Tag: Painted Hills

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Layers of Color

Taking a break at the ‘overlook’

It has been some time since we visited Painted Hills, so this week we spent a day walking trails and taking pictures, very touristy of us.

The Painted Hills Unit gets a lot of hype on the internet  .  .  .  heck, it’s listed as one of the 7 Wonders of Oregon.

We are regular visitors to all the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument ‘units’. But this is perhaps our most photographed.

The stratification that gives the “hills’ distinct layers presents differently depending on the season, as well as time of day.

Our afternoon visit was on a clear day, but there had been a week of rain.

These elements combined to offer some very photogenic views.

 

Even a quick swing into the Painted Hills is worth the time. As such, it gets worked into many different road trips. Frequent readers of the blog will recognize that.

Usually these excursions are short photo sorties to an overlook about a mile in from the junction of Burnt Ranch and Bear Creek roads.

We expanded that typical visit this week with some trail walks past other exibit areas.

Took a quick pass around a fenced off mound of leaf fossils.

We’re kind of leaf fossil snobs, you see we dug samples when you could still just park at Fossil High School and collect.

Spent a bit more time on the out and back trail at Red Hill.

The view from the Red Hill trail

Not as visually stunning as the overlook hills. It’s a lone mound of red capped with green.

There is a texture to the surface as well as color

It’s the surrounding landscape that gives the site an ancient look. Did manage to find a lot of photo ops.

The afternoon sun on the painted hills

We enjoyed ourselves to the point of skipping a trip to Tiger Brewing in Mitchell, so as to avoid night driving. Will be swinging back here again.

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Oregon Geology

Signs of autumn

This week brought the Fall Equinox, officially ushering in the season. Before the first snow and at the end of tourist season, we plan trips over roads that will soon become impassable. Rockhounding trips get back on the schedule, as the days cool down. This week we headed to Painted Hills.

US 26 West out of Prineville over Ochoco pass takes you through a beautiful pine forest. On the Mitchell side of that pass, high desert sage and juniper plateaus are cut into canyons by the John Day River.

Painted Hills, near Mitchell, Oregon

Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument sits just west of Mitchell. The national monument is actually represented by three units each with a visitor center. These points of interest are situated 60 land miles apart. This rather large triangular section in the middle of Oregon is bristling with geological marvels and fossils are only part of that.

Daylight plays across these undulating hills

There are places we revisit seasonally and its been well over a year since we traveled to the Painted Hills. JQ is getting good at capturing High Desert landscapes with her camera, but there are places you need to visit in person to really appreciate them. This region of Oregon is one of them.

Rounded hills made of red, green and yellow layers sparked our interest in this unique landscape. Depending on the time of year or even the time of day, there  are different tones to each layer. All of the monument units offer prospective on the ancient inhabitants of this once tropical forest land.

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Revisiting Painted Hills Area

Painted Hills is listed as one of the Seven Wonders of Oregon and features banded clays from a series of volcanic ash eruptions.

We make regular trips to the John Day Fossil Beds Painted Hills Unit. It’s interesting to see the seasonal changes to this otherworldly landscape.

But this week we decided to drive past the entrance to the unit and head north on Burnt Ranch Road.

We have a general idea where this road leads and have been eager to scout it out. Eight miles later we stopped for lunch on the bank of the John Day River.

Thankfully, this gravel road is well maintained. It winds through grazing land,  hay fields and around the bottom of sage covered hills following Bridge Creek.



The Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA) has been working to re-introduce beaver to Bridge Creek. ONDA volunteers help construct temporary dams, plant native vegetation and deciduous trees to improve the habitat.

Bridge Creek restoration includes installation of in-stream structures to provide support for beaver dam construction.

Bridge Creek passes the Painted Hills Unit before joining the John Day River and is a major spawning area for Mid-Columbia River steelhead. The John Day lies on the eastern edge of Burnt Ranch property at roughly the mid-point in the John Day River’s un-dammed course through central Oregon.

 

With head waters in the Blue Mountains, the John Day river flows 284 miles. If you include the South and North Forks, there are about 450 miles of water that empties into the Columbia River 16 miles east of the Highway 97 Bridge. The John Day is the fourth longest free flowing river in the contiguous United States.

Most of the river is located in sparsely populated areas through beautiful canyons, skirting numerous paleontological sites.

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Painted Hills Pictures

Painted Hills Overlook features a panoramic view of the hills. The trail is accessible year-round, but can be icy in the winter.

The otherworldly nature of the Painted Hills is why we keep coming back to this unit of the John Day Fossil Beds. The guidebooks suggest spring or fall as good times to visit. This just means that those are the seasons with the most visitors at the monument.

Mitchell, the closest town, is a two hour drive through the Ochoco National Forest. There are three units that make up the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.

Painted Hills is at the southwest corner of the complex. An hour and a half north is the Clarno Unit or 45 minutes East is the Sheep Rock Unit. These three sites offer a great look at the paleontological riches of Oregon and as you can imagine the drive between sites is rich in geological marvels.

The Clarno Unit offers the oldest exposed layers and fossil encrusted rocks while at the Sheep Rock unit you can tour the Thomas Condon Center and view fragments of ancient animals under glass.

However, the Painted Hills Unit presents a much larger canvas where stratified layers of soil show off eons of earth history in a very colorful manner.

We make seasonal trips to Painted Hills and find that the colored layers are more pronounced in the winter and spring.

In the spring we plan to try hiking the Blue Basin Loop, at the northern edge of the Sheep Rock Unit, and take in a somewhat different ancient landscape.