Antelope refuge opens eyes to natural beauty, rock art

HART MOUNTAIN NATIONAL ANTELOPE REFUGE, Ore. — The images emerge on the sheer walls of Petroglyph Lake in strokes thousands of years old — a lizard here, an antelope there and abstract swirls and hash marks that blend into the weather-worn rock. A human figure with enormous, buggy eyes towers over an antelope while a nearby hunter takes aim at a crane in full flight.

This is the mystery of Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, a stark and beautiful expanse in remote southeastern Oregon where ancient animals seem to crawl from the rock and take their place alongside the living. On this sweltering day, real-life birds skim the lake, antelope herds pound across the sagebrush, and mule deer sprawl out, panting, behind bunches of meadow grass.

With a little patience and perseverance, visitors can see these animals — and more — and still have time to hike in high-desert canyons, explore caves and wonder at cliff walls peppered with age-worn drawings. Natural hot springs beckon at the end of a long day.

“I think everybody should see this place at least once in their life,” says Raija Guptill, 26, on a recent visit to the refuge with her fiance from Klamath Falls, Ore. “There’s so much wildlife, and the people who come out here aren’t necessarily the city people. Everyone respects the nature.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the refuge in 1936 as a protected breeding ground for the pronghorn antelope, a deer-size animal with bold black-and-white markings and elegant, heart-shaped horns. Pronghorn, which evolved to outrun cheetahlike animals thousands of years ago, flourish on the refuge. Coyotes are their only modern-day predator.

A recent count recorded more than 2,400 pronghorn — the most in nearly 70 years — and today they roam freely over the refuge’s wild expanses.

A drive across the preserve’s gravel backroads yields dozens of sightings, from a herd of 25 lolling in a lush streambed to a single buck ambling across the road. Near dusk, one herd of at least 50 seems to playfully race a visitor’s truck, stretching out in a single-file line and only falling back at 35 mph.

“I was herding them with the pickup,” says Bill Nygren, 68, visiting the refuge with his family from Bonanza, Ore. “They were right in front of us. They were real tame, just jogging along in front of the truck.”

The refuge covers an area roughly one-third the size of Rhode Island and sprawls across a massive tabletop of rock that rises abruptly from a flat plain dotted with alkaline lakes, hayfields and cattle pastures. The plateau, peppered with the refuge’s namesake, Hart Mountain, and other peaks, rises up to 8,000 feet above the plain below. The nearest town of any size is 65 miles away.

Antelope are its most famous attraction, but the refuge teems with wildlife, from floppy-eared mule deer to sleek coyotes to nearly 240 bird species that flock to its shallow lakes and high-altitude aspen groves.

An isolated stand of ponderosa pine nicknamed Blue Sky Hotel, a rare holdover from a cooler climate 10,000 years ago, is particularly good for bird-watching.

“It’s like an island in the desert,” Andy Kerr, a conservationist and author of the “Oregon Desert Guide,” says of the refuge. “Up on top, you have ponderosa pine trees and aspen forests, but you also have vast expanses of sagebrush. It’s more diverse than anything around it, and it’s very pretty.”

The refuge hosts several hundred California bighorn sheep that lurk in rocky canyons. The sheep, which were reintroduced in 1954 from British Columbia after being driven to extinction on Hart Mountain in 1915, usually can be spotted only with field binoculars. The refuge has one of the healthiest populations of bighorn sheep in Oregon and supplies other parts of the state with animals.

“If you scan the rims, often you’ll see them grazing right near the rimrocks. It’s fairly easy to spot them if you’re willing to take the time,” says Bill Marlett, director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association in Bend and an annual refuge visitor.

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