlements here and there to make it not viable. If it was a smaller circle I think that or central Nevada would be the winner
Broke down in Jordan Valley on way to Boise from Sacramento. Extremely lucky, I did not realize I had no reception pretty much after leaving Nevada at McDermott...a nasty speed trap
I’ve been out their dozens of time and something you forgot to mention were the stars at night. It’s one of the clearest places to view the stars in the world, you can see the Milky Way lighting the sky brighter than a full moon
Intersted in dropped reception. Where in the US might you need a reception boost like a Garmin or even something like a GPS Map 66I. How do you keep universal weather reports for the area you're in?
My bad! I found that photo tagged as CC0 public domain- someone may have re-uploaded it somewhere without your permission. I will add a note in the video description.
Be extremely cautious if you drive through SE Oregon... I almost ran out of gas. Dropped reception and a good 100 miles without a gas station on the route Google gave me. Made it to Burns on fumes. My brakes also had issues, no one in town had the correct rotors. I was told 2 days if I waited in town so I chanced it all the way to Winnemucka... Seattle area to Las Vegas.
Winnemucca
@@RootigaI’m gonna start spelling it with Winnumucka from now on
I live in the West too and I always take a can of gas with me for that exact reason. It's not so uncommon to go a long way with no gas stations
Half a tank is the new empty was my mantra as I traveled throughout the west, especially eastern oregon.
This is why you shouldn't settle in rural areas. They are a death trap.
I live in rural southern Oregon right on the outskirts of this area, and it's a big reason I live here. It's difficult to describe just how vast it is, and staggeringly beautiful. I've had days exploring and driving hundreds of miles without seeing another person. I love it.
Sounds like hell on earth. I pity you.
@@ThunderTheBlackShadowKittywell then I feel sorry for you. I pity any individual who fails to see the beauty in solitude within nature, something the vast majority of Americans rarely get to experience. My life is rich, full, and peaceful because of it. And I still get to live in a mid-size town with community and big city amenities. Open your mind.
@@koncretekahunask8 Complete nonsense. I've been to these kinds of areas before. I was born in one. They are boring, lifeless, and the rednecks living in them are insufferable. I'd much rather live in a large city.
@@ThunderTheBlackShadowKitty to each their own. I'm from Oregon and live in Texas now for work. Texas cities are my personal hell - way crowded and driving is a warzone, plus you need to drive hours to see some real nature. Rural Oregon is a different kind of peace
@@ElleixGaming I always tell people to stay away from Texas until they build trains. I want to see the Katy freeway demolished. A 26 lane monstrosity that still clogs during rush hour. High speed rail would fix that overnight.
My family is from Jordan Valley. Your bomb killed us
Sorry
They killed my family here in Fields too.
It is a sacrifice we must make
Thanks for being the sacrificial lamb(s)
I worked in JV. I love the area. It's beautiful.
He is right about the low population. I drove from Bend, OR, through Lakeview, and then on to Winnemucca, NV. I was amazed by the emptiness of this region. I expected very little population, but there are basically no real towns, even very few houses. The land is barren, but also strikingly beautiful. Make sure you have a good amount of fuel and water, plus survival supplies, if you make this trip. No joke.
Low populations are a good thing! My area has so many outsiders moving here and it's annoying. Traffic has become an unbearable nightmare most days...
@@Woketard There definitely is a good low amount of influx that would boost the towns assets without making traffic suck.
That is why ranches are on the road maps for that region and not towns cause there are none
Winnemucca! I haven't heard that word since I was a kid living in Elko.
The area's probably more populated now, but I can remember being driven 30 minutes away through desert just to play another tee ball team in Carlin.
I went out that way just to check out Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge. It's pretty awesome if you really want to go out to the wilderness. Virgin Valley is a must stop if you have the time.
Fun fact: Owyhee is a spelling variant of Hawai'i, used early in the European settlement of the islands. Several Hawai'ian natives somehow were members of an exploration and mapping party in this region in the 1800's and that's how the name got there. Imagine going from tropical islands surrounded by the Pacific to very, very dry inland PNW.
