[pct-l] Desert Night hiking

[Nathan Miller]

>If you ask people who live in wetter parts of the country *cough*Seattle*cough* they'll tell you that the first 700 miles can be damn hot and dry no matter what the desert rats call it.  :-)

For that matter, most of us here in the Pacific North-Wet call Central Oregon "the High Desert."  It's not really even remotely desert at all.  It does sit in the rain shadow of the Cascades, but it's actually a mixture of sagebrush scrub and juniper woodland with some open grassland here and there, considered semi-desert at most.  I've seen some Opuntia fragilis (fragile prickly-pear cactus) over by the John Day Painted Hills northeast of the Ochoco Mts, but that's not really desert either--it's more of that juniper woodland and sagebrush scrub.
There's not much real desert in Oregon, except in places in the southeast corner.  See:
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/range/sites/default/files/EcologicalProvincesOfOregon/province_map.htm

-Nate the Trail Zombie
Newberg, OR