Since I happened to be in central Oregon on a Saturday, I figured I may as well travel down to Lake County for some football. North Lake High School would be hosting their conference foes from Elkton in a 6-man game, and it sounded like a good way to spend what was supposed to be one of the last warm days of the year. Since the game was at 2:00 pm, that also meant I had some time to do a little sight- seeing, and there are a lot of things to see in northern Lake County.
Just south of La Pine I got onto Highway 31 and headed south , and after 20 miles or so crossed the county line. A few minutes later I took a left turn onto a dirt road and headed uphill to see Hole-in-the-Ground. For some reason I’ve always wanted to see it and have just never made it happen, but this morning I was determined to get there. The road could use a little work, and I wouldn’t have complained if they’d put up a sign every mile or two, but within 15 minutes there I was, standing on the edge of a hole 500 ft. deep and a mile across. Those of us who are volcano experts refer to it as a maar, and it’s been there for 15,000 years. It looks like a meteor landed there, but it was actually formed by magma from below. Similar to an air bubble bursting out of spaghetti sauce and leaving a dimple, this maar blew boulders for miles and left this huge dimple in the earth.
It's possible to drive to the bottom of the Hole, but The Bucket had done well to get me this far and I wanted to show my appreciation by not asking him to do that. I could have just walked down, but that would mean walking back up 500 ft., and that wasn’t happening. So, I just stood on a big rock on the rim and took in the vast emptiness of it all. In the middle of the Hole, at the very bottom, you can tell that people have gathered by the lack of vegetation, and I would think that spot would be a pretty impressive place to have a party. The Hole would also be a great place for a Woodstock-like event, too. Or maybe Burning Man could move there. I arrived just as the sun was rising above the far rim, so none of my pictures capture it well, but it's an awesome sight. There’s really nothing there but, somehow, the nothingness has some weight to it, and I was glad I had finally seen it.
Satisfied with how the day had started, I hopped back in The Bucket for a short trip to the next volcanic oddity in northern Lake County: Fort Rock. As I headed east I could see the fort miles before I got there, and its silhouette was unmistakable against the backdrop of mountains in the far distance. Tens of thousands of years before Hole-in-the-Ground was formed, the land around Fort Rock had been at the bottom of a lake, and the fort was created by similar volcanic forces that formed what us experts call a tuff ring. The tuff ring of rock was still within the lake, and you can still see where waves from the lake eroded the sides of the ring and eventually broke down the southern side. It’s about 200 feet tall and is conspicuous within the flat valley around it, and driving across that valley it’s strange to think you are driving across what was once the bottom of that big lake.
In the 1930’s artifacts were found around Fort Rock from people who lived about 10,000 years ago. I spent a lot of my childhood searching for arrowheads around Fort Rock, so for anyone who might have the same idea today, you’re too late. That land has already been worked. The area around the fort is now a state park, and the small village of Fort Rock has grown up just down the road with a restaurant and a small store, but I didn’t stop long enough to do anything but take a few pictures. There are just too many other things to see in the area, and I was on to the next one.
Having already seen the Hole-in-the-Ground, the obvious next stop was at Crack-in-the-Ground. The Crack is another feature produced by volcanic-tectonic activity, where part of the earth sank many thousands of years ago, leaving behind the big crack. The nine-mile drive along washboard gravel roads with bottomless potholes had deterred me on my previous attempt to see the Crack, but I was not turning around this time, and it was actually an enjoyable drive once I accepted the fact that I was going to be moving at a snail’s pace. After 25 minutes or so, I was surprised to see the sign, along with restroom facilities and a message board, all courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management.
Again, I didn’t have a lot of time, but I spent about 20 minutes hiking and climbing up and down within the Crack, and left wishing I’d had a lot more time to explore the whole thing. It’s Oregon’s version of Antelope Canyon in Arizona and, though it made me a little claustrophobic at times, it’s a fascinating place and was well worth the drive. I signed the guest book and got back in The Bucket with a few things still on my itinerary before the game started.
