The Steens Mountains in Southeastern Oregon are a surprise to most people. Rising to above 9,000 feet with a snow covered crest extending for 40 miles; the Steens protrude impressively from the desert below. The range is a fault block, formed by an uplift, which resulted in a steep 5,000-foot high escarpment down to the Alvord Desert to the East.

For years, I had wanted to ski the Steens. From the West, a gentle loop road from the town of French Glen climbs to the south end of the crest. This road can be easily skied or as is more common in this area, traveled by snowmobile. But the total crest, extending from south to north, sees little activity. I found only one reference to a ski trip in the book "The Best Ski Touring in America" by Steve Barnett, published in 1987. But that effort did not follow the entire crest.

After several calls to the Burns BLM office and to Lou West, the owner of a private ranch at the south end of the range to get permission to cross his property, Armando Menocal and I drove to the Steens in mid-March 2001. We parked one of our vehicles at the north end of the range 40 ski miles from where we would start and then drove south along the good road that parallels the escarpment on the east. We drove to the ranch where Lou was kind enough to give us a ride in his truck to the end of the road. The elevation was 4400 feet.

Armando's and my packs were 36 and 4l pounds respectively. We had enough food for 6 days. We carried our skis for about 2 miles but from that point on, we had continuous snow for the remainder of the tour. We skied north up Wildrose Canyon for the rest of the first day in poor visibility, but route finding was not a problem since the canyon was wide and obvious.

The 2nd day, the weather was worse, but we continued up a very steep headwall to above 9400 feet in whiteout conditions to within one half mile of the highest point of the range at 9723 feet. High winds and no visibility kept us from bagging the peak. Instead we continued along the crest, navigating by compass, occasionally seeing signs of the snowcovered loop road from the West. Night 2 was spent just before the crux of the trip, a traverse along a knife-edge ice covered ridge above Kiber Gorge, which needed to be negotiated to reach the more gentle Northern section of the tour.

When we woke on the morning of the 3rd day, the weather was better but it was still windy and cold. It would have required crampons and the better part of a day to negotiate this very technical ridge. Looking to the North, the snow cover was sparse which would have required a significant amount of walking at the end of the 40-mile route. So we bailed! We skied west following the loop road and the many snowmobile tracks toward the small town of French Glen.

By the afternoon of day 4, we had reached the end of skiable snow and after walking for several miles; we were lucky enough to catch a ride with Mary, the BLM Ranger whom I had talked to via telephone several weeks earlier. She had been skiing along the loop road. She offered to give us a lift back to our car, which was a big help since our aborted route resulted in us being 50 miles by road away from the vehicle parked at the end of the trip.

The Steens Crest remains unskied. To finish the route will require a better than average snow year plus some technical gear to negotiate the knife ridge. It might be a great trip.