Harney County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Harney County

Zero point seven persons per square mile — Harney County's population density per US Census 2020 Decennial puts it third-least-dense in the entire contiguous United States behind only Loving County TX and Esmeralda County NV, and the practical effect on any RV traveler is that the entire 10,133-sq-mi county (larger than the states of New Hampshire, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Hawaii combined) supports just four small towns with full-service grocery and fuel infrastructure: Burns (population 2,727, the county seat at the US-20 / US-395 junction), Hines (population 1,447, contiguous with Burns and effectively a continuous urbanized strip), Crane (population 76, with the only K-12 boarding school in Oregon serving rural ranching families across the county), and Frenchglen (population 12, the southern Steens Mountain gateway with a single historic hotel and a USFS visitor contact station). Steens Mountain at 9,738 ft is the tallest fault-block mountain in the contiguous United States — a single massive escarpment lifted along a north-south normal fault during the Miocene Basin-and-Range extension that produced the modern American West topography, with a sheer 5,000-ft east face plunging straight down to the Alvord Desert salt playa and a gentler graded west slope.

The Steens Mountain Loop Road climbs to within 1 mile of the summit on a paved-to-gravel approach that is one of the highest summit-access roads in Oregon, opening typically late June through October per BLM Burns District seasonal closure schedule and closing entirely with snowpack. The Page Springs Campground (BLM, 30 sites, no hookups, rigs to 35 ft, year-round on Donner und Blitzen River) and the South Steens Campground (BLM, 30 sites, no hookups, rigs to 35 ft, May-October) are the two BLM-operated RV-friendly bases on the loop. Steens Mountain Wilderness requires a self-issued permit at trailheads. Malheur National Wildlife Refuge 35 miles south of Burns (the 187,757-acre USFWS-managed Great Basin wetland complex that hosted the 2016 Bundy militia armed occupation) is one of the Pacific Flyway's most-important spring migration stopover sites with peak April waterfowl counts exceeding 200,000 birds.