They must’ve Mormon converts, they proselytized a lot in Hawaii, and were the first non-native settlers in this area.
If I remember right, the Idahoans heard how Hawaii was pronounced by the Hawaiians, but hadn't seen the way it was written and that's why its spelled that
Not sure if there's any correlation, but as someone who grew up on the Big Island, much of Hawai`i's ranch land is almost identical to the areas portrayed in this video. Maybe they named it after Hawai`i because of the resemblance.
@@eliwirth1938I was going to say this. I recently went on a trip to Hawaii and a lot of the big island is barren from lava flows and dry
Damn I thought they just stole that name, thank you for the fun fact
as a Dutchman I was totally not used to the population sparsity of the American countryside. driving over American roads between states made me feel inverse claustrophobia. the sense that you could be completely forgotten if you got lost there was something I was not mentally prepared for.
Im American and know exactly how you felt. Im from the country and then emptiness can be suffocating. But u get used to it.
It’s hard to put that feeling into words. It’s both terrifying and freeing.
I love it though. It gives you a sense that there’s still places that are “wild” and off the grid. As opposed to urban/ populated areas where everything feels touched, like you can’t “escape” from it all and actually be in the middle of nowhere
I feel this. We Dutch people often don't realize just how insanely densely populated our country is, even the sparse parts. A country like France or Germany, which is still rather densely populated if you look at it globally, can feel like a vast place to us.
I for one love my country for it, maybe because I have a severe case of FOMO. I need to be around people to stay sane.
I bet! I had the fortune to recently visit the Netherlands, and we took the bus through Haarlem and then down to Hillegom to see the flowers. Up on the train platform, I got the sense that you would meet someone every km or 2 no matter which direction you went . It felt cozy haha
WOW. You placed the dot at the start of this video damn near on top of my old house. I lived maybe 40 miles northeast of there, in Malhuer county. It's usually not worth your time to travel TO here, but traveling THROUGH here might be the most underrated road trip you could take in the lower 48.
I would discourage most people from spending even a single night in Southeast Oregon. But going THROUGH it is a totally different story. There may be no other drive on earth that compares to Highway 20.
Highway 20 is one of the most geographically diverse and breathtaking road trips you will ever, ever take. It is SPECTACULAR. It's about an eight hour drive from Boise to Sweet Home, OR, and the best time to go is between April and July. If eight hours is too much to drive in one day, spend a night in Bend (and check out the High Desert Museum while you're there!) There may be no other place on earth where you can drive from barren and featurless desert to cascading mountain rainforest in the span of a day. It will blow your mind.
But unless you're on the hunt for a very specific type of obsidian, there is almost nothing to see in Southeast Oregon, besides the stars. Break down, get lost or injured, and no one's coming for hours. If you're unlucky in the winter, it's possible you won't even be able to call for help. If you wanted to disappear out here without a trace, never to be found, you could. There is NOTHING out there. I've spent most of my life living in the desert, and even for a desert, it's barren. The town of Brothers, I swear to god, is literally just a rest stop. No gas, no convience stores, just a parking lot with four public toilet stalls and no running water. Across the street, three or four abandoned buildings. There are no farms, no livestock, no industry, no businesses, no natural resources, no birds, no trees, no water, not even mountains, as far as the eye can see, for over a hundred and fifty miles of road. At most, during the warm months, there is grass. In winter, the landscape is so unremarkable and colorless that traveling through it can be almost physically painful. The seemingly endless stretch of nothingness is what makes the drive west on Highway 20 so totally, completely surreal. It gives you a raw appreciation for the tremendous meteorological power of a few dozen mountains.
Do not EVER go TO Southeast Oregon, but if you can, go THROUGH it.
Sounds like my type of place then, i want nothing more from life than to dissapear and be forgotten
@@albinoyak2755Why do you feel that way?
@nomadben idk, it's not in a bad way or because I'm depressed or anything like that, just ever since I was a little dude I've always wanted to go run off Into the wilderness.... idk if it's because of were I grew up in the rural south, boy scouts, army, or somthing else but there's always been this tug on my sould to go off into the wilderness and just kind of "disappear"
@@albinoyak2755 Hmm, have you seen the movie Into The Wild or read the book? Sounds a lot like what he did.
