The story behind how and why we purchased nearly 80-acres of desert in Central Oregon. Written by Latitude Change Agent Neal Collins.

In the winter of 2020, not wanting to fly amidst the pandemic for the holidays, our family drove over two thousand miles to visit my parents and my sister in Austin, Texas. The decision was made to car camp as both a way to avoid the airports and hotels and see more off-the-beaten-path places along the way.

We started on the 4th of December from Portland. Although still early in winter, we had already become weary from the dark, wet, and at times oppressive weather that comes with living on the western side of the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest.

Once out of the rainforest, the majority of the trip across the West was in the desert. That meant more sun. Sweet, warm, glorious sun.

It dried our bones and lifted our spirits. Many a poem have been written about the dramatic sunrises and sunsets in Big Sky Country, and I now know why. They were magnificent and stirred the soul. The colors soft like a pallet of pastel crimsons.

We traveled to interesting places along the way. With state and national parks closed, we were limited to an app called Hipcamp that enabled us to pitch a tent or rent a cabin on private land. We stayed at vineyard and sculpture garden in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. A goat farm in north Arizona. A vintage trailer in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. A ranch on the Mexican border. It was a new way to see the country that seemed more intimate and raw than a state park.

I was reading Charles Massey’s Call of the Reed Warbler along the route. The book is a captivating compilation of how farmers in arid Australia are regenerating landscapes through holistic land management practices. The stories gave me hope as I read example after example of ecological collapse turned thriving, lush, and resilient ecosystems.

It was these combined sensations and experiences that captured my heart. For the first time I finally understood the magnetism that people feel towards the desert. This is when I knew that I needed to spend more time in this sensitive and seductive landscape. It became a journey to understand my role as regenerative real estate practitioner.

Finding the Land

Fortunately I was not the only one captivated by the desert. My wife Alissa has a way of falling in love with every sunrise no matter where she is, yet the open desert skies made a particular imprint on her psyche.

We had been searching for land in the Columbia River Gorge for some time before our cross country trip, although we were discouraged as most of the properties with acreage in our price range were either on the side of a mountain, a clear cut graveyard, or a combination of both.

The Pacific Northwest is arguably one of the most incredible bioregions on the planet. The Cascade mountain range forms the spin of the region and it divides the rainforest from the dry, sunny side. With dramatic coastline, dense forest, lush countryside, bucolic wine county, snow capped mountains, and high desert, the region is a destination for people at all times of the year.

We had been ruminating on the idea of getting property an hour to an hour and a half outside the orbit of Portland. This radius put us just shy of reaching the sunny side. Our thinking then was that this seemed a reasonable distance for a weekend trip, yet still accessible if we wanted to go out for a day trip.

After we came back from the Desert, however, our thinking shifted. “What if we extended our search towards Eastern Oregon?”

This is what led us to Maupin. A river town tucked on the side of canyon carved by the Deschutes River. Famous for river rafting and fly-fishing, Maupin is an outdoor adventure destination. The town is sleepy yet charming with a nice market, town hall, and a fly shop at the center of the community. Only two hours from Portland, the two roads leading in both held breathtaking scenery.

Above the canyons on the sweeping plateaus with commanding views of Wy’est and Pahto (known by colonial names of Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams) is the area known as Juniper Flats. This is where old lava flows have carved through the landscape. From a bird’s eye view it would look like alluvial flows dropping off into the steep canyons of the Deschutes and White Rivers.

It was here we found a 77-acre parcel located eight miles west of town. With a nondescript fence and a bumpy, two-track dirt driveway, we were immediately drawn in. It was foggy the first day we visited, and we bumped along the half-mile driveway past undulating scrub land, colored yellow from last seasons’ brittle, sun-bleached grasses blanketing the ground. Juniper trees dot the property and are thickest near the seasonal water flows where there are large, porous and lichen covered lava rocks.

On that particular day robins were fluttering on the ground, and occasionally we would hear a raven’s guttural caw. With only the noise of a seldom car traveling down the distant highway it was quiet. No sounds of human activity whatsoever — such a treat to calm the nervous system.

At the end of the driveway was a clearing with a 1969 Airstream and a vintage trailer named Aladdin. From a picnic table and campfire we sat mesmerized watching the cloud show dance over the mountains in the distance. It was as if you could literally see the line that separates the two worlds — the dark and rainy and dry and sunny.

We could feel it in our bones that this was the spot. A feeling that I must wonder was similar to Aldo Leopold’s when he found his sandbox.

Listening to the Land

Eager with new ideas swirling from Call of the Reed Warbler, we wanted to honor the land by undertaking revitalization work. 

