Outdoors

For every mountain I believe there is one place, one vantage point, from which the peak appears particularly fetching.

We walked into the meadow and for a moment I wondered whether some noxious substance had been spilled across the otherwise sylvan scene.

’Tis better to give than to receive, to which I would add that it’s also gratifying to yank somebody’s pickup truck out of the snow.

Oregon’s estimated wolf population increased by 15% in 2019, and as has been the case since the animals returned to Oregon about 20 years ago, the majority of the state’s wolves live in the no…

Oregon’s estimated wolf population increased by 15% in 2019, and as has been the case since the animals returned to Oregon about 20 years ago, the majority of the state’s wolves live in the no…

When you’re serious about social distancing — as we all should be — it’s helpful to live where public land is measured in the millions of acres.

My right boot puffed dust and my left sunk into grainy snow of the sort that’s usually squeezed into a paper cup and slathered with intensely sweet syrup that turns your tongue an artificially…

Poachers don’t just steal from hunters, Yvonne Shaw emphasizes — they steal from every Oregonian.

I was driving through the sage, hoping to find a mild spring breeze and the early buttercup, when I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw a cloud of dust roiling in my wake.

There are millions of trees in the Wallowa Mountains but sometimes it only takes one to stop a bunch of Boy Scouts.

My son Max was so focused on following the heading on his new compass that he didn’t notice he had dropped one of his black ski gloves.

The annual Christmas bird count in Baker County yielded 71 species and thousands of individual birds.

The insect-spread virus that killed an estimated 2,000 white-tailed deer in Umatilla County last fall has been detected elsewhere in Northeast Oregon, but it hasn’t caused any major die-offs i…

The relative handful of hunters fortunate enough to draw a tag for a mountain goat will have more time to track down one of the cliff-dwelling animals in 2020.

I love snow except when my rig is mired in the stuff up to the axles, as helpless as a whale stranded above the high-tide line.

Elk, it turns out, are no more able to resist the lure of ice cream than a sugar-craving kid is.

Henry Spivey clamps a bare fish hook in a tiny vise and starts wrapping bright orange thread around the metal.

A Christmas tree is an enchanting sight both when it’s standing in a snowy glen in the deep woods and later, when its aromatic and ornament-laden branches enrich your living room.

The snowstorms that bookended Thanksgiving didn’t deliver quite enough snow to allow Anthony Lakes Mountain Resort to open for the season.

Oregon wildlife officials are trying to make it easier for hunters to harvest antlerless elk that are damaging croplands in Northeastern Oregon.

The patch of ice looked to me like orthopedic surgery.

When my son Max realized that going elk hunting with me was unlikely to involve any actual elk, his attention wandered.

Farel Baxter’s dad died almost a quarter century ago but even now there are moments, when he’s deep in the Eagle Cap Wilderness, that Farel feels his father as not merely a pleasant memory but…

The stump of the juvenile ponderosa pine nearly sent me sprawling, but I wasn’t particularly perturbed at barely avoiding what might have been a painful tumble.

Fischer Schluessler traveled most of the way across America to hunt mountain goats in Baker County.

The thermometer is the customary instrument for detecting the passage of one season to the next, but I’ve often found that the wind tells the more compelling tale.

Wes Morgan isn’t thrilled by the prospect of slogging through snow before the calendar flips from September to October.

The elk: a great runner, an eater-upper of rough terrain, a beast that knits the Blue/Wallowa Mountain country together in its yearly rounds — summering in the high parklands and meadows, wint…

The Herculean Camping Loop is a seven-day, 292-mile road cycling adventure through a wide range of ecosystems and summits. Each day covers between 16 and 58 miles of isolated pavement and conc…

There is an advantage to hiking in conditions that approximate the inside of a refrigerator, only with wind gusts and rain showers, neither of which is common inside a properly functioning kit…

Some of the more memorable climbs I’ve made in the mountains brought me to low ground rather than high.

As we watched mountain goats saunter across nearly sheer rock, frolic on snowdrifts and crop alpine wildflowers, I had a sudden and almost painful hankering for an elephant ear.

It was the hottest day of the year and my throat felt the way I imagine it would feel if I had recently swallowed a sheet of sandpaper.

A mountain stream is the artistic virtuoso of the natural world.

NORTH POWDER — Dan Marvin stands beside a chest-high bale of alfalfa hay and gazes west to the dark forest at the base of the Elkhorn Mountains, where the hungry beasts wait.

By Katy Nesbitt

By JAYSON JACOBY

By JAYSON JACOBY