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Cruising the Eastern Arctic – Qeqertarsuaq

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Day 9 of our voyage with Adventure Canada found us 168 km (104 mi) south of our last port, Uummanaq, and 100 km (62 mi) west of spectacular Ilulissat in the small town of Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland (population 870 in 2020).

“Qeqertarsuaq” is the Kalaallisut word for “big island” – meaning Disko Island, on which the town is located.  In fact, apart from the tiny village of Kangerluk, it’s the only town on Disko Island.  Founded in 1773 by Danish whaler and merchant Svend Sandgreen, it was originally called Godhavn (“good harbour”).  However artifacts have been found from a Paleo-Eskimo settlement dating back 5,000-6,000 years.

Looming behind Qeqertarsuaq are red basalt cliffs almost 3,000 feet tall, with layered lava benches.  This geological formation  is relatively young,  formed by volcanism some 60 million years ago (the Maligât Formation), compared to the Precambrian bedrock (1.6+ Ga) we see layered at the front in the photo below.  Interestingly, Disko Island is famous for its rare, non-meteoric, naturally-occurring iron or cohenite, which forms when molten magma invades a coal deposit – in this case emerging through sediment in a very deep lake.

Today the town of Qeqertarsuaq is the home of the Arctic Research Station (Artiskstation) Greenland campus, for the University of Copenhagen. You can see the main building on the right up the road from the dad bicycling his kids past the bedrock, below. 

We saw students from the Arctic Station working on a research project. Much of the monitoring here is related to GEM – Greenland Ecosystem Monitoring – a long-term monitoring program operated by Greenlandic and Danish research institutions. The focus of GEM is on Arctic ecosystems and climate change effects and feedbacks in Greenland.

Like Sisimiut and Ilulissat, Qeqertarsuaq features rows of colourful houses. I especially liked the subtle shading here.

Meltwater ponds were abundant at the base of the hill.

In a town where fishing is the main industry, it’s not unusual to see fishing nets drying along with curtains in the sunshine.

We got close to the land in Qeqertarsuaq, beginning our trek crossing the bridge at the outlet of the Kuussuaq River under the bridge.  

Kuussuaq in English is Red River (Røde Elv in Danish), because of the reddish, lateritic soil that washes down from the volcanic rock underlying the Lyngmark Glacier into the river and out into Disko Bay.

The craggy, mossy hillside was dramatic…..

…. and the ground in places was littered with rocks washed down from the glacier, i.e. “glacial outwash field”.

The Kuussuac River is a braided river, with water rushing down through deep crevasses from the Lyngmark Glacier. I can see purple patches of dwarf fireweed on the riverbank below.

We stood for a while beside the Qorlortorsuaq waterfall – a phrase which is redundant in Greenlandic, since the word actually means “big waterfall”.

On my trek, I had to stop and photograph plants, of course – many of which were now familiar since our first day in Iqaluit.  This is dwarf birch (Betula nana).

Clustered lady’s mantle (Alchemilla glomerulans) grew along a stream.

I love the Inuit lore associated with the twisted styles on the seedheads of Dryas integrifolia, the entire leaf mountain avens. In Kalaallisut and Inuktitut, this plant is called malikkaat because it designates practices associated with the passing seasons.  In Nunavut, Canada, according to oral history, “When the seed heads are tightly twisted, caribou skins are too thin to make clothing. As the seed heads untwist, caribou skins are suitable for women’s clothing. When the seed heads are fully open, caribou skins are suitable for men’s clothing.”

An Arctic fritillary butterfly (Boloria chariclea) foraged in the meadow.

The verdant Blæsedalen Valley or Itinneq Kangilleq beckoned ahead, but our time was running out.   

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I managed a few images of the amazing irregular basalt columnar formations forming the cliff walls in certain places. As you might expect from its volcanic origin, there are also geothermal springs in this area, especially a little further up the coast at Unartorssuak where water issuing onto the beach below a large erratic rock (Termistorstenen) is between 13-16C (55-60F).

If we’d had more time there, I would have loved to keep hiking upwards to Kuannit, the place where locals find the biennial herb Angelica archangelica (“kvan” in Danish, “kuanneq” in Kalaallisut) growing and gather it as a vegetable and medicinal.  Alas, no time. I found the plant pictured below growing in Vancouver’s UBC Botanical Garden traditional herb garden.

