Deschutes River

Thanks! Yeah, the area is in the rain shadow of the Cascades (i.e., on the east side), so it's semiarid, and thru here the streams coming off the Cascades have incised these deep canyons. So the water ends up isolated from most of the surrounding land. Hence the irrigation and hydropower projects-- Farther upstream on the Deschutes, around Bend, Oregon, the drainages are not so incised, but as you go north toward the Columbia the canyons get deeper.