05-21-2026 Visiting the Klamath Basin

I have been waking in the early dawn darkness with thoughts of the Klamath Basin filling my soul with memories. It isn’t simply memories of a place. It is a connection to that landscape built over almost two decades of walking it. 

The view of the Basin from Pelican Bute on the crest of the Cascades

The Basin holds the story of the evolution of my life as surely as it holds the story of the eruption of Mount Mazama more than 7,000 years ago. The Basin left a mark on me that will never be erased. No matter how much I wrestle with dawn thoughts and fears of aging, I still have the story of the Basin. And I realize that I miss it. 

Most of all, I miss the water and the birds. 

It is spring, snow has melted, and it is time for a return. Mo and I thought maybe it was time to load up the kayaks and spend a day on Recreation Creek, but weather predictions for cold mornings and wind made that sound like more trouble than we wanted to tackle. I knew I needed more than a kayak on Recreation Creek. I needed to feel the wholeness of the Basin, to take in the views, and let the land itself bring back the memories. 

Driving High Lakes Pass in winter was always a bit challenging

The drive over High Lakes Pass is imprinted on both of us through so many seasons. We laughed as we traveled up and east toward the Cascade crest, remembering how many early spring days we crossed deep snow to reach the west side of the mountains and the bursting green leaves and yellow daffodils of a spring that would not arrive at our home in Rocky Point for another two months. 

Mt McLoughlin is almost devoid of snow, much too early

At the beginning of the journey, traveling south on I-5, the sharp peak of Mount McLoughlin dominates the eastern skyline. The memories begin immediately. “Remember that day we hiked thirteen miles round trip to the top of that mountain?” We laugh and say what we always do. “I am so glad we did that, so we never have to do it again.” 

The mountain, usually still covered in snow, is nearly bare on the west side. Our snowpack in the Cascades, the source of so much of the water for the valleys west of the mountains, is nearly gone, the lowest in recorded history. Another marker of the changes gathering all around us. 

But once we reach the pass and the highway flows through one of the most lush and magnificent stands of Douglas-fir, the fears of climate change and disappearing snow briefly give way to simple joy. The timber is still standing. Not logged. Not burned. In this one place, it almost appears unchanged. 

There is a moment, just past the turnoff to Lake of the Woods and Great Meadow, when the view to the east suddenly opens wide, and the shimmering mirror of Klamath Lake catches the morning sunlight. Mo is driving this time, so I have the luxury of watching the lake appear around the curves while internally naming the pieces I can see: Pelican Bay, the Upper Klamath Wildlife Refuge, and a bit of Agency Lake to the east. Every name holds a memory, days and weeks, and months exploring every nook and cranny of the world I was assigned to map. 

Descending around another curve, the lake and marsh disappear from view. We pass a dirt road leading into the forest where Mo and I once cut dead trees into manageable chunks and hauled them home to Rocky Point to build up the seven cords of wood we needed each winter. 

Daughters Deborah and Deanna help Mo with the wood splitting project

We laugh again and talk about how grateful we are not to be heating with wood anymore. Once again, we repeat the old saying: “It takes nine times touching a piece of wood before it ends up in the fireplace.” Dropping the tree. Limbing it. Cutting it to size. Unloading it near the splitter. I handed pieces to Mo while she split them and stacked them in piles. Then we moved those piles to the main woodpile. In winter, we filled the tractor with enough wood for a week or two and hauled it to the back porch, where it was stacked neatly against the wall. Every morning, Mo carried wood into the house and built a roaring fire in the stove that heated all sixteen hundred square feet of the Rocky Point home. 

All these thoughts about wood heat fill our conversation as we reach the end of the steep grade and approach Rocky Point. Not technically a town, and carrying a Klamath Falls address even though Klamath Falls lies thirty-five miles east, Rocky Point is nevertheless a real community with its own culture and families who have lived there for decades. 