It was time to retrace our steps along the Kuussuaq River and head back towards Disko Bay.

Beyond the outwash field and the drop-off was the famous black sand beach of Qeqertarsuaq.

On our way through town, we stopped at the little museum. In 1840, it was the home of the colonial inspector; today it houses a nice display of traditional artifacts and clothing,

…. carvings and modern art works….

…..  as well as a large collection of the work of Greenlandic hunter and painter Jakob Danielsen (1888-1938) who chronicled the hunting life a century ago.

Painting by Jakob Danielsen (1888-1938) – Qeqertarsuaq Museum, Greenland

There was an exhibit of tupilaqs in the museum, too. In the Greenland Inuit tradition, a tupilaq is an avenging monster created by a shaman and placed into the sea to seek and destroy a specific enemy. But deploying a tupilaq was risky because the enemy target could have stronger power and send the tupilaq back to attack its maker. Ancient tupilaqs were made of perishable materials in secret places; modern ones are fabricated from narwhal and walrus tusk and wood or caribou antlers.

To honour the museum’s collection of ulus or “women’s knives”, I bought a postcard, which the clerk packed in a beautiful…..

….. shopping bag decorated with a wonderful collection of these knives from all around the Arctic. In Nunavut, the knife is called an ulu; in Greenland, it’s called a sakiaq; in the Northwest Territories, it’s an uluaq. The knife is used to skin and clean animals, cut a child’s hair, slice food, and even trim the blocks of ice used to build an igloo.

We headed back to the ship.  Not long after lifting anchor, we were rewarded with another whale sighting — this time a humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae).

That night, we were treated to one of Adventure Canada’s onboard traditions, the “talent show”. Hawaiian-themed, it featured performances from both passengers and crew. Here the resource staff offered their own take. From left, culturalist (Labrador-born Inuk) Jason Edmunds, Adventure Canada president Matthew Swan (now retired), “the entertainer” Tom Kovacs, field botanist Carolyn Mallory, Inuit art specialist (behind) Carol Heppenstall (now retired), seabird biologist Dr. Mark Mallory and expedition leader Stefan Kindberg (now retired).

Though we didn’t sing or recite Scottish ballads or play guitar, Doug and I got into the act with tacky dollar-store leis.

Best of all, the evening ended with a gorgeous Arctic sunset.   

********

This is the 8th in my series on the Eastern Arctic.  Here are the 7 previous blogs (only two remaining):

Iqaluit

Butterfly Bay and the Waters off Baffin Island

Pangnirtung

Sunneshine Fjord

Sisimiut

Ilulissat

Qilakitsok and Uummannaq

Harvest Time on the Palouse

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After our lovely one-night stay at Abeja Inn and Winery in Walla Walla following our visit to Oregon’s John Day Fossil Unit National Monument, including the spectacular Painted Hills and the excellent Thomas Condon Paleontology Center, we headed north on Highway 12 in the direction of Spokane via Dayton and Colfax.  My purpose in visiting this part of Washington State (apart from returning eventually to Vancouver to fly back home to Toronto) during our Pacific Northwest road trip was to see The Palouse. As a photographer I had admired my colleagues’ summer photos of the rolling green hills of the area. Even though driving through on September 11th meant there was little green to be seen, I was looking forward to visiting this unique place, one of the Seven Wonders of Washington.

Right away, we caught the flavour of the next several hours as we were flanked on both sides by wheat, wheat and more wheat. (Most of the following photos are through the window of our rental car, so if they’re not quite up to par, blame dirty windshields at 60 miles an hour.)

There was something so beautiful about these highway scenes, especially in mid-September when the wheat is nearing harvest. And make no mistake about it, this is big business. In the top 5 of wheat-producing states, Washington is #4 after #1 North Dakota, #2 Kansas, #3 Montana; Idaho is #5. In 2018, when we visited, wheat growers in Washington harvested 2.2 million acres of wheat with an average yield of 70.8 bushels per acre. Total production in the year was 153.2 million bushels with a value of $690 million. Of its total production, 85-90 percent is exported, compared with the overall US total of 46 percent. (Statistics from the Washington Grain Commission)

We passed grain elevators…..

