Rowena Crest Viewpoint

Author's Comments

There are two photographs at Rowena. Most people come for the first one, which is the highway curve seen from the overlook above - that perfect horseshoe of road carved into the hillside, the river beyond, the basalt going gold in late light. It is a real photograph and I have made my version of it. Late April, just before sunset, when the arrowleaf balsamroot is at its peak and the curves catch warm light from the west. You will not be alone up there. You will not need to be. The second photograph is the one I keep coming back for, and it requires the climb. Tom McCall Point gains its eleven hundred feet quickly and without much shade, and the wind on the ridge can be serious enough to lean into. But what waits at the top in early May is one of the strangest landscapes in Oregon - a high meadow of yellow balsamroot and purple lupine running right to the edge of the gorge, with the river two thousand feet below and Mount Adams rising white to the north. This is the seam where the wet gorge becomes the dry plateau, and you can feel it. The air smells different. The grasses are different. The light, which has traveled across hundreds of miles of high desert before reaching you, has a clarity that the western gorge rarely allows. Go in the last week of April or the first week of May. Go in the late afternoon and stay until the wind drops, which it usually does around the time the sun gets low. Bring a wide lens for the meadow and a longer one for the layers of ridge that stack toward the eastern horizon.

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