Having survived the drive back to civilization, or at least to Christmas Valley, I wanted to check out the town to see how it was doing. When the Phillips Development Company came to the area in the summer of 1961 they quickly purchased 72,000 acres of ranchland at $10 per acre. They built 30 miles of roads, a lodge, a motel, an airstrip and a lake. Mr. Phillips had bought and sold real estate all over the country, and made a lot of money doing it. He claimed to have sold more parcels of land than anyone else on earth, and he believed he would be selling a whole bunch more in Christmas Valley, and it’s hard not to admire the guy’s optimism. Along with nearby streets named Snowman Road, Christmas Tree Lane, and Mistletoe Road are Elm Street, Maple Circle, Oak Street and Alder Street. If you’d never been there you could probably envision the streets lined with leafy shade trees. It must have been a surprise for buyers when they realized that none of those trees could ever grow in Christmas Valley.
A down payment on land in Christmas Valley got you a free trip from southern California to see your new lot, and Phillips hired a DC-3 to fly buyers in to see what they had purchased. That plane landed on that tiny airstrip 67 times, and ninety percent of the land in Christmas Valley was sold within three months of Phillips’ arrival in the “town”. Almost all of the buyers were either central Californians who wanted to farm or retirees from Los Angeles.
In 1962 Phillips donated ten acres for the future site of an elementary school. The following year he, in a cooperative venture with Lake County, paid to build the road that now links Christmas Valley to highway 31 near Silver Lake, and supplied 681 tons of asphalt for the project. The company expected a town of 5,000 by 1965, but by 1963 there were 203 people living in Christmas Valley, and most of those were employees of the Phillips Company. They were hoping that the proposed Ontario-Coos Bay highway would be routed through the town, making it a valuable conduit for Christmas Valley crops to reach harbor and overseas markets, but that highway was never built.
That didn’t matter anyway, because the new arrivals soon realized, as the homesteaders had 50 years earlier, that the conditions were singularly unfit for farming or growing anything other than sage brush and juniper trees. The arrival of electricity in 1955 had prompted some irrigation that allowed for alfalfa farming, but for almost anything else the rainfall was inadequate, and the aquifer was inaccessible. By the time Phillips gave up on his plan in 1973, most of the original property owners had sold out to residents of the Willamette Valley, and over the years the area has seen some growth, though much more slowly than Mr. Phillips had foreseen. New technology has made the desert a less harsh place to live, and land use changes have allowed for more irrigation that has, in turn, allowed for more farming. Most of those properties in Christmas Valley still sit undeveloped, though, so if you’re looking for some cheap retirement property you may want to check it out.
I wondered what Mr. Phillips would have said if he’d been with me for my drive around the town. His wildest dreams had obviously not come true, but he didn’t accomplish nothing. Though his lots sit mostly empty, there are a few here and there that look just like he would have wanted them to. And it’s a little ironic that most of the growth in the area has taken place outside of his intricately planned community. Most of those who’ve chosen to live in the area have brought in manufactured homes and placed them on the outskirts, far from the lake that was to be the centerpiece of the town. The Christmas Valley Lodge is still there, with a giant OPEN sign in the window, but as I got closer I saw a much smaller sign telling me to keep out. The golf course is still in operation and, though I didn’t see any golfers, it looks to be well maintained. The airstrip still looks to be in operation on the southeast edge of town, though I doubt it’s seen a DC-3 lately. Perhaps Phillips’ greatest legacy, however, along with the miles of paved road he was responsible for, is the fact that Christmas Valley is now home to the world’s most remote Dollar General store. Would that be there now if he hadn’t had big dreams for Christmas Valley? I can’t see it.
North Lake High School draws students from the small communities of Fort Rock, Christmas Valley, and Silver Lake, and everywhere in between and probably far beyond. The school is located in the middle of the three, approximately equidistant from each of them. I’d seen the first two already, so I was off to Silver Lake to see how it compared. The community of Silver Lake was first a focal point for early ranching activities and later became a supply point for the great homestead rush to the region after the turn of the twentieth century. A post office was established in 1875, named for the actual Silver Lake located nearby, and it soon became a busy freight stop on the main wagon road from Prineville to Lakeview, and was platted in 1888.
