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.