About midway between the towns of John Day and Mitchell, on Highway 26, along the John Day River, in the midst of the naked geology of eastern Oregon, the traveler comes upon Picture Gorge and plunges into the cool breezy shade of a mass of reddish brown rock, through which the river has carved a course.

Our well-thumbed copy of Roadside Geology of Oregon, by David D. Alt and Donald W. Hyndman (Missoula: Mountain Press Publishing Co., 1978), says that the gorge is "cut through a thick sequence of basalt lava flows. It is always marvelous to see a stream flow for miles through fairly soft rock and then suddenly pass through a narrow gorge laboriously carved in much harder rock; especially when a short detour would have kept it on softer rocks. It is not true that streams always choose a path of least resistance."

So what happened here? Why did the river take the time to carve straight down through this piece of volcanic rock? About five million years ago, in the dry Pliocene, deposits of sand and gravel were laid down here; deposits which today can be seen on hilltops all around, left high and dry by the erosion of wind and water. The John Day River began flowing about three million years ago, as the climate grew wetter, and as the new river found its way through the soft rocks, its path took it across the top of a hidden lump of harder and older rock; a lone chunk of basalt. Rivers take what comes to them, so as the water gradually exposed the top of what is now Picture Gorge, the John Day bit into the old lava flow.

Today the John Day River has cut right through the ancient stone. The sides of the monstrous divided chunk of basalt form the nearly vertical sides of the gorge, with here and there a step carved out where the river paused to think about its task. The highway, following a man-made carved path between river and rock, is shady. Driving through the gorge on a spring day, as Bob and I did three years ago, I rolled down my window and leaned out into the breeze and shouted up into the canyon as I might have done when I was ten years old. Echoes rolled back at me from the walls. We slowed down to enjoy the moment, and that was when I noticed something else about Picture Gorge.

On the sides of the gorge, from base to summit, pale green fronds of grass waved, over a foot tall, clothing the clefts in the rock. They genuflected in the wind that riffled the river water. What were they? For many miles now, I had grown used to the tawny sameness of hills covered with cheatgrass, their russetcolored heads already ripe and ready to spread on this May day. But here was something different.

With no place to pull over in the gorge, we drove on. Back in the open ground between hills and river, we stopped to look back at it, and I saw, on the rightof- way, some of the same tall grass. I knelt down and pulled up a plant. A perennial, a bunch grass, it looked familiar. But away from the right-of-way, I could see none of it, only the endless invading cheatgrass, covering the slopes long since terraced by hooves of cattle and, before them, sheep. What was different about the fenced right-of-way? No cows, except now and then by accident. So it formed a refugia of sorts for this plant, and the gorge an even better one. For there, on the inaccessible walls, the aboriginal grass of this country had never been extirpated. No tooth of cow or sheep had ever touched it. Yet once, it had clothed all the land around us.

Bluebunch wheatgrass, Pseudoroegneria spicata. I recognized it now, for it grew, in a somewhat different shade of green, in our own backyard in Idaho. Back when I was taking range classes in college, bluebunch wheatgrass was described as an "ice cream plant," and a "decreaser," that disappeared under heavy grazing pressure. A study of cattle diets in eastern Oregon in the 1970s showed that in pastures where bluebunch wheatgrass made up 25% of the forage, it formed 28% of the diet of the cattle. Today in eastern Oregon, the disturbance-driven process of conversion from an ecoregion dominated by bluebunch wheatgrass, Idaho fescue, and sagebrush to one covered in cheatgrass is nearly complete. What we had stumbled upon were relic populations.

This Oregon variety of bluebunch wheatgrass was taller and paler than our Idaho plants, more limber somehow. And once, when mountain men like John Day first saw Picture Gorge, and later when the first white cattlemen and sheepmen salivated over the waving fronds growing on a thousand hills, it must indeed have tickled the bellies of horses and made the viewer think of an ocean of grass. For even now, as it clings for survival to a wall of basalt where no Angus can climb, it is a force of nature, and a wonder.

To restore bluebunch wheatgrass and its fellow natives to the spectacular canyons and fossil beds of the John Day drainage will be the work of generations, and it will only begin with the removal of livestock. Conservation groups like ONDA and WWP are in for a long fight. But although I have been told by other, perhaps wiser, heads that once cheatgrass takes over a landscape, there is no turning back the ecological clock, the sight of those wheatgrass plants thriving on a roadside makes me believe that if these protected areas can be expanded, a seed source yet remains to begin recolonization by native species. For where no livestock graze and trample, bluebunch wheatgrass survives, and multiplies. And if it grows on right-ofways and cliffs, it must also grow, isolated but persistent, in the midst of rockpiles on other hills. Nor is the plant without hidden resources: its roots possess a heavy, waxy skin that survives dry soils and actually resists invasion by cheatgrass. In a fair fight, bluebunch wheatgrass can win, and in a world now warming and drying, it will need all its armor.

Louise Wagenknecht is an author, activist and WWP Board Member. She lives in Leadore, Idaho.

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