Alvord Desert

The Alvord Desert is the floor of an ice-age lake, a playa about twelve miles long and seven wide at four thousand feet, under the east face of Steens Mountain. The mountain, and the Cascades and Coast Range beyond it, wring the rain out of the weather first; the playa gets about seven inches a year, and in late summer it dries hard and flat enough to drive across or land a light plane on. Hot springs rise along the fault at the foot of the mountain, more than forty of them along twenty-five miles of it, and long-billed curlews nest where their water runs out onto the flat.

On December 6, 1976, Kitty O'Neil, a Hollywood stuntwoman who was deaf, drove a three-wheeled, hydrogen-peroxide rocket car called the SMI Motivator across this playa at an average of 512.71 miles an hour over two runs, breaking the women's land speed record by about two hundred miles an hour. By most accounts she did it on about sixty percent of the car's power and believed she could take the outright record, but her contract allowed her only the women's mark, and she was not permitted to try. Her record stood for nearly forty-three years. On August 27, 2019, Jessi Combs, making runs on the same playa to break it, crashed and was killed; Guinness later recognized her speed of 522.78 miles an hour as the new record.

The playa is public land with no services. The gravel road north from Fields along the east foot of Steens passes its edge and the privately run Alvord Hot Springs. Drive onto the playa only when it is bone dry; after rain the surface turns to mud that traps vehicles.