#east oregon

Thursday's child was here

BAKER CITY — Allen Jensen wasn’t surprised to hear that a rock had fallen onto the Dooley Mountain Highway Saturday morning, April 18.

Just not that particular rock.

The chunk of stone — more appropriately called a boulder — dislodged from a roadcut along Highway 245 south of Baker City and landed, almost as though a target had been drawn on the asphalt, in the middle of the road.

“It was the biggest one I’ve ever seen,” said Jensen, who manages the Oregon Department of Transportation’s Baker City maintenance station.

He said the boulder was about 6 feet tall and 10 feet across. He said he had no estimate for its weight.

The boulder is rhyolite, a type of volcanic rock that erupted from a group of volcanic vents that geologists call the Dooley Mountain Complex. The eruptions happened from around 12 million to 16 million years ago.

Jensen said the rock was even bigger than one that rolled onto Highway 86 between Baker City and Richland in late November 2025.

Jensen said the ODOT worker on duty called in a couple of co-workers to help with the Dooley Mountain boulder.

Jensen said the front-end loader they used couldn’t heft the boulder, but it was able to “sort of spin it” to the highway shoulder.

The site is near Milepost 31, about 6 miles south of where Highway 245 meets Highway 7 at Salisbury Junction.

Jensen said the job took a couple hours.

Highway 245 is lightly traveled most of the time, and certainly isn’t crowded on a Saturday morning, Jensen said.

The highway, infamous for its steep grades and sharp curves, climbs the divide between the Powder and Burnt rivers, leading to Hereford and meeting Highway 26 a few miles north of Unity.

The spot where the boulder fell was fortuitous in one sense, Jensen said.

Had it come down a mile or two to the north, where the highway roughly parallels Stices Gulch Road, a rural development with several homes, ODOT would have used a different technique, Jensen said.

In that area the boulder, if pushed to the highway edge, could have tumbled down the steep slope and possibly hit a home or vehicle, Jensen said.

In that situation, workers would have had to use a machine called a “boulder buster” to blast the rock into smaller, less dangerous pieces.

But Milepost 31 is a section of highway that follows a side canyon where the boulder didn’t threaten any homes.

In any case, the rock didn’t roll, Jensen said.

Yesterday we realized Tom McCall Preserve is the same distance from Forest Grove as it is from Bend. I was feeling rather home sick yesterday and needed to see a familiar landscape. 

This was our first time ever taking this route. The landscape blows my mind. It was beautiful but also left me feeling vulnerable at the same time. Its just so open. I felt so exposed without the trees. I have a hard time even out here in Bend. Its just so odd not having a cover of trees overhead.