Oregon's Ancient Desert in Winter | Ténéré 700

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]I had to [clears throat] pull over again.

[00:00:03]I got my gloves off. I got my hands stuck underneath my clothes.

[00:00:08]Oh, it hurts.

[00:00:10]Wow.

[00:00:12]I mean, between here and Albert Lake, it really is mind-blowing. It is beautiful.

[00:00:16]It's a great drive. There's no traffic.

[00:00:19]There's nobody out here. Totally worth the drive.

[00:00:23]>> [music] [music] [music] >> All right. Man, that was cold. That was probably the longest stretch of being that cold that I've ever had to deal with. It's uh I want to say I left the house Well, actually, I know I left the house at 4:45 this morning. It's probably almost 8:00 already. And I've made it what would be like an hour or an hour and a half into the trip. It was just I had to keep on pulling over, getting feeling back in my fingers. My toes are still numb. Um and [snorts] yeah, it was just It was just quite the morning. So, we're going to head out to Silver Lake. We're going to head out to Albert Lake. There's some really cool history to this area, and um the geology out here I mean, this whole place used to be a giant lake bed. And we're not even that far from Fort Rock.

[00:01:52]Um it's right over there. We actually I almost went there this morning, but the two lakes are actually uh they're they're salt water lakes, and the it It's just a really neat area. There's some petroglyphs along the way hopefully we'll get to see. And uh yeah, we're going to see if we can't make up for some lost time here, uh step on it a little bit, and go see what we find today. Here we go.

[00:02:16]Man, I'm excited for this. This is going to be good.

[00:02:19]We got the moon up there. We got a little mountain.

[00:02:23]Just kind of Yeah, come on, baby.

[00:02:32]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Yep, that's me blowing right past the petroglyphs right there.

[00:03:20]Look, here's the thing. I was so caught off guard here by just how pretty this place was. You come up and over that pass, and you start looking down here in the valley, and Summer Lake is down there on the left. You've got Winter Rim up there on the right. And this place was really catching me off guard. I'd never been down here before, and I was loving this experience.

[00:03:42]Something that's crazy to keep in mind, we're dropping down right now into a little basin.

[00:03:47]This lake used to be 100 ft deep. So, the water went so high up these walls right here on the right. Those petroglyphs that we just drove by, just think, back in the day, that was people sitting at the river's edge or the the lake's edge, just carving things >> [music] >> into these rocks. It They were not climbing up this hill and hanging out on the hillside. It is wild to me to think about how cool it is that these things [music] have changed this much. So, at this point, we're down here at Summer Lake now. This is some really fun windy roads that kind of go along the lakeside here. This is one of those two alkaline lakes.

[00:04:31]>> [music] >> So, this one and Lake Albert or Abert, however you say it. Um these are two salt lakes right here, just a couple hours from home.

[00:04:41]Pretty rad. I was loving the ride here.

[00:04:43]Let's keep going.

[00:04:49]As you continue out here, you're riding along the bottom of Winter Rim on your right, and Summer Lake on your left. And the story goes, there's this guy, John Fremont. He gets assigned by the army to come out to the Great Basin out here in the Eastern Oregon area, and his job is to map this place out. Well, the guy's walking through 3 ft of snow. He's up there on the rim, and he is just shivering himself to death. And then all of a sudden, he comes over, and he sees down this nice, lush, green-looking Summer Lake. It's said that the contradiction between the two different areas were so strong that he said, "You know what? I'm going to name this Winter Rim up here, and that is Summer Lake down there."

[00:05:39]>> [music] >> Here's a cool fact for you. This basin was home to one of the earliest known settlements in North America. The Paisley Caves just south of here had human DNA dated over 14,000 years ago. That's before the Clovis culture that was previously thought to be the earliest Americans. This pushed the expected timeline for known humans in North America back by at least 1,000 years. It's still kind of contested out there, but this would imply that the people living on the shores of this ancient Lake Chewaucan were there before the ice age even ended.

[00:06:17]>> [music] >> How cool is that? Look at this.

[00:06:22]Wow, that is beautiful.

[00:06:29]The Google I just had the Gaia overlay with the snow, cuz I know that it starts up here. And it looks like right around the corner, um that's kind of where it starts. I know that I'm not going to get all the way up to the top, and I do want to get some shots of the um those cool peaks over there, along with spend some time down at the water. So, I'm thinking that I will call it good right here, um since I know that I'm really just going to kind of beander through around the side of this mountain without really gaining any elevation or anything until I hit the snow. So, I'm going to head on back down.

[00:07:07]See what that lake is all about.

[00:07:10]As much as I had aspirations to go up to the Fremont Overlook up there on Winter Rim today, I also needed to be realistic about it. I kind of knew that there was going to be some snow potential. So, at this point, I headed this bike back down, linked up with the pavement, pointed things south, started heading towards Lake Abert.

[00:07:29]>> [music] [music] >> Lake Abert doesn't actually look like much at first. You come around a bend on 395, and boom, there it is. This wide, flat sheet of water sitting at the base of a 2,500-ft rock wall. No beaches, no boats, no campgrounds, just the lake and the rim and the highway running between them.

[00:08:05]What's really cool about this is that what you're actually looking at is one of the last inland seas in North America.

[00:08:12]The water here is so alkaline, almost nothing can live in it. No fish, just brine shrimp and alkali flies, and the birds that come from thousands of miles away to eat them. Hundreds of thousands of them. These birds somehow know that this is the place to be, and they make sure they don't miss it. This lake is actually named When John Fremont came through, he named it after his colonel, who was back up in Washington. The dude never even stepped foot here, but hey, he got a lake named after him. It was a great place to stop and look. The rim above is another place that I can't wait to go up and get to explore once some more of this snow has melted.

[00:09:06]>> [music] [singing] [music] [music and singing] [music] >> It was starting to become that time when I needed to start thinking about pointing this bike back home. I could mess around here a little bit, but what I really wanted to do when I was out here was get up on the rim, and you could even see some of those images that there's still snow up there. Gaia was saying there's still snow up there, and that's usually pretty accurate. I decided that I'd kind of peace out of here real quick, and maybe it would give me a little bit of time just to check out a viewpoint that I had in mind that was back on the way home. So, at this point, started heading back towards Bend. We might be starting to head back home, but the adventure's not over yet.

[00:09:59]>> [music and singing] [singing] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Well, for a day that started off super slow, we certainly were able to put a ton of miles in. We're finishing off over here on the road that would go up to the Fremont overlook here over Summer Lake. We're not going to go over there today due to the late start and the fact that you can see that there's snow up there still. The overlays show the road gets pretty snowy.

[00:11:53]I'm just not going to go up there. So, we're going to call it a day here, but I absolutely cannot wait to come back to this area later in the summer. I want to go up and ride the winter ridge here. I want to go ride the ridge over at Albert Lake. And those places I mean, between here and Albert Lake, it really is mind-blowing. It is beautiful.

[00:12:16]It's a great drive. There's no traffic.

[00:12:18]There's nobody out here. Totally worth the drive. I'm super pumped about today.

[00:12:23]I can't wait to put these uploads up and see how it all came out. Most importantly, I can't wait to come back here and explore around some more cuz this area is really something else.

[00:12:35]Okay. Hope you enjoyed the ride. Thanks for coming along. See you next time.