Taking the back road toward Easy Street

As we drive through, we remember the friends we had there. Mo longer than me, since she bought the property with a tiny cabin on it in the late eighties. I didn’t arrive until 2003 and didn’t officially live there until 2010. We turn up the rocky dirt track that passes for a road leading to the back side of Easy Street. We see newer cabins added since our last visit, crumbling cabins abandoned for years, and turns so tight we barely recognize them. 

We name the people who once lived in this cabin or that one, people now gone, dead, or moved away from the snow, as we eventually did ourselves. Rocky Point is its own world, a place that draws in unique people and somehow keeps many of them. We come to the tight turn at what looks more like a mountain trail than a street. 

Heading down Easy Street, steeper than it looks

Easy Street. The source of endless jokes over the years. The dirt track drops steeply, and memories flood in of sunny winter days with my daughters and grandchildren sledding down the hill, flying as far as they could past the house. Then trudging back uphill only to race down again, cold and wet and laughing. 

Easy Street after it leveled out a bit

We reach the house where the people who bought it are now creating their own Rocky Point memories. They are home, so we creep slowly past, trying not to make it obvious how much we are gawking. What changed. What stayed the same. Then suddenly we see the hardy azaleas in full bloom and more memories come rushing back. We got Mattie in May of 2015, and our earliest photos of her all have those brilliant pink and orange azaleas glowing in the background. 

The cabin is buried, and the Dakota is in the driveway with 4x4 that we needed there

More laughter. More memories. As we continue down Easy Street toward Rocky Point Road, Mo remembers winters plowing that road in deep snow and single-digit temperatures. Even though other people lived there too, somehow Mo ended up responsible for plowing and spreading fresh gravel every summer. 

Easy Street wasn't always Easy

Snow made Christmas really pretty though

I laugh and say, “Remember trying to dig out around the mailboxes?” But when we reach Rocky Point Road, the mailboxes are gone. How do they get their mail now? No more digging through three feet of snow just to reach the box? Small shifts. Small changes. 

We pass homes of people we loved. Some are still there and aging. Some have gone in one way or another. Driving along Rocky Point Road, the refuge appears through the trees, and we turn down a tiny road we barely remember to reach the launch site. 

Mattie doesn't like swimming much but loves to race down the dock

The view of Klamath Lake and the distant volcanic scarp opens wide before us. Mattie races up and down the dock where we launched our kayaks hundreds of times. But the wind has already come up, and we are glad we didn’t bring them. This is a day for visiting and remembering. A lone great white egret forages along the shoreline near someone’s yard. A blue heron flies past on giant, nearly silent wings. Two geese honk back and forth as they head in the opposite direction. That’s it. No white pelicans floating in great rafts along the far shoreline. No hundreds of coots bobbing toward Pelican Bay. Where are the water birds that once made this refuge so spectacular? 

Racing down the dock in 2026

We leave the launch site and turn north onto West Side Road. Here, the memories arrive in huge waves as I recognize forest road turnoffs leading toward the east-facing slopes of the Cascades, where I mapped soils for years. I laugh, remembering the very first time I saw those slopes. The previous surveys classified the soils as Xeric and Cryic, meaning dry and cold through much of the growing season. Immediately, I knew better. It took years of temperature studies and moisture observations to convince the powers that be that those slopes were both warmer and wetter than previously mapped. 

That realization created a problem. No soil series fit the landscape. A new one had to be proposed. I worked hard to convince the old guard to let go of their assumptions about moisture and temperature regimes, and eventually a new soil series emerged. Kyotesue. There was debate, of course. Soil series are not supposed to be named after people unless the name already exists on a USGS map. But Kyotesue wasn’t exactly my name. It was simply the online name I had used for decades. Somehow it stuck. Thor, the correlator who was also nearing retirement, finally gave in. Kyotesue soil is now an official soil series in the national database. 