@nomadben actually yes I have but it's been well over a decade, mabey almost 2 since I've last read it, such a good read!
Woah I seriously assumed this had at least 10,000 views. As someone from Boise who loves exploring the pacific northwest, I thank you for this super interesting and well put together video.
This video will definitely gain more views.
It's just three days old and this is a great video.
It has 10k now!
@@jvwilliams That was fast!
Retweet some quality content
110k now
I drove through here on a road trip between Portland and Vegas. Absolutely stunning. At one point I drove well over 100 miles without seeing a single other car. Or building. Or gas station.
Crossing into Nevada is great. The Toiyabe mountains and Carver NV are pretty cool spots as well.
I've spent a lot of time in this region camping and exploring. The whole area is littered with agate, jasper, and petrified wood. One very interesting geologic highlight is the McDermitt caldera in the Trout Creek Mountains region. The caldera is the first eruptive center of the Yellowstone hotspot on the continent, around 11Ma. Now there's a trail of calderas that go from McDermitt all the way to modern day Yellowstone due to the continent moving slowly over the stationary hotspot.
Nice job on the video. You've highlighted one of the truly great regions for explorers who demand the freedom of extreme desolation and seclusion. September is the best time to visit in order to avoid spring mud and summer heat
I live in washington and september is always as hot as August for at least half of it
@@agnoopinni Yakima avg temp drops from 83 to 71 over the month of September, I stand by my experience and the statement I made based on such
@@agnoopinniyes but September is still the best overall month for dryness but better temperatures
The McDermitt Caldera is also home to the largest lithium reserves in the United States. However the lithium is within a clay form which makes it extraction an innovative process and which is largely untested in the economic sense.
@@rayj5311 So what you're saying is we need to surround the Caldera with CIWS systems trained to open fire on any vehicle or anything humanoid
Yup, I've driven through this area a time or two and it is soooo empty and fascinating to travel through.
One of those times I turned onto Christmas Valley Road off Highway 395 near sunset with less than half a tank of gas and nearly didn't make it to the end. It was so unsettling watching the sun, and my gas gauge, slowly dip down as I glanced out at my surroundings and realized how far out I was away from anything or anyone.
I have NEVER been so happy to see a Chevron.
I bet you any money the algorithm will pick this up like a leaf on the wind. Amazing work! I instantly subscribed. As someone else said, this has the quality of a much larger channel. Thank you for making such an interesting video on a topic I would not have known about otherwise.
Wow, thanks!
@@themcbobgorgeGreetings from the algorithm!
@@themcbobgorgeI know you probably won't see this, but malhuer is pronounced Mal, like maltreatment, huer, is like here, with a sort of h/hu sound as you transition into the h. Take care and God bless
I used to drive over the road (local now), I would take 395 from Victorville, CA and take other little highways to get to Oregon and Idaho. It was very and I mean very desolate on some of those highways, driving late at night into the early morning I wouldn’t see a single car or truck for hours.
Eyy, some of my earliest childhood memories involve being in our old minivan while being thoroughly lost on the outskirts of this region.
My grandma lived northeast of sisters at the time (she's like a cool 90 year old nomad now, living in a trailer and bouncing around the west coast and nevada, moving with the seasons and staying at her friends' houses occasionally), so sometime in the mid 2000s (sometime between 05 and 07) we went to visit her for thanksgiving. My only memory of being actually at her old house is a very brief flash of dinner, and then my memory abruptly ends because my body had a very bad reaction to her water(?) and the rest of my stay would either be on the toilet or in transit between the toilet and the guest bedroom.
And then the plans for our return trip were thoroughly thwarted. First, the mountain roads had been snowed over during our stay, and our pathetic should-have-been-retired-in-the-90s little blue minivan had no chance of safely heading back the way we came
So my dad and my at the time teenaged brother talked my mom into trying to navigate a route we've literally never taken to find our way back west. The fact I started my story with saying we ended up in the southeast region should tell you how well that went. Neither my mom nor my dad had a good sense of direction on a good day back then, and they were both sleep deprived because I was running too and fro the bathroom all night.
