The photos on the Wallowa Mountains pages were taken not only within Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness but in surrounding areas as well. Included are photos of the mountains from a distance—from the Wallowa, Grande Ronde, Pine Creek, and Powder River Valleys which flank this mountain range on three sides and also from the rim of Hells Canyon to the east.

The Wallowas set aside in the Eagle Cap Wilderness are favorably distinguished from other mountain ranges by lacking foothills. Yes, the Grand Tetons could not rise more abruptly from Wyoming’s Jackson Hole, and the peaks of the Sierra Nevada soar dramatically above California’s Owens Valley. But those exceptions aside, where else in the United States do mountains rise so high and so abruptly above valleys where people live and work? You don’t have to drive for miles and then hike in order to see and photograph the Wallowas. You can do that through your window at home.

Still, it’s great to get out and hike, and by hitting the trail you’ll learn things about these mountains you wouldn’t appreciate otherwise. You’ll learn, for instance, that the Wallowas, unlike Oregon’s Cascade Mountains which seem monotonously volcanic, resemble the Rocky Mountains in being made of a wide variety of much older rocks. You’ll find granitic rock like in the Sierras and Rockies, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks like in the Rockies, and, yes, volcanic rock at the very source of the great floods of lava thickly blanketing much of the Pacific Northwest.

So unlike the Cascades do the Wallowas seem that people have been moved to wonder if these mountains should be considered part of the Rockies. No geologist would support such a claim, and yet from a broad perspective all ranges of the western United States can be lumped together (including the Cascades). They all rose into the sky (at different times) because of the Atlantic Ocean’s ambition about 180 million years ago to become an ocean, sending North America on a westward drift and dramatically rumpling the continent’s western half. That narrative obscures a lot of complexity, but that’s your story if your mind craves simplicity and you like the idea of the Wallowas being part of the Rockies.

The Wallowas are also like the Rockies in being less heavily forested than the Cascades, thereby better displaying the recent, mountain-sculpting impact on the land of a great network of Ice Age glaciers . This is Oregon’s most alpine mountain range, though the glaciers at present have thrown in the towel. The remnant of ice known as the Benson Glacier was declared officially dead by the Oregon Glacier Institute in 2021, but two rock glaciers still cling to existence on mountains nearby.