Winter still has it’s cool and windy grip on northern Nevada, so I’m digging into the archives from last summer for some recordings to share. In July of last year, after visiting and recording in the Santa Rosa Mountains, I traveled to Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southeastern Oregon. I first visited Hart Mountain 30 years earlier as I was scouting for study areas for my dissertation research. I remembered it as a wonderful, wild place that I would get back to one day.
It was cloudy and breezy when I arrived. It was early July, so things were already starting to dry out. Hart Mountain consists of a large volcanic escarpment that rises steeply above the playas of the Warner Valley to the west. To get there, you take a scenic dirt road that switchbacks up the escarpment, providing lovely views of the valley. The top is a rolling mesa, mostly sagebrush dissected by small riparian areas and a few ponds. The refuge was set up to protect habitat for bighorn sheep, sage grouse, and the summering habitat of pronghorn.
There are a few camping areas scattered around the mesa. When I visited this time, I opted to skip the main camping area and headed south to an area with the odd name of Guano Creek. This area is normally only open after August 1, but for some reason, it had opened up just before I got there, so I drove up the canyon and found a nice site sheltered by aspen and pinyon pine. Little Guano Creek was still flowing with a nice gurgling sound and the aspens were alive with warblers, tanagers, and red-breasted sapsuckers. I set up camp and watched the activity for awhile. Most of the birds were carrying food, especially the sapsuckers whose babies kept up incessant begging calls that formed the backdrop to every daylight hour.
It was a quiet evening, with only a couple of other cars driving up the canyon and very few planes overhead. No coyotes, owls, or insects. The dawn chorus was wild though, and almost chaotic:
After breakfast, more birdwatching, and a walk up the canyon to watch butterflies, I headed down the canyon and stopped in a little grove of ponderosa pines. I set up the recorder while I checked out more butterflies. By then the wind was really picking up, as the skies finally cleared. The wind in the pines was wonderful, occasionally slowing down and tickling the nearby aspen trees:
Such a beautiful place. I hated to leave it, but I had other places to be. Although it was noticeably more crowded than when I was here before, Hart Mountain, and it’s sister refuge, the Sheldon Antelope Refuge in northern Nevada, portray a sense of quiet and wide-open spaces. Some of the things I like best about the Great Basin.