And so there we were. A minivan packed with two grumpy parents with like 6 years of their marriage left, a smug and annoying teenaged boy, two preteen twin girls who hate everyone else only slightly less than they hate eachother, and me, a small, very tired child, who was still suffering from diarrhea.
This is, unfortunately, where my memories come back, because I remember our doomed voyage through the arid wastes of eastern oregon very vividly, because of how awful I felt asking to stop and go to the bathroom like once every hour.
The mood was horrible, the sights were beautiful, I would be instilled an eternal love for american deserts and arid climates, and we would wind up heading through parts of both Nevada _and_ California, to make our way back back to the Willamette valley. Time spent at grandma's house for thanksgiving: Less than 24 hours. Time spent trying to get back home without a map or much of any clue where we were half the time and countless missed turns: A little over two days
We never went to thanksgiving in eastern oregon ever again :)
I'm very happy you made a video on this area, I went through it all the time growing up on the west coast. I have nobody to talk to about it because nobody else can relate.
I know that feeling, there’s amazing remote places out there in the west that can’t be related to anything most people have seen, I live in the Portland area and even people here don’t know anything about the crazy places like Death Valley and the Mojave desert and Southern Utah red rock country they practically think I’m talking about a different country and it’s hard to relate to people how seriously cool these places are in the remote west, I try to take good quality pictures so I can pass the magic on to friends that way
As a European, I never knew Oregon had dry parts and even a desert. I always think of the state as rainy and covered in dense forest, but that seems to only be the western part.
It's a high desert. Alot of sage and scrub brush in that part of the state.
Truth. If all you have to go on is the travel brochures, it's not terribly obvious that Oregon has some VERY isolated areas. Same with California - people who've never been there think the entire state is beaches & Disneyland. They tend to miss things like Mt. Whitney, the dormant volcanoes in the Mojave Desert/Owens Valley, Death Valley, and the list goes on & on.
As an American I had no idea
Same with Washington. The Cascade mountain range marks a massive divide in both culture and ecosystem. And driving through, the change happens so quickly it feels almost like you went through some sort of portal...
Ever look at satellite view on google maps? Brown areas are usually dry
McDermitt Crater on the Nevada Oregon border is the old Yellowstone hot spot and has huge lithium deposits. Jarbidge Nevada where Oregon, Idaho and Nevada meet is the farthest town from any other town in the lower 48. SE Oregon has some of the largest ranches in the US like Roaring Springs, Whitehorse and XL. Pretty sure Steens is the largest fault block. Alvord desert a few thousand years ago was a 100 mile long lake. Great rodeo in Jordan Valley the Big Loop. Near Crack in the Ground is Whole in the Ground, a huge Crater. Old Perpetual geyser near Lakeview. Huge Antelope herds, the famous Kiger wild horses, SE Oregon is awesome.
I cycled through this land on my way to the Oregon coast from the east coast. I had one flat tire (in Wyoming) over the course of 3500 miles, until I got west of Vale, Oregon…
It was almost impassible due to flats from goatheads. I improvised a solution to continue.
I remember it was late fall and quite cold every day, water was sourced from snow, food resupply occurred every 4-5 days, but damn was it a gorgeous place to set up camp every night in the wilderness.
I would definitely read a book or your experiences
@@voxifera2300thanks I really appreciate that. I’ve been teaching myself video editing to make a series of videos on it but it is difficult in scale.
Mom and Pop gas stations tend to close on Sundays. These are essential in central Montana between Billings and Miles City.
