Painted Hills

The Painted Hills look less like geology than like a bolt of striped cloth thrown over the high desert of central Oregon. Rounded, almost bare mounds are banded in brick red, ochre, gold and charcoal, and the bands are not a surface stain but a record of climate laid down layer by layer. Most of what you see is volcanic ash that drifted roughly a hundred miles east from eruptions in the ancestral Cascades beginning some 35 million years ago, settling here and weathering into clay over the following several million years, as the warm, wet world of the late Eocene cooled into the drier Oligocene.

Each colour corresponds to a different chapter of that change. The deep reds are fossil soils formed in humid spells, rich in oxidised iron and aluminium; yellower bands record drier intervals; the dark streaks are lignite, the compressed remains of plant matter; and the soft greys are mudstone, siltstone and shale. The slopes carry almost no vegetation, so the stripes stay exposed, and the light keeps rewriting them: flat and pastel at midday, saturated and almost glowing in the low sun of morning and evening. Fossils are scarce here compared with the rest of the monument, though leaf impressions of redwood, alder, fig and cinnamon relatives have been found in the shales.

The hills are one of three units of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, alongside Sheep Rock and Clarno, and cover a little over 3,100 acres. Five short trails each start from their own parking area. The Painted Hills Overlook trail gives the classic wide view of the main ridge; the Painted Cove trail crosses a boardwalk through a small amphitheatre of crumbly red and yellow mounds you can see up close; Red Scar Knoll and Leaf Hill are brief loops; and the Carroll Rim trail, the only demanding one, climbs about 400 feet to a panorama over the whole unit. The soil crust is easily scarred and footprints remain for years, so staying on the paths matters more here than almost anywhere.

Getting there

The unit lies about 9 miles (14 km) northwest of the small town of Mitchell, off U.S. Highway 26. From the highway, take Burnt Ranch Road for about 6 miles, then turn left onto Bear Creek Road at the unit entrance; directional signs lead to each trailhead. The nearest larger town is Redmond, roughly 84 km away in a straight line, and the closest airport is Roberts Field (RDM), Redmond, at a similar distance. The area is remote with few services, so arrive with fuel and water.