Silver Lake continued to serve as a trading center for the vast surrounding country, and it had grown to have a population of about 50 people by 1894, but approximately 170 people gathered from miles around for a dance and social gathering that took place on Christmas Eve of that year upstairs in the Clayton Community Hall. The hall was decorated with pine garlands and a large Christmas tree decorated with cotton, paper chains, strings of popcorn, and presents, all lit by oil-burning lamps, with the people crowded together on long wooden benches.
At about 8:00 that night a young man stood on a bench to look across the room and hit his head against one of the oil lamps, spilling oil on himself and the wood floor. The crowd made a run for the single exit, and those unlucky enough to make it to the door were crushed against it by those behind them, and the people outside trying to help couldn’t open the door, which opened inward. Within minutes, the stairway had collapsed, and the only escape was a long jump from one of the windows. All of the town’s medical supplies had been in the store downstairs, and the lone doctor in Silver Lake was making a house call 50 miles away. It was said that there was probably no other town in America farther from a railroad than Silver Lake, Oregon, so one cowboy made the 100-mile trip to Lakeview over 19 hours in -20° weather to notify their doctor, and the doctor arrived at 6:00 am on the 26th, by which time the Silver Lake doctor had returned. The two of them did their best for the dozens of injured and burned, and though 40 people died on Christmas Eve, only 3 died afterward.
Five days after the fire, the town buried their dead in a common grave in the Silver Lake Cemetery: 19 women, 16 men, and 8 children, and four years later they erected a monument in their honor. There was a small group gathered at the site when I visited, and I didn’t want to disturb them, but I could see the monument and there is a sign outside the fence that mentions those 43 people who perished. It is still the deadliest fire in Oregon history. Today the population of Silver Lake is about three times what it was 130 years ago, but it’s still a tiny unincorporated town. There isn’t much to it, but it seems like a nice little place.
As an aside, the man who owned the building that had hosted that ill-fated Christmas party was a Mr. Peter Chrisman, who happened to also own an old cabin several miles to the north, on the banks of a lake that came to bear his name: Chrisman Lake. The Chrisman, or Christman, family alternated between spellings of their last name, which over many years apparently led to people mistakenly referring to the lake as Christmas Lake. The name change was pretty well established among locals by the 1880’s and when that misnomer made it onto maps used by homesteaders who flooded the area in the early 1900’s, the Chrisman name was gone for good. The valley became known as Christmas Lake Valley, and when the Phillips Company bought up much of the land in 1961 to sell as part of their new residential community, they dropped the “Lake”, and the small settlement became “Christmas Valley”.
That small log cabin on the west side of Christmas Lake, by the way, was later bought by Rueb Long’s father, who filed the first homestead claim on the land in 1912 and became its first legal owner. I don’t have space for Rueb’s biography here, but he was a remarkable man whose biggest of many claims to fame was eventually co-writing The Oregon Desert with E.R. Jackman. If you haven’t read it, it needs to go on your list. My 1964 edition, handed down from my father, is one of my prized possessions, so you’ll have to get your own.
That book states that most pictographs made by native Americans are relatively new, since the desert wind and sand erase most of them after a few hundred years. However, if you drive about 15 miles south of Silver Lake to Picture Rock Pass you can see petroglyphs that have been there for 10,000 years. I parked on the side of the road and within a minute was standing in the same spot someone had stood thousands of years ago, doing their best to communicate something to someone. What that thing was, I don’t know, and neither does anyone else, but I think I would have liked those people. They weren’t trying to show off or make me feel inadequate because my artistic abilities peaked in second grade. My skills would have been perfectly normal among them, and I would have fit right in. They were also considerate enough to draw their pictures right next to the highway. If they had drawn them on the other side of the rock you wouldn’t even have to leave your car, but that would only have invited vandals, so they had the good sense to use the other side.
There was still more to see, but it was getting close to game time and I needed to get to the school. I headed back north to where the roads from the three communities all converge, and not far from that spot I could see the sign beside the road letting me know I had reached my destination. It’s an electronic sign with a reader board listing all of the upcoming activities for the school, but I was only interested in one. The Elkton Elks were in northern Lake County, and the North Lake Cowboys would be looking to add another W to their 4-1 record. I turned left and drove up the hill where I found the k-12 North Lake School sitting at the top. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s nice, and clean, and there’s plenty of parking. There were a few cars in the front lot, but I assumed there must be another one somewhere, so I kept driving and made my way around the back of the building. There were a few spots in the smaller lot back there, but almost everyone had parked in the gravel lot down by the field. I was content to leave The Bucket in the paved lot and walk the 50 yards to the field entrance.