Montana, or West side of north/south dakota. It's amazing the amount of places in the northwest that has NOTHING there but a single Cow every 20 miles
I've spent months out here doing geophysical exploration near Adel, Denio, and Steens Mountain. I think it's worth mentioning that to the south of your drawn circle, the Massacre Rim Dark Sky Sanctuary has some of the best astrophotography in the country. The whole northern border of Nevada is pretty remote, and Jarbidge usually gets all the coverage when it comes to "isolated towns" in the lower 48 states. Highway 140 between Adel and the highway 95 junction north of Winnemucca has my vote for the "loneliest road in America" - I've driven the whole thing (~180 miles) and seen only 5 cars.
i love the editing style and brief overview of the local geography of the area! these seemingly little history topics are my favorite. also ive been looking to go camping and hiking somewhere super remote, so...
10:22 There is two active volcanoes in this part of Oregon. Newberry Volcano right next to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge & the Jordans Craters near the Idaho Border.
16:23 i think most mountains in Nevada’s part of the basin and range were originally fault blocks like steens but have been uplifted/tilted/eroded more since then. But they are considered ranges not single mountains so they probably don’t count
This is such an interesting video. I live in the PNW and have spent a few years living on the eastern side of Washington. There was Spokane and Wenatchee and a few other cities but it was still so barren. It's difficult for me to imagine a similar region with similar culture that has even less people.
Aweseome video and great insights into the area, I especially like the rare books that you noted. However, using the map tool I did notice that the Ruby Mountains area south of I-80 in central Nevada is even less populated, as long as you exclude Ely to the East and Carson City/Reno area to the West.
There's definitely some pockets of Central Nevada that are less densely populated, but I haven't been able to match the size of the radius of the southeast Oregon circle anywhere in Nevada
Cool! I hiked about 40 miles of the Owyhee canyon a few years ago. Hardest hike I’ve ever done. Brutal bushwhacking, swimming with packs, and super dry if you leave the river for the canyon rim. Beautiful though.
This reminds me of the outback of Australia so much, even the spot where you're recording feels like the edge of the desert and I've rafted in places that look just like those rivers
My family drove from SLC to Eugene through SE OR, and I vividly remember turning off a north south highway to head west. Immediately after taking the turnoff, we encountered a ‘road construction’ sign. 163 miles ahead. It was a cool trip.
I’ve lived in Eugene OR for roughly 9 years now. Came here from Tucson AZ and Las Cruces before that. I love it here. It’s green, beautiful and alive in Oregon. I’ve slowly been exploring the full breath of the state. And the south east corner of the state is the last place for me to get to. I’m so excited for whenever I finally do!
the grand tetons, the wasatch range, and mount whitney (tallest mountain in the contiguous united states) are a part/peak of a fault block range so there are some bigger ones in the lower 48 but steen's does look like it's the tallest in oregon. Other notable examples are the black forest and harz mountins in germany, the vosges in france, the great rift valley in africa, and the satpura and vindhya in india
Random fact: The first episode of 'Bonanza', the 1960s TV show, was called 'The Paiute War' (sorry if mispelled).
i remember an episode when hoss blindfolded hop-sing with dental floss...
@@z-z-z-z Hoss you can't fool hop sing!
Paiute go all the way down the west desert areas though SE Oregon is only a tiny bit of their areas
You have a gift for travel writing. I’m so glad I came across your channel! I can’t imagine how good it’ll get once you get popular!
Fantastic video man. I feel like we'd be friends!
I'm from Portland but live in SC now, and I remember my dad saying how easy it was to find dinosaur bones in East Oregon deserts. I wanted to visit this area so bad!
I spent a few weeks doing forest service work on Steens Mountain during Covid. It was crazy isolated
The town of Fields is a good place to stay if you want to visit the Alvord. On my bucket list: To lie on my back on that playa on a clear, moonless night and see the Milky Way in amazing clarity.
I've spent enjoyable times hiking and camping in the Owyhee mountains and Steens Mountain. I've floated the Owyhee. The Hawaiian trappers this area was named after detached from David Mackenzie's Northwest Company trapping expedition in 1819 to trap the area, and disappeared.
Great place to disappear, and get a little piece and quiet. Makes a lot of people nervous these days, 'cause you can't play with your phone.
When I drove through this region we drove through Jordan Valley. Talk about a small town in the middle of nowhere. The closest town to that place was what felt like 100s of miles away.