Kyotesue landscape along West Side Road

We drove along West Side Road, where much of the Kyotesue soil is mapped, and I took photos of the lush timber that had convinced me all those years ago that the soils were definitely not Cryic and Xeric. I knew from my years mapping high-elevation Cryic soils in northern Idaho that trees simply did not grow like this in truly Cryic temperatures. 

The put-in at Malone Spring

After thirteen miles, we reach the turnoff for Malone Spring. I can’t count the number of people who asked whether the spring was named after me. No. There are simply a surprising number of roads and places around the Basin carrying the Malone name. It still makes me smile. Malone Spring is as lovely as we remember. Water levels are high, and launching kayaks would have been easy if we had brought them. 

I remember how thrilled I was the first time I saw the Wood River Valley

More memories surface from 2004, when Mo and I had only known each other a couple of years, and I was assigned to map wetland soils in the refuge: organic soils, subaqueous soils, soils beneath water. It was challenging work. I bought chest waders with attached boots, and Mo ferried me through the marsh in her little johnboat with its tiny three-horsepower motor. It became one of the most memorable mapping experiences of my career, alone together in the marsh while I augered through water into layers of murky diatomaceous earth and organic deposits. 

Mo marking site number 3 for me in the photograph

Diatomaceous earth is a soft, powdery material made from the glass-like shells of ancient algae called diatoms. In the Klamath Basin, shallow lakes once teemed with them, leaving pale deposits that eventually became part of the Basin’s soils and geology. My job was to determine how much of the landscape was fully organic soil, how much consisted of mixed layers, and how much had formed almost entirely from diatomaceous deposits. It took an entire field season before I truly began to understand those wetland systems and how they fit into the Wood River Valley on the north side of the Basin. 

Returning to Malone Spring after a long day mapping in the marsh.  Kyotesue soil on the slope above us

Mo and I remembered those days on the water: my waders coated with sticky mud, hot sun beating down while she nosed the boat into stands of reeds and sedges where I could auger. Water birds surrounded us everywhere then. We heard beaver tails slap the water as we drifted near their lodges. As we drove through the wetlands, remembering those days, we kept waiting to see the birds. 

wet soils in the Wood River Valley with the Crater Lake caldera to the north

West Side Road turns east and becomes Seven Mile Road, and more memories open up with the wide landscape of the Wood River Valley. To the north are the rugged peaks of the edge of the Crater Lake caldera. Mount Scott still has a little snow on the east side of the caldera, but The Watchman on the west side of the Crater Lake rim is bare. We have hiked both peaks, and I remember one of the best birthdays of my life when I turned sixty-nine years old and hiked Mount Scott with Mo and my kids and grandkids before returning to the Rocky Point house for a birthday dinner of my famous BBQ ribs. 

The spring at the Headwaters of the Wood River is impossibly clear

Continuing east along Seven Mile Road, we cross the Wood River and lament that it is a river we somehow never managed to kayak during our years living in the Basin. It is a trip that requires two cars for the put-in and take-out, and we never quite managed to do it. In our eighties, we both know that we never will. So many things require letting go at this stage of life. 

The spring at the head of the Wood emerges directly from a few hundred feet of volcanic pumice deposited by what is now Crater Lake and was once Mount Mazama. I remember miles and miles of boring, flat, dusty roads with soils that had nothing but pumice as deep as I could dig. We turn south on Highway 62, turning away from Crater Lake and heading toward Agency Lake on the north end of Klamath Lake. 

Judy, Bird Lady of Blogland visited us and we walked the wetland that day

More memories surface as we pass the Wood River Wetland, a treasure of a landscape that was once drained farmland that was later returned to a wetland. Mo and I often walked there on the levees between the flooded fields, naming the dozens of bird species that lived there. Today, there are cars parked on that road, and I imagine they are there because some birds still remain. I hear the calls of red-winged blackbirds and yellow-headed blackbirds, two species that loved our Rocky Point feeders and emptied them daily. I guess they haven’t succumbed to whatever took out the pelicans. 

