Painted Hills is one of those places I’ve been Insta stalking for a while now. This weekend was the time to go explore. In true road-trip spirit, we checked the oil, filled up on gas, stopped by Starbucks and hit the road for a 5 hours drive to Oregon.
Quite a few podcast episodes later, we arrived in the Painted Hills unit of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.
Immediately my breath was taken away.
This place is stunning. And completely off the beaten road. We snapped a couple of pictures + made our way to the first official stop, the Painted Hills overlook.
There is a nice bit of information as to why the clay is different colors. If memory serves me, the black “chalk dust” color is from manganese and the yellow indicates a certain moisture content, while red clay holds the most moisture. (I’m going off of memory here..)
The short 1/2 mile hike up to the overlook is well worth it. I hear the colors vary depending on the day. We were lucky that it was very overcast and cloudy– perfect for hiking around.
We sat and stared at the gorgeous colors for a short period of time, thinking about how crazy it was that we were staring at 35 million years worth of creation and then moseyed our way back to the car. Snapping a few more pictures as we wandered.
The next section we were dying to visit is called Painted Cove Trail. It was everything I hoped it would be. In fact, I had to run to see it. 🙂
Bright red clay with a short trail in the middle of it so you can get a close-up look at the clay. Oddly enough, this clay is so moisture dense that it doesn’t allow any plant life to grow here. The clay doesn’t share water with any plants. Even nature struggles with a-holes!
Painted Hills has a very unearthly feeling to it; definitely worth the drive to explore around. It’s a great reminder that nature, when left untouched, is amazing! The next stop we made was Blue Basin.