My dad used to work on a ranch in Southeast Oregon back in the 90's. He took me out there a year ago and it is the most baron/desolate landscape i've ever seen. Very beautiful but very quiet and lonely, and when it get's dark... it gets dark.
For the past 5-6 years I drive from Sacramento to Moses lake in Washington . I was shocked how empty it was after bend , (went to the last blockbuster in the world). Now I know where to go when the zombie apocalypse happens. Thanks for the info.
Really well done man - thank you. I often find myself wandering on google maps satellite view around places like this (or even in my car as time and money permit), and this is like the ultra researched version lmao
I used to live in Medford. Often on the weekends I'd drive out to Lake and Harney Counties to soak in the beauty and feel truly alone. It definitely puts into perspective how small you really are as a person.
As others have noted....pack supplies and be mindful if you are driving in this area because there truly is not a whole lot there. Additionally, if driving on Highway 140, use extreme caution on Doherty Slide. That's a sketchy part of roadway.
Well done on the way you put your video together. I live near Baker City, Oregon where I was born. Oregon has it all.
Glad you enjoyed it!
on my way home from roseburg, me and my partner went through southeastern Oregon. there was a stretch of road from freemont national forest to Riley, where we didn't see any signs of society for 80 miles. said society being an inn and gas station which was closed. after resting briefly, I had to drive another 26 miles to reach a real town, burns. over a hundred miles of mostly empty desert. I'm from the middle of nowhere, but that was way more remote than I was used to. I regret not having gone through during daytime, but it was still really cool.
2:23 i need more info on Dickshooter Idaho here
Unfortunately it's just a footnote in history, maybe a ranch of some kind in the past or distinctly named for some event that happened there. Dickshooter is somewhere I never got to visit when I was living in Boise because it's truly in the middle of nowhere and it's not a real town
I used to live and work on the ranch in the background of the photo at 14:10. Still the most remote place I've lived since.
I’ve driven thru this area a few times while driving from Bend, OR to Salt Lake City or Wendover in Utah. I grew up in Portland and I’ve spent a lot of time in Central Oregon, and it’s kind of crazy how so few Oregonians will likely ever see this part of the state because of how vast and remote it is.
I drove through the Steens from Western Oregon on a trip, took about 9 hours and we stuck around for about two days exploring some salt flats and springs. The mountains are something else and being from Oregon, I'd still never experienced such a noticeable lack of people for so many miles.
It just so happened that Oregon was hit with one of the worst winter storms in its history and the drive back took us two days through some real deep snow. Absolutely unforgettable experience.
Thank you for the Well done video and presentation. and thank you so much for not having annoying music or sound effects in the background😅 just subscribed
I think I still have to choose about 20 miles north of the half way point in between Red dog Mine and Anaktuvuk Pass in Alaska.
Loved driving out to those areas with my dad
Good video. I spend time down there with some friends every year or so.
Protip: get and practice with a teleprompter app. The location you chose to read the essay was great. It'd be better if you where looking at the camera though. Like the channel. Keep it up!
In the appendix, while talking about the freemaptools population finder, you use a circle of radius 80.85, which isn't the 90 miles radius you said in the beginning. Not trying to be pedantic or anything, but I thought I'd point it out. With an actual radius of 90 miles, I could still get the population of that general area to 2,050. So it's not a big difference. But I got some other places even better, using a 90 miles radius circle:
- 1,871people: centered ~4 miles South of Bracket Peak in Nevada. Includes a sliver of California. It took some very minute adjustments of the circle, however.
- 1,836 people: centered ~8 miles west from Worthington Peak, Nevada. Contains a small sliver of Utah.
At this point, the website broke, and told me every area had zero population. Bombs got to them, it seems. In any case, I'm still curious of other areas. Mostly around Michigan's upper peninsula, if you allow large parts of the Great Lakes to be included in the circle. They are, after all, undoubtedly part of the United States. Another thought it allowing slivers of Canada, Mexico, or international waters, if the center of the circle is still on US land. That might be interesting, too.
