Oregon’s Strangest Landscape Looks Nothing Like Oregon

Southeastern Oregon harbors one of the most geologically improbable corners of the American West. The Steens Mountain and Alvord Desert region sits in a remote pocket of the state where Great Basin geology intrudes on the Pacific Northwest, producing a landscape of fault-block mountains, barren playas, and glacially carved gorges that feels more like Nevada than Oregon. YouTuber Topo Traveler recently made the long drive out to explore why this chunk of high desert feels so out of place.

The Steens are the largest fault-block mountain range in southeastern Oregon, formed when stretching tectonic forces fractured the earth’s crust into rising and sinking blocks. Unlike the limestone and granite ranges typical of the Great Basin, the Steens are built almost entirely of flood basalt, the same ancient lava flows that created the Columbia Plateau. The range is also tall enough to have supported glaciers during the last ice age, which carved dramatic U-shaped gorges into its western flank before giving way abruptly to flat basalt plateaus at the ridgeline.

Below the eastern escarpment sits the Alvord Desert, a dry playa that is the remnant of a glacial lake, now reduced to a vast mud flat by the double rain shadow cast by both the Cascades and the Steens themselves. It’s a pretty wild landscape that’s managed to impress visitors who come expecting something that looks like Oregon and find something that looks like nowhere else entirely.

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