Friday Farm Fun- Lone Tree

Lone Tree on Princeton hill

My husband and I own two parcels of land. Sixty-nine acres is our residence. We raise cattle here and are in the process of selling it. The other land is 280 acres in Eastern Oregon. There we have sixty acres in alfalfa and the other 220 is a large hill and rock cliffs. When our house sells we'll be moving to Princeton.

When I first laid eyes on this parcel of land, I fell in love with the stegosaurus rock formation that will one day frame the house we'll build and the large hill that is on the south end of the property.

The hill has been a huge entertainment. From watching my overweight, flat-lander horse huff and puff his way up the hill ten steps at a time to George, the burro, navigating the hill in his own time and creating new trails.  We've watched deer heads pop up on the skyline of the hill and herds spring their way up the side like it was flat and not a six hundred feet climb.

Visitors are taken on a "Sami"(Suzuki Samarai) ride up the hill and around to the back side to see our one and only tree on the whole 280 acres. The ride can be exhilarating for the people who wind up in the back of Sami or the pick up. Remember this is a six hundred foot climb and the first half is straight up! If you're in the back of the vehicle you put your back to the seats(Sami) or the cab (pick up) then slide down and brace your feet against the back of the vehicle and hope you don't bounce out the back.

This particular stretch of road was more than my mother-in-law could take. I was riding int he back of the pick up, with my husband driving and two of our grandchildren and my mother-in-law int eh front. I was hanging on and watching through the window. I thought my mother-in-law was playing with the grandchildren, hiding her head and making scared noises. When the pick up hit the flatter road that curves to the back, the passenger side door flew open, my mother-in-law came bailing out and shouted, "Are you trying to kill me!" Here I thought she'd been playing with the kids when she'd really been scared to death!

The crew waiting for me to take a picture of the tree.

Once the road curves and heads around the hill to the back, you can relax and enjoy the valley stretching out below you, or once we top the hill the wide stretch of Steens Mountains to the south. Curving around the hill the road drops down a bit and there at the end of the road is the lone tree. The reason we make the trek up the hill.

We'd commented about the tree so much that an eighty-year-old friend who paints asked us to take a photo of it. We rode the horses up to the tree this past summer and I took the above photo. Our friend presented us with a painting of the tree for Christmas. The tree and the painting are special to us.