Interesting- I'm surprised any circle including tonopah is showing under 2k population because Wikipedia shows the city as having 2100 people. The Worthington peak circle seems interesting. I'll do some more research to see if that might beat out southern Oregon.
I used to live in Lakeview. It’s a pretty bad idea to visit SE Oregon during the summer, as there’s always tons of wildfires that ravage the plains and mountains. The summer before I left, the sky was brown and thick with smoke and ash rained from the sky in fist-sized chunks. Just make sure you know what you’re getting into before you go there.
this has the quality of a huge channel; love that you are interested in the same niche areas that are just fun to investigate on google maps. awesome channel man, subscribed
I'm a geology student. My mineralogy professor has a tradition of giving away part of his rock collection to the student who gets the most answers right on the mineral identification exam every semester. And this is how I wound up with a piece of beautiful high-grade gold ore from the Owhyhee Mountains. It's worth over a hundred dollars, but I'm never going to sell it!
I still have absolutely no clue how I aced that exam. I was absolutely struggling in that class. I must've really wanted the gold, I guess!
I live in Boise and I have to go through this area a lot when traveling to Reno or California and it truly is like a hidden area of wonder, especially the area around Steens Mountain.
Great production. Keep it up
I reside in OR. And yes the south eastern part is devoid of human life. But this is also where the largest amount of cattle reside in the state. Many people won’t think of Oregon as a pork or beef producing state, but it is
Heh. Back in the day (early/mid 70s) my maternal grandfather had 50 acres in Central Point where he'd run heifers & calves. Never thought of Oregon as anything BUT cattle country until fairly recently. Grandpa's place is now apartments & condos. 😬😭
Thanks for this neat video.
If there are lithium deposits then it might be a great location for a solar power station with battery construction right nearby.
The only difficulty would be getting the power out of the area but that isn't insurmountable.
You want to set that up in what may be the most naturally pristine, unadulterated region in the country?
as an Alaskan… thank you for the disclaimer at 1:02 :)
That was a great watch. Thanks for all the great information!
I've tried to explain this to people, but if they've never been here, they don't understand.
Pretty good video of my neighborhood.
My folks and I passed through there when I was ten or so, back around 1958. I still have a five-pound block of obsidian glass I collected from the area. One of the few items that I still have with me after all that time...
Great video. The times that I've driven through this region, I've always had the impression that it must be some of the most remote terrain in the country.
Had a girlfriend years ago who took me camping out at Three Forks Hot Springs. Unbelievably beautiful place, and you'd never know it because until you get to the canyon, you're surrounded by endless sagebrush. The desert holds secrets!
Grew up in the boise area, very familiar with this area camped in the Owyhees mountains and saw silver city this video was pretty special to me
Think I found me a good camping site for a vacation destination.
I worked in Burns this summer and spent time in the Owyhee area and Steens, yeah there’s nobody there except cows and pronghorn
excellent video. I wish you talked more about the extremities of the circle in other states. Sheldon Antelope Refuge is an absolutely beautiful area just across the border that i visited and had a good time in.
This was very interesting. Thank you for sharing!
I grew up in Jordan Valley, and it’s crazy how remote the surrounding area is. The closest thing to a traffic jam is when the local ranchers are herding cattle across highway 95.
The area of northern Nevada, southern Oregon, and Idaho that are in the owyhee desert and canyonlands of the make river plateau is super empty. The remote area you choose could have been expanded. Visited theses areas many times. Some of the most beautiful mountains with the most desolate and empty plains, and the huge beautiful canyons that would definitely be national parks if it wasn’t so remote.
As a 4th generation Oregonian, this is my heaven. I love this part of Oregon and visit as often as I can. I was born and raised in north central Oregon in the Columbia River Gorge, which has it's own beauty. But there's something about the high desert that calls me.....
I drove through Lakeview from winnemucka on my way to Klamath falls last summer, definitely an interesting region.
Thurmond, WV is also a very deserted place with only 3 trains per week. It has a population of 3 citizens, and it is 5 hours away from Washington, D.C.