….. and little farms. Though we passed this one at 60 miles an hour, I was delighted later to be able to make out the name in my image and read the story online. Just Another Chance Ranch near Waitsburg rescues horses and connects them in programs “to bring healing and purpose to youth”.

Between Waitsburg and Dayton, the characteristic rolling hills of the Palouse began to take shape behind the Columbia County Grain Growers Silo. The strip farming on the slope seems to be part of the strategy to conserve soil, a major concern in the region. More on that later.

We passed through the small town of Dayton.

For the most part we saw wheat, but here and there farmers grew other crops that stood out in sharp contrast to the sea of golden grain.

Wind farms dot the landscape in eastern Washington and Oregon. This is the Tucannon River Valley with the Hopkins Ridge Wind Farm.

The river valley sustains its share of agriculture. You can’t see the Tucannon River, a tributary of the Snake, but it’s winding beneath the hills.

We crossed the Snake River via the Elmer C. Huntley Central Ferry Bridge.

We were on Highway 127 now. I loved the little farms with their clusters of windbreak trees.

As we drove through the hills our vision was limited but I was sure I could see smoke from a fire in the distance. “Maybe a grass fire?” I said to my husband.

A few miles later, we discovered the source of “the smoke”. It was dust blowing from a farmer tilling his field. Fittingly, we were near the town of Dusty! This might be a good place to talk for a bit about soil conservation on the Palouse. Before farmers arrived from the east, the region was bunchgrass prairie, including bluebunch wheatgrass (which we saw in Oregon’s Painted Hills a few days earlier). Palouse wildflowers included arrowleaf balsamroot, biscuitroot, Lewis flax, prairie smoke, velvet lupine and sticky geranium. Wild roses grew among the grasses, as did serviceberry, hawthorn and chokecherry. The prairie yielded much of the traditional food and medicine for the indigenous people of the area, including the Palouse (Palus), Coeur d’Alene and Spokane Tribes. In 1855, a member of the surveying party of Isaac Stevens, a US Army officer and first Governor of the newly-created Washington Territory, wrote:  “I will again say, we have been astonished today at the luxuriance of the grass and the richness of the soil. The whole view presents to the eye a vast bed of flowers in all their varied beauty. The country is a rolling tableland and the soil is like that of the prairies of Illinois.” But the arrival of the Army, the resultant Indian wars and subjugation of the local tribes spelled the end of the use of the virgin prairie for its natural gifts. Homesteaders arrived from the east in the 1860s and began to dig up the Palouse Prairie to plant crops. With the arrival of the railroad, farmers could ship their grain to points east, enabling large-scale wheat farming. By the time the disastrous 1920s Dust Bowl of the Midwest forced the nation to understand that the erosion of topsoil was caused by bad farming practices coupled with drought, wheat had been grown for a half-century in Washington State. But the Palouse was different: it was hilly, not flat, and the erosion came not just from wind but from winter snows. Without the roots of the native plants, the silty Palouse soil – called “loess”, which rhymes with “nurse” – was highly susceptible to hillside erosion. In 1930, the Pacific Northwest Soil Erosion Station at Pullman, Washington opened, one of ten to open in the U.S. under passionate conservationist Hugh Bennett, to study the “national menace” of soil erosion. Experimental plots were set up using major cropping and tilling systems and testing the run-off, while demonstration plots showed the benefits of good farming practices such as stopping summer fallow: i.e.leaving fields unplanted every other year, requiring excessive tillage of the stubble fields when the soil was at its wettest, causing it to wash away. (If you’re interested, you can read a fascinating memoir by William A. Rockie, the soil conservationist who set up the Pullman station.) Today, soil conservation remains an important focus in the Palouse where it is estimated that in just over a century of farming, half the soil has disappeared. Farmers are encouraged to do direct (no-till) seeding in the stubble mulch of the previous crop; to do contour strip farming, especially on slopes; and to plant cover crops. Steeper land can be placed into the USDA-funded Conservation Reserve Program, effectively paying land owners not to farm (though this program has unfortunately seen cutbacks recently).

With all that in mind, let’s get back to our road trip. Two-and-a-half hours after leaving Walla Walla, we were now 8 miles north of Colfax on Hume Road in sight of Steptoe Butte, a unique geologic formation in the Palouse.

