Ron DeRoest, a natural raconteur with a voice that ranges from a deep bass to a high-pitched cackle, shares stories of his life on Nov. 14, 2023, at his home outside Baker City.

BAKER CITY — Ron DeRoest’s best friend for a while was a bobcat.

DeRoest caught the kitten in a trap but the feline seemed not to hold a grudge.

So long as DeRoest kept it fed, anyway.

“He would eat nine ground squirrels or three rabbits a day,” DeRoest said.

He has also been acquainted at times during his 72 years with a raccoon and a bull elk and a verbose crow that took up with DeRoest even after he shot it.

“I have an appreciation for wildlife,” the Baker City native said during a recent interview from his home in Griffin Gulch, a few miles south of town.

Appreciation understates DeRoest’s relationship with the fish, birds and other animals that live in the wild parts of Northeast Oregon.

He’s no hermit — although decades ago that moniker wouldn’t have been wholly inappropriate.

But DeRoest greatly prefers the mountains to the city — has since he was a teenager.

“I like to get away from people and be with the animals,” he said.

It can be lonely up in the hills, to be sure.

“You spend a couple months by yourself in the mountains, it affects you mentally,” DeRoest said.

But animals, despite being lousy conversationalists, don’t get drunk.

They don’t put you in a foster home.

Home in the hills

DeRoest gravitated to the mountains because he felt he had no better option.

His parents divorced when he was about 10.

He lived with his mom and stepfather on a farm in Baker Valley. DeRoest said his stepdad was mean and abusive, and not interested in raising his stepson.

DeRoest said his biological father, Leon, who was an alcoholic, didn’t want him either.

When he was 13 or so, he was “kicked out” of the house.

He said he lived for a while in a barn, cuddling with the dairy cows, which he milked daily, to stay warm.

Then he lived with a nearby family for a while, and later in a series of foster homes.

But he disliked living in those homes, felt he was valued for his ability to work but for nothing else.

He ran away.

DeRoest said he lived for a while in a cement silo near where the Baker Truck Corral was later built.

He went to school, but rarely.

Mostly he lived in the mountains.

One of DeRoest’s favorite places was Rondowa, where the Wallowa River meets the Grande Ronde.

He said he trapped raccoons and caught steelhead, soaking the fish in honey before smoking them over a fire of alder.

Sometimes he traded smoked fish with crews from trains on the nearby railroad. A member of a train crew gave him a .22 rifle.

DeRoest said he ran afoul of game wardens eventually. He had no money to pay fines. He spent a few days in the Wallowa County Jail in Enterprise.

DeRoest said he decided to move around, to become, in his word, a “nomad.”

A momentous meeting

DeRoest was 17 when he caught a ride that changed his life.

He had been in the woods above Sumpter for quite a while.

Without access to a shower.

His odor was powerful.

“I stunk like a damn skunk,” he says with a grin.

The vehicle that pulled to the shoulder, as DeRoest hiked near Deer Creek in Sumpter Valley, was a 1948 pickup truck.

The driver, having had a whiff of his passenger, relegated DeRoest to the truck’s bed.

But when they got to Baker City the driver brought him to his home and insisted he take a shower.

He even let DeRoest cook a fish he had caught.

He was preparing his catch when he met the teenage girl who lived in the home. Her name was Christine.

And although she complained about the fishy aroma emanating from the kitchen, she ended up as his wife.

They were married for 43 years.

Christine DeRoest died on Christmas Day 2011.

“What a Christmas present,” DeRoest says.

From Los Angeles back to Baker

Marriage and a family ended DeRoest’s mountain man days, though his affinity for the woods, and the creatures who live there, has never abated.

He and Christine had two sons.

Jody, the elder, died a few years ago. Ron Jr. lives in Boise.

DeRoest did odd jobs but eventually was hired with a construction company that did concrete work around the country.

He helped build Interstate 84 through Baker County.

He lived for a time in Los Angeles, where he was working on a construction job.

“Totally different jungle out there,” DeRoest said.

Unsuited for an urban environment, he quit the job and returned to Baker City.

He worked for his uncle, Francis DeRoest, a building contractor, for many years.

“I was really good at building houses,” he said. “He paid me real good.”

DeRoest continues to do construction jobs.

Between work and his hunting and fishing trips, he doesn’t have a lot of free time.

“He’s the busiest man I’ve ever met,” said Julie Reed-Brown, who lives with DeRoest.

They’ve been a couple for three years.

Reed-Brown lived in Los Angeles until her husband died.

She much prefers Baker County.

“I like the peace and quiet,” she said.

She often accompanies DeRoest — no longer the lone wanderer — on his trips to the mountains.

“I’ve been on a lot of adventures with him,” Reed-Brown said.

She marvels at his ability to navigate solely by his own internal compass, one programmed not with megabytes of digital data but by his own decades of experience.

“I punch in something in my GPS, but he just knows,” she said with a laugh.

DeRoest concedes he has no need of technological assistance.

“Anywhere within 100 miles of Baker, I can show you what’s there,” he said.

A deep well of stories

DeRoest is a natural raconteur.

His voice careens from a bass rumble to a higher-pitched cackle as he narrates stories of steelhead hooked and elk chased down and raccoons befriended.

To illustrate this last he rifles through a bureau, muttering to himself before finding his quarry.

Beaming, he drops the photo on his kitchen table like he’s a blackjack dealer laying down a card.

The photo shows DeRoest — a much younger man, his beard bushy, as it is now, but showing no trace of gray — with a raccoon perched on his neck, seeming as comfortable as a pet cat.

The raccoon, he said, was hardly the only wild animal he took up with, at least briefly.

There was the bobcat with the prodigious appetite.

And one time, along about the early 1970s, he was out hunting jackrabbits in the sagebrush country east of town. A persistent crow kept cawing just as DeRoest was taking aim.

Finally, his patience dissolved, he turned the barrel on the crow.

DeRoest almost immediately regretted his decision.

But as it turned out he had only winged the crow. The bird was quite alive, though not, for the moment, capable of flight. DeRoest decided to bring the bird to his home on Seventh Street.

He said his older son, Jody, was fond of the crow — he especially liked mimicking the bird’s croaky call.

The crow hung around for a few years. One day it flew away and didn’t return.

“I never did find out what happened to him,” DeRoest says.

Although his favorite stories involve the mountains, DeRoest doesn’t avoid talking about his difficult childhood.

But after spending so much time alone, pondering his life, he’s philosophical.

“What my folks did to me, I’ll never forget,” he said, his voice much quieter than when he’s talking about an elk or a long ago camping trip when a young companion placed his sleeping bag too close to the fire and was awakened by blazing fabric and .22 shells going off.

“But I loved them,” he continues. “Jesus forgave everyone for what they did, and I’m no better than him.”

After a few moments of reflection, though, DeRoest resumes his role as storyteller, sounding as though he ought to be sitting on a stump beside a campfire rather than in a chair in his kitchen.

He sums up his lifestyle with a pithy statement accompanied by a smile that could almost be described as a leer, albeit a jolly one.

“If somebody says, ‘let’s go fishing’ or ‘let’s go hunting,’ I’m gone.”

A 20th century mountain man

Name: Ron DeRoest

Age: 72

Occupation: contractor

Residence: Griffin Gulch, a few miles south of Baker City

Former homes: a dairy barn, a cement silo, the woods around Baker County, L.A.

A few of his former friends: a bobcat, a raccoon, a crow

“I like to get away from people and be with the animals.”

— Ron DeRoest