I have been dreaming to visit this part of Oregon for years. It’s even hard to find images on the internet of these places. But I’m so scared of it’s emptiness and I can’t stop thinking about scenarios where my car will break down and I would have to walk without a water for miles and eventually die from hypothermia. I wonder how many people have died over there is there any statistics on that somewhere?
Always saw this area when I was bored at work and looking at Google Maps. I work in real estate and we did a few deals in Burns and John Day, so it was cool learning more about the area!
I know I just left a comment here, but I want to add that Malhuer gets its name from a very early hunting dispute between Native Americans and French trappers. Mal = bad, huer = time. You can probably guess how well things ended for the french trappers.
Both Silver City and Roaring Springs have theme parks named after them. Roaring Springs water park in Boise, and Silverwood theme park in Athol. Both are great!
Additionally, Malhuer Wildlife Refuge was recently the site of an armed standoff between the Bundy ranching family and federal law enforcement. The Bundys wanted to graze their cattle on land in the area that, iirc, is technically still owned by native Americans. One of those ranchers, the absolute nutcase Amon Bundy, who had to be zip-tied to an office chair during his arrest at the Idaho State Captiol, RAN FOR GOVERNOR of Idaho in 2022. He got 17% of the vote.
I spent a few years of my childhood growing up in Heppner and Wasco, neat to see Eastern Oregon on TH-cam. I miss living out there, beautiful area
The only part of the US I’ve been to where you can drive for fucking hours without seeing any sign of civilization other than the road you’re on is SE Oregon.
What about Northern California north of redding?
I’ve driven through this part of Oregon many times. The stretch from the Nevada border to Burns or Jordan Valley Oregon (if you are going to Boise) it’s probably about a 150 mile stretch. There are areas with no cell service. But it’s a lot better than it was 10 years ago.
Yes, I've driven through this area once or twice and it's secluded and fun to drive through
There's more space in Alaska than Oregon without people.
Did you look into the possible fatalities if the bomb were dropped at the Salmon Challis national forest area? Its 100 miles wide of wilderness and probably like 250 miles from North to south. Probably a lot of campers and park visitors though.
Yeah I looked in that area, around the frank. Enough little settlements here and there to make it not viable. If it was a smaller circle I think that or central Nevada would be the winner
Broke down in Jordan Valley on way to Boise from Sacramento. Extremely lucky, I did not realize I had no reception pretty much after leaving Nevada at McDermott...a nasty speed trap
I’ve been out their dozens of time and something you forgot to mention were the stars at night. It’s one of the clearest places to view the stars in the world, you can see the Milky Way lighting the sky brighter than a full moon
Very true, I remember camping in the Alvord desert and looking up and being amazed at the clarity of the milky way
You might also see one light on the horizon that could easily be 40 miles away. It’s that dark on a moonless night.
I really enjoyed this video. I like your video style.
Thanks!
“Drop the bomb in northeastern Montana” bro you would kill me. 😭
Is nobody gonna talk about Dickshooter, Idaho?
Intersted in dropped reception. Where in the US might you need a reception boost like a Garmin or even something like a GPS Map 66I. How do you keep universal weather reports for the area you're in?
Fantastic video. Excellent work!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Northern Maine. The Allagash for east of the Mississippi River
what an interesting video to come across as an oregonian living in eastern oregon, lol! :0 i learned quite a bit !
Neat video ab out an area I definitely want to visit now. I like the appendix too
The alvord is probably one of my favorite places. It is one of the more unique parts of the US for sure.
Great video man! I would love if u kept making videos about interesting, less talked about places in North America
I see you used a photo of mine. I would at the least appreciate credits for it. The cowboys behind the cows airing the horses out. Thank you
My bad! I found that photo tagged as CC0 public domain- someone may have re-uploaded it somewhere without your permission. I will add a note in the video description.
At least they are in the heart of the area of where your video is. I appreciate it. Many thanks
I grew up here! It's so cool to have a full video like this about my home region. I never thought it was very unique lol
Glad you enjoyed it!
12:00 Wrong. "Donner und Blitz" means "Thunder and Flash". "Donner und BlitzEN" are two of santa clauses reindeers in a german christmas poem.