By Jim Witty/ The Bulletin (bend)Published: June 26. 2008

Getting there: From Bend, follow U.S. Highway 97 north and turn right to Wasco. Turn left at the airport sign onto Armsworthy, which becomes Hilderbrand Lane. Drive east about four miles to North Klondike Road. Turn left and drive north about 2.5 miles. The PGE Field Office is straight ahead.Contact: 503-464-8000.

The wind is always howling at the Columbia River Gorge.

The scientific explanation involves stuff like synoptic scale flow, high amplitude ridges and lower troposphere air temperature contrasts. What that means to us is that the wind is always howling at the Columbia River Gorge.

According to Justin Sharp and Clifford F. Mass of the University of Washington, the Gorge is the only "near sea-level gap through the Cascades," which means that differing low and high elevation pressures conspire to create almost constant gap flow.

I'm no meteorologist, but I'm thinking gap flow is synonymous with wind that rips through the Gorge.

All that wind has made the Columbia River Gorge a world-renowned windsurfing and kite-boarding playground, as well as a real bad place to be stuck in a car during an ice storm.

It's also a fine place to sprout wind turbines to generate electricity. Why not harness the power of the prevailing flow? That's exactly what Portland General Electric was thinking when the utility brought the first phase of windmills online last year atop the hunch-shouldered hills above the river in Sherman County.

According to PGE, the first phase contains 76 turbines able to generate up to 125 megawatts, enough to power about 34,000 homes. Phases 2 and 3, set to be up and running by the end of 2010, will eventually generate enough power to serve 100,000 homes. That's a start.

You really don't get the full effect of these gigantic windmills and their 132-foot turbine blades driving by on U.S. Highway 97 west of the charming little town of Moro. You have to get out among them to appreciate the scale.

I was poking around the area recently and ended up face to face with a phalanx of rotating turbine blades on both sides of me on a gravel road. The wind, of course, was howling.

Here's the place where I include the disclaimer that I may have been overstepping my bounds and that PGE probably doesn't want hundreds of people descending on the wind farm tilting at windmills. Tours are available and are limited to groups that have scheduled an appointment with the PGE Field Office (see "If you go" on Page E1).

I ended up camping toward the bottom of Biglow Canyon, just off the county road, in a strip of land surrounded by wheat fields (and windmills) up above. I fell asleep that night to the soothing trickle of a little, brush-choked creek, but mostly to the whoosh of wind pushing those turbines round and round.

I awoke to the growl of a four-wheeler. It turned out, the driver, Chris Baum, is a bird biologist who works for PGE monitoring the wind farm for dead birds and bats that have run-ins with the big blades. He's a passionate birder, and a nice guy, and we ended up talking about an hour before he took off up a hill on foot to survey the area. Standing there with the shadows ascending the canyon walls, Baum filled me in on the workings of the turbines (it only takes 5 mph of wind to get them going; if the wind gets over 50 mph, they automatically shut down) and pointed out birds in flight (a Bullock's oriole; nice).

He's in a band that plays the Goose Pit Saloon in nearby Wasco on weekend nights. He said the place is often filled to capacity with windmill workers blowing off steam. I told him I had been there the evening before but must have missed the rush. There were only three or four people bellied up to the bar, but the tuna salad at the adjacent Lean-to Café was way better than I had a right to expect.

There's more to see and contemplate in the area than the Goose Pit and the windmills on the hill. The Highway 97 towns of Moro and Grass Valley exude plenty of small-town charm and old-school friendliness.

By most accounts, the wind farm has been an economic boon to the surrounding communities. The rural area is certainly at the vanguard of renewable power.

As I drove off, the wind showed no sign of letting up.

Jim Witty can be reached at 541-617-7828 or jwitty@bendbulletin.com.