Baker City Herald editor Jayson Jacoby looks down into the Ritter Creek Canyon on Dec. 8, 2024, east of Baker City.

I left home anticipating my favorite view of the Wallowa Mountains.

The sort of stirring vista of snow peaks that inspires people to pen poetry.

Bad poetry, like as not.

But we should all welcome anything that entices us to create. The satisfaction we derive is a reward, and anyway what constitutes art is, like beauty, a unique and personal definition.

What I got, though, was fog.

Of the Wallowas there was no sign.

The gray ceiling thinned briefly to reveal only the peculiar visage of Sparta Butte, distinctive because its south slope is grass and its north covered by dense forest.

The demarcation, particularly when seen from the west, as I did on the morning of Sunday, Dec. 8, is as sharply defined as a mohawk haircut.

My eye always strays to Sparta Butte when it's within sight, even if I'm 50 miles away. No other landform looks like it, and its presence orients me as surely as a glance at a compass.

But Sparta Butte is hardly spectacular.

Its position in the Wallowas is at most a foothill -- a minor rampart that serves only to put into perspective the great peaks beyond, as the slightly talented opening act can whet the audience's appetite to hear the headline performer.

I don't mean to imply the outing was a waste.

My wife, Lisa, and I drove about 20 miles east of Baker City to hike in the grass and sagebrush country south of Highway 86.

The sun was shining in town.

I envisioned the point where the highway crests the ridge above Keating Valley and the Wallowas are revealed, as though conjured from the sea of sage.

This view, though familiar, seems never to lose even a bit of its potency.

The placid ocean of gray we saw instead was not so grand.

But as we left the highway and started driving the rough road that leads south along Bulldozer Creek, I was pleased to see that, although fog and clouds obscured the Wallowas, the sky to the south was blue.

Little Lookout Mountain, an eminence considerably higher than Sparta Butte, seemed a suitable stand-in for the Wallowas, particularly wearing its fringe of fog.

Besides which, with no great mountains to hog the limelight we could focus on the landscape we were walking through.

A different sort of entertainment, to be sure.

Sagebrush, it seems to me, is less likely to move someone to try their hand at iambic pentameter than a horizon crammed with 9,000-foot peaks.

But the sage steppe is more compelling when seen at walking pace than at 55 mph. Speed, I think, robs this land of its complexity and creates the illusion that it is no more diverse than a field of corn.

I especially like to hike in such places soon after a fresh fall of snow.

The previous evening a meager storm had swept through. It did little to bolster the snowpack, but even a skiff of white creates a temporary canvas.

The most obvious signs are animal tracks.

I find it endlessly entertaining to follow the meandering path of a coyote and to try to decipher something tangible from the impressions.

Does a longer span between tracks, after a series of shorter steps, reveal the point where the desert dog detected a potential meal and broke into a trot?

I'm fascinated by the intersection of species, where a coyote's prints pass over the tiny tracks of a squirrel. Did the coyote grab its breakfast here or did the rodent, forever vigilant against threats from the ground and from above, where hawks glide, make good its escape?

Absent a splash of blood or a tuft of hair, the question can't be answered.

We hiked for a while in the gravelly bed of an ephemeral stream, a tributary of Bulldozer Creek. I suspect water flows here only once every couple of decades, when a summer storm lingers longer than usual.

Yet over the centuries the stream has gouged a channel that in places is several feet deep. I was reminded of photos of World War I trenches, only without the sandbags, machine guns and corpses.

We climbed a couple hundred feet to a ridge above Ritter Creek, a more reliable stream than Bulldozer Creek.

I was surprised by the steepness of the slope dropping to Ritter Creek. It might fairly be called a canyon.

We followed a road along the ridge spine for half a mile or so and then descended back to the tributary. The fog dropped along with us and even expectorated a few snowflakes.

The Wallowas never showed.