The nice old guy at the ticket table took my 5 bucks and handed me a printed roster for the game, and in I went. The green natural grass of the field stood out in contrast to the miles of sagebrush just beyond, and right in front of me was a small two-story press box, with small aluminum bleachers on either side. There are no lights at the field, and Saturday afternoons are the norm for North Lake home games. There was no clear way to tell who was supposed to sit where, so I made my circuit around the rubber running track to take things in. The first thing I noticed was the view. The field is elevated from the surrounding country just enough that you can see for miles across the flat valley, with Fort Rock standing out 10 miles to the northwest. There was no seating on the opposite, north side of the field, but many visiting fans were choosing to stand on the track and watch the game from that side. As I completed my circumnavigation I found the concession stand in a bright red food truck just east of the entrance, and went over to take a look.
It had been a busy day, and I hadn’t had anything but water during my travels. I hadn’t noticed I was hungry, but when I saw the menu it suddenly hit me. There at the top was my ideal football meal and it was almost too good to be true. A baked potato with chili, cheese and sour cream. The game hadn’t even started and I already knew I was going to like this place. I got that potato, with all that stuff on it, picked out a place at the top of the small west-side bleachers and dug in. It had to be about 3 days worth of calories, but I was at a football game, so it didn't really count.
North Lake plays in the Southern Division of Special District 2 in the 1A – 6-man classification, and came in tied for second in the seven-team league. They’ve only made the playoffs three times since the school opened in 1991, but their lone playoff win in school history came last year, and things are looking up for the Cowboys.
There were no cheerleaders and no band, but there was a good crowd for the game, and I was probably the only one who wasn’t on a first name basis with the majority of those who were there. I felt a little self-conscious being the only one in the whole place wearing shorts and tennis shoes, but I cheered loudly for the home team, so they were willing to accept the strange guy who’d showed up without jeans on.
The temperature was in the low 70’s when the game began (thus the shorts), and the Cowboys looked hot in their all-black uniforms. Let me rephrase that: The Cowboys looked like they must be getting quite warm in their all-black uniforms. If they were a little warm they certainly didn’t play like it. They dominated the Elkton Elks in all three phases. If there would have been more phases they would have dominated those, too. Neither team threw the ball much, but the Cowboy running game was lethal, and they ran out to a 21-0 lead after one quarter.
They stretched that lead to 48-0 by halftime, and I think everyone was ready for a break in the beat-down by then. Fortunately, it was homecoming week at North Lake, and the princesses rolled up front and center in some classic old cars. I’ve given my thoughts on this routine before, and if I were running things it would be different, but it was still nice, and all of the princesses in their casual cowgirl attire and the escorts in their football uniforms performed their roles well, as did all of the moms in their HOCO 2024 t-shirts who scurried around making sure everything went off without a hitch. But, of course, everything didn’t go perfectly, and since the PA system went kaput just before halftime and they were relying on a portable backup system, I couldn’t hear a word of what was going on. But it was all, as I said, very nice, and the queen was crowned and everyone was happy, except the Elkton football team, who had to come out and play another half of football.
It was more of the same after the intermission and even though the clock ran continuously the Cowboys were able to add 20 points to their score and win the game 68-0. That’s not an unusual score in 6-man football, but it is hard to watch a team score ten unanswered touchdowns against a team that is clearly overmatched. If Elkton had gotten 7 points for each first down they still probably would have lost. As a coach, I think I could find a way to minimize the humiliation for the other team, but maybe that’s why I’m not a coach.
By any measure, my day in northern Lake County had been a success. I’m sure there have been others who’ve seen both Hole-in-the-Ground and Crack-in-the-Ground in one day, but I’m just as sure that nobody has ever seen both of those things AND cheered the North Lake Cowboys on to victory on the same day. Ever. There will probably be others now that I have blazed the trail and shown what’s possible, but I will always be the first, and that’s what I kept telling myself as I made the 3 ½ hour drive home with the sun shining straight into my eyes the whole way.
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