Jun. 27--BURNS -- The road into Harney County's largest city rides like butter, an asphalt welcome mat unfurling for miles across a vast desert.

Here, in a place with no railroad and no commercial airport, the two-lane highways intersecting in downtown Burns reflect the economic pulse of this community of 4,000.

Read the other stories in the Jobless to Oregon series.

When times were good, logging trucks and recreational vehicles burned rubber down the pavement. When times are bad, as in the past year, the roads are starved of vehicles. Shuttered businesses sit on their shoulders. There no new jobs in sight.

Soon the empty roads around Harney County could be the way out for people with no job prospects and no more unemployment checks on the way.

As the recession wears on, an uncharted phase of the downturn is setting in not only in Harney County but also across the state: Workers, jobless for longer than a year, are beginning to exhaust their unemployment benefits.

Those benefits have provided a safety net for nearly 170,000 unemployed Oregonians so far this year. Unemployment insurance provides between $138 and $507 a week, depending on previous income, for about a year and a half.

So far, benefits have expired for 144 Oregonians, a sign that the long recession is not easing. About 13,000 Oregonians are scheduled to run out of unemployment benefits by the end of the year if they don't find a job, according to the Oregon Employment Department.

Without the weekly checks from the state or federal government, those who haven't landed work after 79 weeks are on their own.

"You should come up with a plan so that you're not still out of work when you lose your benefit," says Nancy Alvarado, who manages WorkSource Oregon in Malheur, Grant and Harney counties. "Sometimes folks have to move out of the area to find jobs. That's one of the realities of life. If there's no jobs there, people have to go where there are job opportunities."

But in Harney County, where a single new job seems like a miracle, the unknown future of the longtime unemployed looms for rural leaders, who fear an exodus.

"When the unemployment runs out, what happens then?" asks Judge Steve Grasty, the chief elected official in Harney County, where the unemployment rate of 19.3 percent is second-highest among Oregon's 36 counties. "When people run out of unemployment, there's going to be an out-migration, and it's going to happen all at once."

So far, unemployment benefits have helped small communities sidestep the eye of the economic hurricane. Many have yet to see large migrations of families in search of jobs.

But if the job market doesn't turn around soon, the recession could have wide-ranging social implications for the state, officials say. "This is just the beginning," says Tom Fuller, an employment department spokesman. "Just as when we saw a bubble of people beginning their claims, we'll see a bubble of people exhausting their claims."

Folks aren't ready to leave

In earlier recessions, those who ran out of unemployment benefits hit the road to look for work.