On the way to the Painted Hills, we stopped at a ghost town named Shaniko. The tiny old buildings looked more like a miniature abandoned movie set than an actual town. This place was quite popular back in its day before the main rail lines moved further west.
Our destination was the Painted Hills in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument area of central Oregon. It is one of three “units” that compose the national monument area. We visited two of them – Painted Hills and the Sheep Rock area. This is high-desert country, dry and these days susceptible to summer fires. I love being out in the dry air, so different from mossy, rainy Seattle.
Entering the Painted Hills is an adventure back into geologic time. The hills are striped in rich red, yellow, black and gray. Over millions of years, sediments were deposited and collected in the floodplains. Then as the ocean floor rose higher and higher, erosion began to mold those shallow sea beds into the hills we see today, exposing the layers of sediments deposited so long ago. Erosion is of course still at work here, so there are certain trails to follow in order to protect the fragile soil.
Painted Cove Nature Trail has a partly elevated wood walkway over part of the trail that is particularly fragile, so that we can get up close to it. I enjoyed sitting on the bench at the end of a short trail, looking at the completely bare red hill.
Next day we drove up to Sheep Rock, stopping at the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center museum, Cant Ranch, up past Goose Rock to the Blue Basin Area, and walked the overlook trail there. Then on to Cathedral Rock before returning. The paleontology center was an interesting stop, learning about the animals that once roamed these lands.
On our way back we stopped in the town of Mitchell, where we were very happy to find Tiger Town Brewing. Like an oasis in the desert, we had a great lunch here and tried their local IPA and cider. I like the tagline on the beer glass that reads "Buy our beer or we'll punch you in the face."
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