We explored regenerative cattle ranching and studied Allan Savory’s Holistic Management framework. We learned about successional planting and soil web food health through Dr. Elaine Ingham, and fire ecology from Dr. Tim Ingalsbee.

Unfortunately we seemed to hit roadblocks with each idea.

The land has no water source which limited the feasibility of having animals. Ranch land experts concluded the land could only support six cows year round due to the capacity of the land. We didn’t want to have to buy tons of outside fodder and hadn’t come up with a solid solution to the active management that comes with rotational grazing. 

One of the ranch families in the area use neighboring property on all sides to graze their cows. The neighbor to the west told me they got paid per head in exchange for grazing the property at different intervals around the year. This helps lower property owner taxes by declaring their property is used for agriculture, rather than paying higher residential rates.

Much to our amazement we soon learned how skillful cows are at getting through fencing. At one point we had about 17 of them on the property, and Alissa even came across a cow and a newly born calf one day. A quick phone call to the neighbor and they came and retrieved the cows and mended the fence. As luck may have it, these infrequent encounters seems to be well-timed and potentially similar to the herds of what the land must to have seen in distant history. Not much else was needed to go down the route of using animals as a regenerative tool.

There is more biological diversity on the eastern side of the Cascades than on the west side surprisingly enough. This is hard to believe in the late summer when the autumn rains haven’t returned. However it’s in the spring that the land comes alive with green grasses, colorful bushes, purple lupin, and yellow and white wild flowers. Since this property had never been cleared for hay or wheat by Westerners, there seems to be an incredible array of grasses, shrubs, birds, and insects.

Nervous about the potential for wild fires since we have an abundance of downed juniper trees from a fire in 2007, we felt we must somehow remove the trees. It would be a multi-year feet to remove them one-by-one by hand, and running a machine to pile and burn the trees seemed was out of the question due to the terrain. Knowing that fire has been an ancient tool of regeneration used by indigenous cultures, we had thought it would be a good idea to clear the downed trees through controlled burns. This in turn, we thought, would help decrease the amount of fuel laying around the property that could exacerbate a forest fire as well as springboard a new growth cycle of more native plant species.

Yet again our grand plans were stymied though. After speaking with expert fire ecologists, we were somewhat disappointed to learn that the natural fire cycles of that area were roughly 50–75 years. It didn’t make much sense to pursue a controlled burn. Outside of aesthetic reasons to have the trees removed, the ecologists ensured us that the spacing of the dead trees posed little forest fire threat and in fact made good habitat for birds, insects, rodents, and deer. The trunks even created microclimates that retained moisture in the soil.

So eager were we to do something to the land — to be stewards and saviors of the land — that it had never really occurred to us that simply letting the land be was what we should do.

Creating Intention

With this new scaled-back conservation approach, we have come to see the land as a place for personal rejuvenation. It is a quiet place to get away from humanity. Instead of car sounds and sirens you hear migrating geese on their biannual flights in the autumn and spring. The coyotes howl in the summer, and ravens and eagles can be heard year-round. The sounds of frogs croaking can be heard at night, especially when the land is wet during the spring.

While the views of the volcanoes steal the show in the daytime, it is the stars that do it at night. Far away from any light pollution, the mercurial haze of the Milky Way is prevalent to the naked eye.

We now have our sights set on two different projects to help deepen our relationship with the land. One being the construction of an earthen building using the natural resources of clay, mud, and wood found onsite. We know some incredible natural builders from across the country, and we look forward to a day in the near future that we will host a workshop on the land to help educate and inspire this kind of low-tech, sustainable design.

Another idea has been percolating since I did a podcast episode with Justin Dolan in Costa Rica who converted a country club into a permaculture-based ecovillage with the old golf course getting converted to a disc golf course. This Justin said, has been a great way to compliment the food forest efforts while putting limited pressure on the environment.

Making the Investment “work”

It is a privilege to be able to purchase this land. An ongoing conversation we have in our house is how we can transmute financial capital into different capital currencies like natural capital and cultural capital. All capital, however, needs a return, and we are not in a position to invest money into a property without some financial income.

It is not lost on us that this is stolen land that once was territory of the indigenous tribes of the area. We confront this each day in our work in the real estate industry. The complexity of reality makes us aware that there are fifty shades of grey to this issue — to owning this land. To living where we do.

I have no answers, but what does feel right is to donate a portion of the income to the nearby Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs as part of the Land Back Movement. I myself am still searching for guidance around what reparations and the social justice work looks like when it comes to land ownership, but this at least feels like a step in the right direction.