The Ochoco Divide never looked like this.

I’d been here before, to make a brief pit stop at Bandit Spring while traveling to or from Mitchell or John Day, to ski the trails or just to admire the natural pine forest beauty at the tiptop of this fine range of mountains.

But today, there was a heady haze of mystery draped like a veil over this cloudless springlike afternoon.

We weren’t here on mundane motorist’s business. No, we were here to unlock some secrets, to wave away the foggy tendrils from a 142-year-old enigma, to make some sense of the senseless.

Or so it felt.

We were here, my son Keven and I, with Dan Petchell, the guy who’s writing the book on the baffling tales of buried treasure and hidden caches of Central Oregon. A Fred Meyer electronics salesman by trade, Petchell spends his free moments sleuthing out the skeletons in our outdoors closet, trying to loose the hermetic seal of time.

The stories flow from Petchell like vintage wine from an oaken cask.

There’s the rumor of riches at Skeleton Rock, the whisper of gold in the High Desert, the murmur of a lost cave filled with crystal. And the not so trivial matter of six dead horses, a big batch of stolen gold and a stubborn mystery as yet unsolved.

It was 1863, and gold fever was running high in this part of the country. According to Petchell, who’s talked to old-timers and mined the archives of the Crook County Historical Society, a half-dozen masked bandits robbed several sluice boxes near Canyon City, loaded the gold on their horses and galloped away. Their next stop was Dayville, where they robbed the bank and fled into the Ochocos, a posse of townsmen in hot pursuit.

”They traveled over through the Antone and Mitchell country and up into what is now the Ochoco National Forest, stopping at a spot which now is known as Burglar’s Flat, about 10 miles north of the present Divide Ranger Station,” Tom Lindsey wrote in the Aug. 10, 1930, edition of the Sunday Oregonian.

The outlaws apparently fled quickly from the glade, leaving their horses tied to a log. No one knows why they spooked, but this was Indian country; Chief Paulina held sway over these mountains. The posse never caught up with the desperadoes.

According to the late Gale Ontko, writing in his epic ”Thunder Over the Ochoco,” four days after the bank robbery, a man crawled into Alkali Flat Stage Station, ”his arm shattered by a bullet and an arrow driven through his leg.” Before he died, he spoke of ”tossing some gold into a deep mountain spring flowing from the base of a large pine to hide it from the Indians.” Another version has the outlaws being attacked by Indians and quickly burying their loot at the base of a large pine tree.

End of story?

Not so fast, said Petchell with a flourish.

Some 50 years later, a prospector or a sheepherder (depending on who you ask) picking his way through the Ochocos came upon a ”strange and terrible” sight.

”He noticed a log with six notches dug out of the top side of it,” Petchell wrote. ”As he approached, he discovered that the ground next to the log was littered with the bones of six horses. Among the bones were the remains of six saddles and bridles. The horses had been tied to the log and left to die.”

After the discovery, the people of Prineville put two and two together, linking the skeletons and the robbery a half-century before.

More than 90 years after that, no one really knows what caused the bad guys to abandon the horses they were riding, but Petchell advances a theory. They didn’t.

”I suspect that what really happened was that the outlaw gang had a saddled change of horses standing by near the summit of the Ochocos and were forced to move on quickly by the pursuing posse before they were able to turn their tired mounts loose,” he wrote. ”They would certainly have taken the gold with them and probably headed for the Willamette Valley where they could enjoy their ill-gotten gain.”

Ah, the gold. I’ll put it this way. We were back to work come Monday morning, buying a lottery ticket in the afternoon.

The three of us poked around Bandit Spring, now a rest area along Highway 26. Petchell believes the horses were found in one of the spacious meadows in the immediate vicinity.

He also believes it’s ”entirely possible” that there’s a hidden cache up there waiting to be found.

Trouble is, there are lots of pine trees, as far as the eye can see. We never found the gold. But I’ll never look at a ponderosa pine quite the same way again.