The Crooked River National Grasslands offers spectacular views of the Deschutes and Crooked River Canyons. Cove Palisades State Park, Central Oregon. If interested in blank greeting cards of this image, you can find them in my Note Card Gallery here.
Lake Billy Chinook and the Crooked River Canyonlands: Where Water Meets Ancient Stone
In the high desert of central Oregon, Lake Billy Chinook lies cradled within sheer basalt cliffs, its deep blue waters contrasting sharply with the ochre and black of ancient lava flows. Formed in 1964 by the completion of Round Butte Dam on the Deschutes River, the lake occupies the confluence of three rivers: the Crooked, the Metolius, and the Deschutes. Together they carve a dramatic canyon system that exposes millions of years of geologic history, now preserved within the Crooked River National Grassland and surrounding protected lands.
A Landscape Forged by Fire and Water
The cliffs surrounding Lake Billy Chinook are part of the Deschutes Formation, a thick sequence of basaltic lava flows, volcanic tuffs, and sedimentary deposits laid down between 5 and 11 million years ago during the Miocene epoch. These layers were built by repeated eruptions of the Columbia River Basalt Group and later Cascadian volcanoes, each new flow burying the landscape beneath molten rock.
Over time, the Deschutes, Crooked, and Metolius Rivers cut deep canyons into this volcanic plateau. The Crooked River in particular exposes dramatic cross-sections of columnar basalt, interbedded with layers of volcanic ash and ancient soils. Erosion continues today, though slowed by the dam’s regulation of flows, leaving vertical walls up to 500 feet high around the lake.
Creation of Lake Billy Chinook
When Portland General Electric constructed Round Butte Dam in the early 1960s, the flooded confluence of the three rivers became Lake Billy Chinook. The reservoir was named in honor of a Wasco chief who lived in the region during the mid-19th century, though the lake also covers lands that Indigenous communities had used for thousands of years for fishing, root gathering, and seasonal encampments.
The new lake transformed the local ecology and economy. Salmon and steelhead runs were blocked, leading to decades of decline in anadromous fish populations. Efforts at fish passage have since been attempted with limited success. At the same time, the lake quickly became a recreation hub, drawing boaters, anglers, and campers to the high desert canyonlands.
The Crooked River National Grassland
To the east of the reservoir lies the Crooked River National Grassland, a protected expanse of more than 173,000 acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service. This landscape is shaped by the same volcanic geology that defines the canyon: rugged basalt outcrops, juniper woodlands, sagebrush flats, and meadows adapted to the region’s arid climate.
The Grassland preserves not only habitat for mule deer, golden eagles, and native plants, but also traces of human use. Indigenous peoples including the Warm Springs, Wasco, and Northern Paiute once harvested camas roots, hunted, and gathered medicinal plants here. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, homesteaders attempted dryland farming in the thin soils of the plateau, often with limited success. Many of those failed farms eventually reverted to public ownership, forming the foundation of today’s Grassland.
Geology as a Record of Time
Few places in Oregon display such a clear record of volcanic history as the canyon walls of Lake Billy Chinook. The stepped layers of basalt are testimony to repeated eruptions that blanketed the land in fire, later dissected by the slow persistence of rivers. Geologists studying the Deschutes Formation have uncovered fossils of ancient plants and animals, as well as evidence of massive lahars and explosive ash falls from the ancestral Cascades.
At the junction of the Crooked and Deschutes Rivers, cliffs reveal a sequence of flows so regular they resemble stacked pages in a book. Each layer marks a chapter of the landscape’s past — molten floods, cooling fractures, periods of erosion, and renewed volcanic activity.
A Place of Contrasts and Continuity
Lake Billy Chinook today is both a modern reservoir and a geologic archive. Its waters invite recreation and tourism, while its canyons remind visitors of forces far older than the dam. The Crooked River National Grassland extends that story across the plateau, where sagebrush plains meet sheer cliffs and juniper woodlands thrive on the margins of basalt flows.
For all its modern uses, the landscape remains rooted in deep time and human memory. From Indigenous trails to homesteader fields, from fiery eruptions to dammed waters, the canyons of the Crooked River continue to embody the ongoing dialogue between people, rivers, and stone.
Bunchgrass, Cove Palisades State Park, Jefferson County, Lake Billy Chinook, Oregon State Parks, Sage, Sky Scape
