He has stuck his fingers into the soil beneath, and finds dark,
rich, damp mud! And this at the very end of a dry summer, in what
was an official drought year!Watching the dust devils play over the stunted
sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) and abbreviated grasses
of OSP's main telescope field, it's hard to imagine that just
1/2 mile away and 150 feet lower things are a lot less arid. Here
Davin has found a rather extensive area of dry, dusty hillside
that is magically transformed by the presence of oozing water
just beneath the surface.
He has stuck his fingers into the soil beneath, and finds dark,
rich, damp mud! And this at the very end of a dry summer, in what
was an official drought year!
The short hike down to Indian Trail Springs
swiftly brings one to green grass and big trees. 
Here my son sits upon the massive stump of what
was an old- growth ponderosa pine. Our estimate from tree-ring
counting was about 250 years old, and you can see that its diameter
was over four feet! It's location was alongside the margin of
a seasonal stream, and close to where the year-round flow of Indian
Trail Springs enters this streambed and disappears. This stump
is about 100 vertical feet below where the spring waters exit
the bathtub-like watering trough shown below. 
Water, green things, mud, big trees, these are certainly some reasons Indian Trail Springs was a favored camping place for many generations of Native Americans.
About 100 yards down from the bathtub, the spring waters widen out into a large expanse of muddy green grasses. Just to the right of the green, the typical dry prarie resumes, although down here in the canyons, there are fewer rocks, very little sagebrush, and overall it looks like great forage for deer and elk-- and, after all, this whole area around the springs is an actual designated elk refuge!
OregonPhotos.com