Shut The Front Door!

Linda Burton traveling from Boise, Idaho to Bend, Oregon on the way to Salem, Oregon – “Shut the front door!” or some version thereof is what I repeated each time I rounded another curve. The scenery was unexpected. According to the map, once I crossed the Snake River from Idaho into Oregon and left the freeway for Highway 20, there wasn’t much. First Vale, a small agricultural town, then what looked to be a curvy road to Burns, and Harney Basin. It was that unassuming curvy road that gave me the “wows” – a juicy-fruit of changing scenes, each one a surprise. All I could say was “Shut the front door!” Just outside Vale a lonely mass in a freshly plowed field commanded my attention. I stopped to read the sign. “Mahleur Butte,” it said, a leftover from the Idaho Lake of 2 million years ago. “Mahleur,” derived from the French “misfortune.” Turns out I’d see that name again and again. » read more