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Cataclysmic Origins
Violent geological forces first molded this place around 14 million years ago. The shifting Yellowstone hot spot first erupted in the area where Idaho, Oregon and Nevada meet, spewing gigantic clouds of volcanic ash into the air. When these superheated billows of ash reached the ground, they cooled into masses of welded rhyolitic tuffs characteristic of the Owyhee region.
Shifting slowly northeast, the rhyolite caldera blew again, about 11 million years ago, in the Bruneau region, belching more molten rhyolite and leaving basalt shield volcanoes in its wake. After this turbulence, massive Lake Idaho began to form, flooding the volcanic crescent of the Snake River Plain. As time passed, the climate grew moist and cool; plants and animals, some long-extinct like the saber-toothed salmon and the scimitar-toothed cat, flourished in and around this series of ancient lakes just north of the eruptions. The fossils of these creatures are still visible in a series of extraordinary exposed strata found only in the Owyhee-Bruneau Canyonlands.
Nearly a million years ago in a prolonged flood, Lake Idaho drained out Hells Canyon, and, as the water level dropped, the mouths of the Owyhee, Bruneau, and Jarbidge Rivers and their tributaries began to erode headwards, carving a fantastic labyrinth of canyons in the thick layers of igneous deposits. These gargantuan natural forces left a network of exposed rhyolitic formations found nowhere else in the world, and molded the fantastic topography of the Owyhee-Bruneau Canyonlands. Just 3,000 years ago, the climate began to grow warmer and drier, and the surrounding flora and fauna in turn changed and adapted, until the present-day high desert ecosystem developed in the remnants of massive volcanic and climatic cataclysm.
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Flourishing Sage Steppe and Canyons
Today, in this desert defined by rivers, expansive reaches of sage steppe, lush riparian pockets, ancient juniper woodlands, and intermittent drainages support rare, endemic, and diverse populations of flora and fauna including sage grouse, California bighorn sheep, spotted bats, Columbia spotted frogs, red band trout, rattlesnake stickseed, Davis's peppergrass, and the unique papposa sagebrush. Often sagebrush country has been maligned as useless land, but even a short walk here reveals instead a network of vibrant biotic communities. Pronghorn antelope, gray fly-catchers, mule deer, loggerhead shrikes, ferruginous hawks, pygmy rabbits, and scores of other birds, mammals, reptiles, and invertebrates utilize the forage and cover of the sagebrush sea.
This wealth of biological life is linked to the health of the Owyhee as a dynamic ecological system, in which all these diverse species rely on the communities of sage and riparian oases that provide necessary habitat and food. Identified by the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP) as one of only three regions in the entire basin with high range integrity, the Owyhee is the largest and one of the last remaining examples of the flourishing sage steppe that once covered the Columbia Plateau. It provides the expansive habitat that these species and natural processes need to survive in one of the most rapidly growing and changing sectors of the West.
A Dynamic Cultural Landscape
Beyond its biological richness, however, the Owyhee Canyonlands are also a dynamic cultural landscape where people have long joined in a close-linked relationship between land and life. The canyons run through some of the richest archaeological and cultural sites in the country, a place inhabited for thousands of years by the ancestors of the Shoshone and Paiute Tribes, and still an essential and sacred landscape to this nation within our nation.
In 1818, the Northwest Fur Company sent Donald Mackenzie on an expedition to explore the lower Snake River Country. Several of the expedition's members were from the Hawai'ian islands, termed "Owyhees," in another spelling of the European explorers'. Three Owyhees went to explore an unchartered river in southwest Idaho, failed to return to the Rendezvous at Fort Boise that spring, and were never seen again. The river and surrounding region were named for them and remain the only topography with that old phonetic spelling. Jarbidge, the river flowing from Nevada into Idaho, is a Shoshone word that means "a weird beastly creature". These colorful names depict this area known for its dramatic, stark beauty.
In this high, lonely desert cowboys and Basque sheepherders scratched
out a living or went bust, Native Americans clashed with the westward
push of Euro-American settlement on the Oregon Trail, and nefarious
outlaws evaded the law. The contours of the land are dotted with
vestiges of this rough history - the skeleton frame of a homestead,
crumbling stone walls, petroglyphs depicting bighorn sheep etched into
the rimrock.
The story of people in the Owyhee Canyonlands has been shaped by the land itself, from the ancient tribes whose hunting technology changed as the climate grew warmer to the horse thieves who took advantage of the broken topography of Juniper Mountain to hide. In deep canyons, ancestors of the Shoshone and Paiute tribes gathered camas and caught salmon according to the change of seasons. Their modern relatives consider the whole landscape sacred - the canyon walls, the flights of migrating birds, the water melting down from the mountains - a symbiotic relationship in which their lives and spirituality intertwine with their traditional homeland. Since the history of people here has been composed according to the landscape itself, protection of this place must include an understanding of the indigenous conception of the land as well as preservation of the thousands of cultural sites that tell the stories and hint at the mysteries of its human inhabitants.
- What you can do in and about the Owyhee Canyonlands
- Background on conservation challenges and opportunities
- View a slide show of spectacular images from the greater Owyhee Canyonlands
Photos, top to bottom: The Owyhee river in a rhyolite
canyon, courtesy Wm. H. Mullins; sunset over the North
Fork at Three Forks, courtesy
Tom von Alten;
historic stone cabin, courtesy Amy Haak. All photos used with permission.
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