Alvord Desert by Drone | Rain Spills Over Steens Mountain!

🏜️ After circling Steens Mountain through Frenchglen, Fields, and Andrews, I finally reached one of the places I had been most excited to see — the Alvord Desert. This video continues my journey around the perimeter of Steens Mountain, this time exploring the remarkable landscape on its eastern side. And on this particular day, the weather gave me something I never expected to capture. 🌧️ Rain was spilling over Steens Mountain and into the Alvord Desert. The western side of Steens had been rainy much of the day, while the eastern side sits within the mountain’s powerful rain shadow. As moist air climbs Steens Mountain, it cools and loses much of its moisture. Once the air descends the steep eastern face, it becomes warmer and drier. That helps create the dramatic contrast visible here: 🏔️ Steens Mountain rising thousands of feet to the west. 🌵 The incredibly dry Alvord Basin stretching away to the east. Yet during this flight, some of that weather actually made it over the mountain. What looks almost like smoke or haze north of the drone is actually a heavy curtain of rain moving across the desert. Considering how dry this country normally is, it was an incredible thing to watch from the air. 🚁 The Alvord itself is something completely different from almost anywhere else in Oregon. The main playa is roughly six miles wide and eleven miles long, forming an enormous, nearly level surface at about 4,000 feet elevation. Thousands of years ago, this basin held a much larger lake. Today it is a closed desert basin where water has nowhere to drain to the ocean. Water that reaches the playa eventually disappears through evaporation, leaving behind the broad, pale desert floor we see today. 🪨 And towering immediately west of it is Steens Mountain. The summit reaches nearly 9,700 feet, putting the high Steens more than 5,000 vertical feet — essentially a mile — above the Alvord Desert floor. That is one of the things I wanted this flight to show. The drone can climb high above the playa, but even then the east face of Steens absolutely dominates the landscape. It gives you a sense of just how enormous this fault-block mountain really is. ✈️ One of my favorite parts of the video comes much lower. Instead of always looking down from hundreds of feet in the air, I brought the drone to just a few feet above the desert floor and flew across the playa. For a moment, the viewer gets to experience the Alvord almost as though they are soaring directly across it. Flat ground ahead. Clouds overhead. Almost nothing between you and the horizon. The scale and emptiness are difficult to describe until you see it this way. 🏎️ The Alvord also has a remarkable place in speed-record history. On December 6, 1976, legendary stunt performer Kitty O’Neil piloted a hydrogen-peroxide-powered rocket vehicle across this very desert. Her official two-run average was an astonishing 512.71 mph, earning her recognition as the world’s fastest woman driver. Kitty was deaf from infancy and built an extraordinary career as a stunt performer, racer, and record setter. She lived a long life after her Alvord run and passed away from pneumonia in 2018 at age 72. Standing on this enormous playa and imagining someone traveling across it at more than 500 miles per hour adds another dimension to an already fascinating place. 🌧️ But for me, the unexpected star of this particular flight may have been the weather. Watching rain descend the eastern face of Steens and spread into a landscape famous for being so dry was one of those moments I could never have planned. Sometimes you simply happen to put the drone in the air at exactly the right time. ❤️ The Alvord Desert is stark, empty, rugged, and absolutely beautiful in its own way. It is the perfect counterpart to Steens Mountain towering beside it. One rises dramatically toward the sky. The other stretches almost perfectly flat toward the horizon. And together they create one of the most extraordinary landscapes in Oregon. Come along with Above the Frontier as we fly high above the Alvord, skim just feet above its desert floor, watch rain spill across the playa, and experience the incredible eastern face of Steens Mountain from the air. 📍 Alvord Desert — Harney County, Oregon 🏔️ East side of Steens Mountain 🌵 Rain-shadow country 🏎️ Site of Kitty O’Neil’s historic 512.71 mph run 🚁 DJI Mini 4 Pro #AlvordDesert #SteensMountain #KittyONeil #OregonHighDesert #AboveTheFrontier