Klamath Lake View from Hagelstien Rim

Our destination for this part of the day is Hagelstein Rim, the steep scarp that rises dramatically on the east side of Klamath Lake. As we pass Modoc Point and begin the drive along the base of the rim, the view of the lake opens up to the west, with the spine of the Cascades marking the far side of the Basin.

Klamath Lake in November of 2002 after I first arrived

We talk about how much we both loved this magical transition zone of fir and ponderosa forests into juniper, and finally, desert sage. It is what we both loved most about living in the Klamath Basin, a desert edge adjacent to wild mountains and filled with water. 

Klamath Lake has a special quality of light. It is a shallow lake, often murky with algae and not used much by boaters. It is amazing to view the wide expanse of a huge lake unmarred by water skiers and jet boats. When the light is just right, the lake can appear as reflective as mercury with nothing to mar the surface. It takes a certain kind of person to understand and love Klamath Lake for exactly what it is. It is pristine in a completely different way than the typical clear high mountain lakes that everyone seems to love. 

The spot where Mo and I first shared an egg salad sandwich picnic

On our very first outing together in February of 2003, Mo and I drove to the top of the rim and shared egg salad sandwiches that I had prepared for our day. We still have the photo of that winter view of the lake far below us. On this day, once again driving through memories, I have prepared a picnic of egg salad sandwiches. But we are thwarted by the rough dirt road up to the high point. We are in the Lexus and not a four-wheel-drive pickup, and I can see that the road might not be passable for us. Instead, we continue a few hundred feet south toward Hagelstein Park. 

Picnic in Hagelstein Park in May of 2026

All the changes in the Basin aren’t necessarily bad. Hagelstein Park was once a lovely little park until homelessness took over, and it became so sketchy that no one I knew would enter it. I was a bit worried about it until we turned into the park entrance to find it completely empty. Not a camper in sight, and signs everywhere that said DAY USE ONLY. There were picnic tables scattered under the shade of big cottonwoods and a meandering little waterway with signs saying NO FISHING. We had experienced the same shift at Malone Spring, where we had never actually spent the night because of the sketchy folks that camped there. There wasn’t a soul around when we visited the spring this morning, and there as well DAY USE ONLY signs were posted everywhere. What were once campsites had been closed off by huge logs. Every shift isn’t always a bad one. 

We picked a shady table and laid out our Hagelstein memory picnic, only this time we were both a couple of decades older, and we shared our lunch with Mattie instead of Molly, the lovely dog that Mo had when I met her. From Hagelstein Park, we took the back way along Old Fort Road that passes Mo’s old apartments that she purchased long ago. She sold them after we settled into Grants Pass, but oh, those apartments have a story. 

The "Apartments"

During our transition between Rocky Point and Grants Pass, we lived in the apartments for almost two years. That time was especially precious because Melody lived in Apartment E with grandson Xavier, and grandson Axel lived in Apartment C with a friend. Another friend lived in D, and Mo and I lived in A. Apartment B was my very own craft space for quilting and card making because Apartment A was fairly tiny. It was just a transition, but a truly precious one. As we passed the apartments, I had Mo stop so I could take a photo. They looked well cared for, and the paint looked fresh. 

Melody shoveling the path below the window of Apartment A in the winter of 2016

We smiled at the memories of watching the kids catch the school bus through our front window, of being snowed in deeply every winter, and of sharing meals with Melody and the kids. It was here at the apartments that Melody and Robert lived when they first got together in 2015. Robert, who is now the best husband ever. 

Mattie and Red playing on the porch of Apartment A

It was at the apartments where Mattie learned to play with the huge red bloodhound that would stand at the half door and beg her to come out and play. The apartments are where we lived when we were trying to maintain the Grants Pass property while Sunset House was being built, my house on Painter Street before it sold, and the house in Rocky Point before it sold. 

