This adventure begins long before you begin to push the pedals. Driving to the ride start from Lakeview offers up several unique points of interest (all documented below): drive-by art sculptures, mountain peaks, gorgeous wetlands, and more. But the true highlight of the day awaits 12 miles down a desolate dirt road: the historic Shirk Creek Ranch.

Shirk Ranch
The Shirk Ranch property was originally homesteaded by R.A. Turner around 1881 and then sold to William Herron. Shirk bought the ranch from Herron in 1883. When Shirk purchased the land, there were three buildings on the property: a house and two sheds. There is no record of the property size when Shirk bought it, but county tax records show the ranch was 480 acres in 1887.

Shirk was a well-known cattleman. In 1869, he assisted with the first drive of Texas cattle to Oregon and reportedly held up to 50,000 acres of Oregon rangeland. But this ranch in Guano Valley was different. It wasn’t a cattle ranch.

Shirk purchased the Guano Valley site as a horse ranch and wrote that he “at once began improving the property to accommodate a large number of horses and mules.”

“These I raised myself, shipped to market, . . . and sold them,” he wrote, “and in this I did fairly well.”

Horse raising was a key industry well into the twentieth century, before the automobile and mechanized farm machinery were widely available. Demand was high. Oregon horses raised by stockmen like Shirk even ended up at war on two foreign continents, supporting military actions in South Africa’s Boer War and, later, World War I in Europe.

Family was essential to Shirk’s ranch operations. “I and my family, including my wife and children, were almost constantly in the saddle, doing our work and lessening expenses,” he wrote.

Shirk also relied on the help of ranch hands. “I endeavored to secure as employees the better class of young men,” he wrote. “I had constructed an elegant country home, and all were treated as equals. They ate their meals with me and my family, and in other respects were treated as equals.”

Today, after more than a century, the site’s main house today offers clues to Shirk’s egalitarian vision. This building’s second floor features a large, rectangular room that probably held, of all things, a billiard room.

“Upstairs,” Shirk wrote, “I fitted up a billiard room, placing therein a modern billiard table for their amusement during times of idleness and the long winter nights. I had a two-fold purpose in this. First, because I believe that every man is as good as any other man, provided he is honest, industrious and conducts himself as a self-respecting man, and also, because I sought by this means and by such methods to secure contentment and steadiness on the part of the men in my employ.”

In 1914, Shirk sold the Guano Valley Ranch to the partnership of Mitchell and McDaniel of Cedarville, California. Shirk’s daughter, Olive, known as one of the best “horsemen” in the area and a “tough ranch lady,” leased the Shirk Ranch with her husband, Zetus Spaulding, from the Bank of Willows, California, which had acquired it in foreclosure from the Mitchell and McDaniel Partnership. The ranch became part of the Hart Mountain National Wildlife Refuge in 1942. Shirk’s daughter and husband lived and worked on the ranch until Zetus death in 1945. The ranch was leased to various interests through the 1980s but has been vacant since that time. The ranch is now administered by the Bureau of Land Management.

In 2009, the ranch was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of its national significance. Today, the BLM administers it for public access, keeping it open for intrepid visitors interested in exploring Oregon’s ranching past beyond a drive-by, windshield tour.

Click here for a full multimedia tour of the ranch.

[Ref: Bureau of Land Management]

The reasons to do this ride are to:
– see the historic ranch
– compare and contrast desert scape that has been grazed and ungrazed by cattle
– view the striking Dougherty Slide
– and experience the open expanse of the high desert.

Note that this is the most remote All Access ride we have documented. You may see no one and there is no cell phone reception. However, the navigation is straightforward and the road driveable by most vehicles.