Jacoby

I tried to avoid looking at the thermometer, but keeping your eyes open is a key aspect of safe driving.

It’s the key aspect, really.

This particular instrument, which displays the temperature in pale orange LED digits, sits conveniently in the center of the dashboard.

You can’t truly ignore it.

Even when you concentrate on the road ahead the numbers tug at your peripheral vision, much as the selection of items entices once you’re confined to the impulse-buy tunnel leading to the grocery checkout.

I was blissfully unaware, for instance, of how deeply I desired a salted caramel Twix, a confection I was not aware existed until I saw a stack of them in their brightly, crinkly wrappers, placed conveniently at just about my eye level in front of the conveyor belt.

On the morning of Jan. 29 I resisted the urge to glance at the thermometer because of the frigid treachery it betrayed.

As we descended from Blue Springs Summit toward our snowshoeing destination near Granite, the number steadily shrunk.

And it wasn’t balmy to start with.

From 19 to 17 to 13, an inexorable demonstration of the confounding phenomenon of the temperature inversion, which perverts the notion that to warm up you go lower.

When we parked at the intersection with the 7370 Road, which follows Boundary Creek, the verdict was 11.

I took solace, meager though it was, that at least the figure was above zero.

My wife, Lisa, and I were hardly surprised by the chill.

An arctic front had bulled its way through Northeastern Oregon the previous day, scouring out the clouds that hold some of the ground’s heat and replacing them with the sort of north wind associated with polar bears patrolling ice floes for unwary seals.

I picked Boundary Creek based in part on the idea that the nearby bulk of Mount Ireland would at least deflect, if not altogether block, the eye-watering, nostril-clenching gusts.

Mount Ireland, a sort of granitic flying buttress to Elkhorn Ridge, lies a few miles to the north of Boundary Creek, so my optimism was at least grounded in topographic reality.

We hadn’t even strapped on our snowshoes, though, before a nasty breeze whipped up. Even a gentle zephyr is unpleasant at such temperatures, and I winced.

Worse still, the wind was coming out of the south, proof that large-scale wind patterns don’t always comport with the contorted terrain of the Blue Mountains.

Happily, the wind was a brief interlude in an otherwise placid day.

Placid but also dazzling.

I wouldn’t have made it 100 feet without my sunglasses to protect my eyes from the disco ball effect of unfiltered sunlight on fresh snow.

Although I hadn’t considered this factor in choosing the 7370 Road, its location was ideal for snowshoeing on a frigid but sunny late morning. The road runs generally north, so the sun enveloped our backs as we trudged along.

We were both wearing black jackets, and even though the tight-feeling skin on my cheeks told the tale of the air temperature, the fabric absorbed the heat. That, combined with the inevitable exertion of snowshoeing, left us pleasantly warm.

The illusion was interrupted only when the road, which meanders as mountain roads usually do, curved into a fold in the landscape where the sun, at that hour, didn’t penetrate.

The rapidity with which the cruel cold of midwinter asserts itself never fails to impress me.

It’s a trifle frightening, too, a reminder that while a 90-minute snowshoe romp is easy, surviving in such conditions for even one night would be hard, and probably painful.

We walked the road for almost a mile, to where it crosses from the east side of Boundary Creek to the west.

There’s a fork here. We walked a short distance on the road leading up the ridge to the west of the creek, but only because we hoped to reach a view west toward the Desolation country.

(We didn’t.)

Instead we descended to the stream, which I had intended to follow back to the highway at the Forest Service’s Boundary guard station.

I don’t mind snowshoeing on roads, but I much prefer cross-country routes — especially along ice-bound mountain creeks in winter.

It is the ideal season to stroll beside such streams because the snow — it was about 3 feet deep on the day of our hike — covers most of the logs and brush and other obstacles that can make summer walking so annoying.

Also I find the variety of the scenes endlessly fascinating. I ponder why the creek is frozen in some places but flowing freely in others. I try to imagine, based on the tracks of the squirrels and hares and, occasionally, an elk or a coyote, what I would see if I set up a video camera to record for a day or two.

In the end, though, nothing quite compares to a forest in winter, particularly in an isolated place where few people go in that season.

Lisa and I saw no recent signs of human activity. And although we never got more than a mile from the highway we heard only a couple times the distant and unimportant hum of tires on snow or, even less relevant, the soft roar of an airliner’s jet engines miles above.

On the ground the world is distilled to its basic elements — the brutal cold tempered by the beneficent sunshine, the music of a mountain brook, a sky of blue that does not exist in any tube of paint, the scent of lodgepole pine that can’t be confined to a spray bottle.

From Baker City drive Highway 7 for about 25 miles to Sumpter Junction, then turn right on Granite Hill Highway. Continue through Sumpter to Blue Springs Summit, and then for 6 miles, toward Granite, to the 7370 Road on the right. The snowplows have created a small parking area here.

Hike Road 7370, which heads west for a short distance then veers north, for about 0.9 of a mile to where it crosses Boundary Creek. From here, Road 7370 continues, at a steeper uphill grade, on the west side of the creek for a few miles. 

To return to the highway and pass Boundary guard station, follow the creek back to the south. The guard station, which is closed, is in a meadow a few hundred yards off the highway.