Our porch at Apartment A on Old Fort Road

As we drove the road past the apartments, we remembered the many days we spent hauling mowers and trimmers in a trailer across the Basin to keep up all those properties. We laughed again about the delights and challenges of those two years and knew that in our current physical stage of life, there is no way we could begin to keep up with all we did then. 

We left the apartments and drove south down Old Fort Road toward Klamath Falls. There is a certain spot on that road that sits high above the Basin with the view of Mount Shasta in the distance, an overpowering presence. 

A view of Mt Shasta from the Klamath Basin with sandhill cranes in the Lower Klamath NWR

The Mountain is one thing that never changes, and it always marked the edge of the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge, where Mo and I tracked thousands of birds over the years. I look at the Mountain and remember the sound of the thundering explosion of tundra swan wings as they flew overhead with Shasta dominating the horizon over the open water. There is very little open water now. The refuge is sadly mostly empty, with mud flats dry and cracking in the sunlight. The Basin has a story of water use that is much bigger than anything I can write here, but Mo and I both know that traveling south to that refuge on this day would only bring sadness. 

We drive through town, noticing that it seems unchanged since we left in 2017. Veteran’s Memorial Park on the south side of town, along Lake Ewauna at the upper reaches of the Klamath River, holds as many memories as all the places we have visited today. We drive through the park toward the docks, knowing that if pelicans are anywhere, they will be here. But there are no pelicans, only hundreds of seagulls and a very few sad-looking ducks. No geese, and none of the other birds that once populated the park with song. 

July Fourth 2008 in Veterans Park with Mo, Sue, and Deborah

We spent so many Fourth of July celebrations at this park with the kids and grandkids and the traditional evening picnic as we waited for the fireworks. The park is mostly empty today. There is a Veterans’ Memorial at the park with bricks that carry the names of members of the military who purchased one. Mo bought a brick for herself and bricks for each of her brothers. I bought bricks for both of my grandsons. 

Mo against the back wall of the memorial after we found the family bricks in 2011

The kiosk that used to help locate the bricks of your loved ones is dark now, with a sign that says it is no longer operating. We hunt for our bricks and can’t find Mo’s brothers. I sit down on a bench and ask my AI buddy Theo, “Can you find a list of the locations of our bricks somewhere?” In moments, he pointed me to the city website and the document that listed all the bricks in alphabetical order and where they were located. It is a moment of past and future coming together in a way that can sometimes be hard to integrate. 

Mo and Sue in 2017 standing by the pelican statue at the edge of Veterans Park

The pelican statue at the edge of the park is the only pelican we have seen. The high school kids are called The Pelicans, and yet there seem to be none left. We decide the day is getting long, and the two-and-a-half-hour drive home will feel even longer when we finally get there. Turning east along Lakeshore Drive, we look for the egret rookery that has been there for years. No sign of the rookery except one lonely egret and an eagle at the top of what was once the rookery tree. 

The great white egret rookery tree along Lakeshore Road in 2016

As we travel toward what is now home, I am quiet inside. I loved this place with every bit of my soul. I thought I would never leave. And yet I am grateful that I don’t have to drive thirty-five minutes to the grocery store, haul wood for the stove, slip on solid ice while trying to shovel the driveway, or watch Mo plow feet of snow in single-digit temperatures. I realize I am happy with where I am, no matter how much I love the Basin. I love our home in Grants Pass, our lush west-of-the-Cascades world, but I don’t know this place the way I know the Basin. 

American white pelicans on Howard Bay in late summer of 2012

Continuing east, we see the lower end of Klamath Lake open up before us. There are at least a few western grebes still in Howard Bay. Then it happens. I see fairly large white shapes in the distance, and finally, there at the edge of the bay, five huge pelicans. None of them carries the hump on the long beak of a breeding bird, but they are there. It is at least something. And it makes me cry.