Thursday August 4, Burns, Oregon

With 300 miles on the trip meter for today, it has been the longest so far. Hadn’t planned such a big day but couldn’t find a decent place to camp any earlier.

Left Glenn’s Ferry after having a bit of a look around town, but nothing to really excite. Noticed most of the towns we saw today seemed to have a big Mexican population, but suspect it is because of the intensive cropping area needing a lot of manual labour.

We headed north west on HW78 to the Oregon border which proved to be a very interesting drive. The amount of irrigation in the southern part of Idaho is amazing, there are water races, canals and pumps everywhere feeding all sorts of different types of irrigation.

Gradually we left the green and drove through real desert with interesting rock formations. The skies had been stormy all morning with a lot of lightning and as we drove on we saw a lot of smoke in the distance, and the closer we got we could see the flames. Stopped on a high point and watched with the binoculars as planes were spraying the fire with what looked to be a red fire retardant. By the time we got to Murphy there were helicopters and BLM staff loading fire fighting gear into them. Not sure what the outcome was as we continued on with our drive, but saw later on the news that there was a number of lighting strike fires in the area. It is so arid and the brush is tinder dry and ignites quite easily.

Back to civilisation and stopped in Caldwell for supplies before crossing into Oregon and taking HW 20 to Burns. More irrigation and cropping and even some fruit growing areas, before starting to climb into the desert. The temperatures were in the low 30’s, a bit better than yesterday, let’s hope it continues for awhile.

It was an interesting drive through the gorge then up onto a plateau. We changed back into Pacific Time zone putting our watches back an hour, so not as late getting in as it seemed!!!! Arriving in Burns another thunderstorm was starting with dark skies and lightning and by the time we had parked the RV and hooked up it was blowing a huge gale. Strangely though there was very little rain and after about an hour the wind eased and all was normal again.