S. John Collins / Baker City Herald Little Mill Creek cascades from higher reaches in the watershed through cool, lush vegetation to provide clean water for Baker City residents.

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Welcome to peak water use season in Baker City, when as many as 9 million gallons flow from our faucets each day as if by magic.

You turn on the tap and what do you find? Water, like anywhere else.

But Baker City water has a path like few others, and a history like no other.

Almost every nearby waterway snakes toward the Columbia and the Pacific Ocean, even the Powder River running through town.

The Northwest is a region geographically highlighted by humidity west of the Cascades and aridity east of them. Yet Baker City, located east of the Cascades and the Elkhorns, a subrange of the Blue Mountains, has water.

Lots of water.

By Jayson Jacoby

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Baker County’s best-known ghost town has been livelier than usual this summer.

Sumpter’s history, which mixes a rich legacy of gold mining with anecdotal tales of various hauntings, has proved irresistible to the ever-growing arena of reality TV.

A crew is producing a multi-episode series in and around Sumpter this summer that combines the area’s historical and supernatural attributes, said LeAnne Woolf, a Sumpter city councilor.

The working title of the series is “Ghost Mine,” she said.

A member of the film crew told city councilors this month that the series is tentatively scheduled to air this November, on Syfy (formerly the Sci-Fi Channel), Woolf said.

“It’s been quite a summer,” she said.

By Chris Collins

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Superintendent Walt Wegener will focus on leading  the Baker School District through a new process for evaluating its teachers in the coming year as required by a state law that takes effect in July 2013.

After a nearly day-long planning session Tuesday,  the Baker School Board agreed that Wegener should shift his priorities to ensure the district complies with Senate Bill 290, passed by the 2011 Legislature.

The law requires the state to adopt performance standards to help school districts make employment decisions “including continued employment, compensation and career advancement” for teachers and administrators based on student, school and district performance data.

In earlier goal-setting sessions, Wegener had been directed to focus on leading district administrators in realigning the curriculum to comply with state standards.

Laura Hurley of Vancouver, Wash., says she dresses in the attire common to the period when the big 1918 Cadillac cruised the roads of America. Hurley arrived at the Quail Ridge Golf Course with her husband, Frank, not shown, for lunch Tuesday along with car club members in 31 other classic old cars. Behind her is friend Joyce Knepper of Portland. Hurley said she considers herself and others as “caretakers of the old cars.”

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Take a look around Baker City this week and you might notice a few special guests. They aren’t hard to spot — there’s about 90 of them. And they’re driving cars from before World War II.

Listen to those horns awooga, watch the sun glint off lacquered fenders, smell the leather and rubber of these well-loved and well-restored vehicles.

Or should we call them horseless carriages? Which isn’t to be flip or to revisit the parlance of their times — it’s the name of the group.

By Terri Harber

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Dr. Wendy Ring and her husband, Michael Shapiro, were pedaling a tandem bicycle through Baker City on Monday afternoon. They came to talk about the weather. 

Theirs wasn’t a friendly little chat about pleasantly warm summer days, however. The couple wanted to discuss global climate change and its effects on people’s health. 

The couple began their cross-country bicycle trip in Eugene earlier this month. They intend to reach Washington, D.C., in September. Ring wants to return to work as a family doctor in Eureka, Calif., by October.

Physicians “have one foot in the science world and the other foot in the people’s world,” Ring said. “Doctors can help people try to understand what climate change really means to them."

By Jayson Jacoby

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A Baker City man has been charged with manslaughter for a May crash on Highway 7 that killed a Pendleton woman.

Derrick A. Coates, 24, was arrested just after midnight Saturday morning and taken to the Baker County Jail. Bail was set at $75,000. Coates was scheduled to be arraigned at 1:15 p.m. today.

Coates is charged with two felonies — second-degree manslaughter and third-degree assault — in the May 28 crash that killed Leta Louise Currey, 46.

Second-degree manslaughter is a Measure 11 crime in Oregon; if convicted on that charge, Coates would be sentenced to a minimum of 75 months in prison.

Caleb Johnson competed in the 2007 Baker City Bull Riding Blowout.

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This weekend, a Baker City native returns home for one final bull ride.

“I shattered my knee a year ago, and I decided my career was over,” said Caleb Johnson.

Riding a bull at the time, Johnson was thrown to the ground, where his knee buckled in the wrong direction. 

He broke his tibial plateau in 11 places, destroying the smooth surface which syncs against the femur bone.

“I know I’m done for good — but I wanted to do one more ride,” said Johnson, who is the son of Dave and Cathy Johnson of Baker City.

That ride will be Saturday’s Baker City Bull Riding Blowout at the Fairgrounds. It starts at 6 p.m.

By Jayson Jacoby

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If environmental groups file suit to stop a proposed timber sale in eastern Baker County, they might have company in the courtroom.

But on the opposite side of the aisle.

“If that happens (a suit is filed), I personally want to be there when they make a case before a judge,” said Fred Warner Jr., chairman of the Baker County Board of Commissioners.

The potential legal intrigue has to do with the Snow Basin project on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.

Forest officials announced this month that later this summer they intend to offer to mills the first of five proposed timber sales.

The Snow Basin project covers about 28,500 acres in the southern Wallowa Mountains.

By Jayson Jacoby

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The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest will soon announce a schedule of public meetings regarding the forest’s controversial plan to ban motor vehicles from many roads.

Forest officials will announce, “on or about Aug. 1,” a schedule for meetings that will take place later this summer, said Matt Burks, public affairs officer for the Wallowa-Whitman.

That announcement will include several other matters related to the Travel Management Plan, Burks said:

Delbert Stephens farms southwest of North Powder.

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The morning of Saturday, July 15 brought a two-prong hail storm to portions of the North Powder Valley and the Bridgeport area. Although many in the area were spared so much as a single hailstone, local farmers saw their wheat and potato fields thrashed by these white pellets varying in size from peas to golf balls, according to Mark Bennett, Baker County’s planning director.

Delbert Stephens, who farms near Haines, watched the strip-like hail storm sweep down from the Elkhorn Mountains. It reached the potato fields he and Jason Williams lease from Allen and Dale Bingham.

On Tuesday morning, Stephens dug through the shredded leaves, the flattened stalks and the wet soil.

“Without the leaves there’s  no photosynthesis,” he said.