Dee Wright Observatory at McKenzie Pass

Author's Comments

The road up Highway 242 is its own slow argument for being here. By the time you reach the pass, you have wound through enough forest and switchback to forget what the rest of Oregon looks like, and then the trees fall away and you are standing in the middle of a lava field that goes to the horizon in nearly every direction. Sixty-five square miles of black rock. It does not entirely register at first. The observatory itself is a small stone hut built by the CCC in 1935, and the genius of it is the windows. Each opening frames a named peak. You walk a slow circle and the Cascades come to you one at a time - North Sister, Middle Sister, Mount Washington, Belknap, Black Butte, eleven in total if the air is clear. I prefer late August and early September, when the road has been open long enough to lose the early-season traffic and the haze from summer fires has not yet settled in. Some years that window is generous. Some years it closes in a week. Golden hour is the time. The lava goes from black to a kind of bruised purple, and the snow on the peaks holds light long after the field below has gone cool. The half-mile interpretive loop is worth walking even if you do not normally walk interpretive loops. The texture of the rock at close range is its own photograph - ropes and folds and broken edges that look almost wet in raking light. This is a place that rewards staying past sunset. The drive down in the dark is slow, but the sky up here, away from everything, is worth the patience.

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