We're being served a beer and a story at the local tavern-general store-restaurant, which is decorated with rattlesnake skins, pictures of women holding elk antlers and old-timey jokes about fishing. The tavern makes no bones about its position on Canadian wolves being introduced to nearby Idaho, with signs reading: "Canadian wolf ... tastes like chicken" and, "Canadian wolf ... It's what's for dinner!"
Eating wolves might sound like bumper-sticker banter, but until a few years ago, Imnaha served barbecued bear along with rattlesnakes at its yearly Canyon Days festival. Animals play a big role in conversation here. Cougar sightings, where the salmon are biting, wolf politics and, of course, rattlesnakes. The tavern keeps a freezer full of rattlers for the barbecue.
The waitress recently moved here from Florida and beams with pride about her new home; a place of exquisite beauty, and a simple life. She explains that if you're taking the unpaved road to the prairie, it's essential to let someone know. "If you don't come back, they do go looking for you."
About the morel mushrooms on the road, she says, "Some people just go mushroom hunting from their car. They stick their heads out the window and look for them that way."
The road from Imnaha to the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve winds through a canyon lined with grasses and dense thickets of pines. It's rocky at first, but after an hour of driving slowly, we gain elevation, the trees and rocks disappear and soon we are on bare grasslands, which sway in the breeze under giant cumulonimbus clouds.
The 300,000 acre Zumwalt Prairie, on the other hand, is so high in elevation (between 3,500 and 5,000 feet), so remote and so generally unusable, it's avoided the plow. Most of it is used for ranching.
Its center is protected in a vast 33,000-acre preserve by the Nature Conservancy and is an example of the Internet's power of conservation. The Nature Conservancy had been interested in the prairie for years but never had the funds to pay for it. When the property was up for sale, the Conservancy marketed the proposition on the Web and secured the funds.
As we drive on a lone dirt road that straddles a ridge of grass, I tell my brother that a Portland birding friend had mentioned that a snowy owl had been sighted on the prairie a week ago, and that I should keep my eye out just in case.
"But snowy owls are seen in the continental states only in the dead of winter," I say. "They leave Canada because the weather conditions make it hard for them to hunt, so they'll survive by moving south."
Just as we finish up talking about the owl, a huge white ghost of a shape launches itself from a fence-post in front of us. It is June, but there is no question what we have just seen; the extreme coincidence hits hard as we stop the truck and watch the giant bird glide down a field of wildflowers.
It is such a rare sighting this time of year, but birds that travel end up in some weird places. A snowy owl was found this winter in Hawaii.
We continue to drive along the ranchlands into the evening. The Zumwalt Prairie is so huge, driving across it can take hours.
As the sun sets below the rolling hills, we see elk in the hills. "There must be 12 or 14 of them," I say. "No look, 10 more over there," my brother responds. But it doesn't stop there. Just up the road, another 120 elk are racing along the hillside.
Seeing this huge herd of elk reminds me why the gray wolf, which now has established populations in Oregon, was reintroduced into Idaho and Montana in the first place: keystone species are fundamental to natural balance in vast, unmanaged wildernesses. Their primary purpose: keep elk populations in control.
I wanted to know more about the bumper stickers in Imnaha; why some people in this part of the country didn't see eye to eye with conservationists who were making a pitch for the reintroductions.
Anti-wolf sentiment has been spreading to the Zumwalt Prairie, where signs on ranch fence posts are starting to appear: "New wolf management Plan: Implementation of plan requires the use of these tools – Beretta, Browning, Colt, Glock, Marlin, Mauser, Remington ..."
There are real concerns about wolves in both Idaho and here in the northeastern Oregon ranchlands, as wolves can and do kill livestock, and certainly create a reasonable sense of fear among ranchers about what might happen any night to their animals. But actual confirmed livestock kills are few and coyotes contribute to more livestock deaths than wolves. But wolves keep coyote levels in check.
At night, we drive back to Enterprise, population 2,000, home of the Terminal Gravity Brewery, which distributes microbrews cold around the state. Enterprise, like nearby Joseph, is not draped in Wild West motifs like so many other out-west towns.
These towns also sit on the Zumwalt Prairie. A hundred-fifty years ago, this prairie was the seasonal hunting grounds of the Chief Joseph band of the Nez Perce. Stalked and hunted by whites in the 1870s, the Nez Perce were forced on a military retreat that led them 1,200 miles to seek support from other tribes. Much of the history of this area centers around Chief Joseph -- that's his Christian name. His native name translates as "Thunder Rolls Down the Mountain."
Chief Joseph's nephew, Yellow Wolf, was a vital strategist in the retreat. He never converted to Christianity, and, like some other Nez Perce, followed a revivalist tradition called the Dreamer Faith, which was deeply rooted in the environment of eastern Oregon and was a call to return to indigenous traditions.
The connection to the past feels real in these towns and ranches on the northeastern edge of Oregon, with all the early 20th-century homes and farms spreading across a vast, green prairie. It is how I imagined a people should keep their land, close to its natural state.
-- Erik Gauger lives in Portland. His blog, notesfromtheroad.com, is illustrated with a large-format 4x5 camera,hand-painted sketches, watercolor maps and travel notes.