A little while later and we were at the entrance to Steptoe Butte State Park. We parked on the access road so I could get out of the car and photograph it straight on. At a height of 1,100 feet (335 metres), it doesn’t exactly “loom” over the Palouse but it’s definitely the tallest thing around. It was named (alas) after the US Army Colonel Edward Steptoe, famous for his defeat (and retreat), along with his 164 men, by a combined force of one thousand Palouse, Coeur d’Alene and Spokane warriors during the 1858 Battle of Pine Creek.  Despite being immortalized as the “Steptoe Disaster” the butte was named for him – and in fact became the archetype for other such geologic formations, where an island-like bedrock mountain protrudes through a lava flow, in this case a 400Ma Precambrian quartzite mountain protruding through the 16Ma Columbia River Basalt flow (see my previous blog). In 1946 pharmacist Virgil McCoskey, who had spent his childhood on the family farm at the base of Steptoe Butte and was passionate about retaining it as a natural feature, donated 120 acres (49 hectares) to form the state park, later increasing it to 150 acres . In 2016, Kent and Elaine Bassett purchased 437 acres (177 hectares) of the lower slopes to ensure its protection.

Let’s drive up Steptoe Butte. Here you see the native quartzite bedrock peeking through late summer grasses.

From Wiki: “Quartzite is a hard, non-foliated metamorphic rock which was originally pure quartz sandstone. Sandstone is converted into quartzite through heating and pressure usually related to tectonic compression within orogenic belts (during mountain building). Pure quartzite is usually white to grey, though quartzites often occur in various shades of pink and red due to varying amounts of iron oxide.”

We stopped partway up to get a sense of the mountain. Those transmission towers – or earlier versions – were erected when Virgil McCoskey was still involved, and he hated them. But you have to admit that the telecom companies found the ideal place.

Here are more colours of the native quartzite at the summit….

…. including pink-splashed rock at the precipice.

There is room for parking at the summit which at one time featured a hotel! Built in 1888 by English-born merchant James S. “Cashup” Davis (for cash upfront), it wasn’t exactly a roaring success. In time Davis lived alone there, hoping the odd guest might drive the winding road up the butte. He died in 1896, and in 1911 it burned down in a fire started by teens.

There are three interpretive signs at the top: one about Virgil McCroskey and Cashup’s Grand Hotel; one identifies the mountains visible in the distance in the Selkirk Range; and one explains….

….. the geology of Steptoe Butte.

I tried not to notice the telecommunications towers…..

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Now, with your permission, I’m going to geek out a little on crop pattern photography.  I switched back and forth from my camera with the wide-angle lens to the one with the 70-200 F4 telephoto lens. I wanted the full panorama, but also the incredible texture of the fields

At first I was disappointed that I wasn’t going to be seeing the Palouse in early summer, when the crops reflect back a hundred shades of green. But then I realized there are hundreds of shades of brown as well.

The tracks made by the big combines in the shorn fields were like the nap of well-worn velvet.

From a thousand feet up, the farms and wheat trucks below could have been tiny toys.

I tried to imagine living in a farm down there in the Palouse, hoping for summer rain to water the grains and not getting any. Other years, seeing your seed and soil washed away in spring torrents.

Green gullies and winding roads were the seams in this undulating harvest cloth.

The combine patterns emphasized the contours of the loess hills.

In some respects the Palouse reminded me of the hills of Tuscany, only with Ponderosa pines instead of cypress trees.

The same combine tractor worked the crops below. And we would see it later as we headed out of the park.

Looking south, the view included a Douglas fir on the butte’s slope.

A hundred names for brown. Buff bronze ecru sepia ash camel taupe chocolate tan heather ochre…. and so many more. The colours obviously reflect the crops, but I couldn’t begin to separate them by hue. In the Palouse, they grow wheat in all its variety and gluten content. Soft white wheat, both winter and spring, is used in cakes and cereals and pastries. Hard red wheat is for breads and pizza crusts. Soft red winter wheat is best for pretzels. Durum is the wheat for pasta. Hard white represents ethnic menus, especially Asian noodles and steambreads. Barley grows here too. Lentils are a major crop, having arrived via seed from Europe in 1916. Farms in the Palouse now supply 95 percent of America’s lentils. Chickpeas are grown in the Palouse as well.

We headed back down the mountain but I begged to stop at a little clearing.

I wanted to fill my imagination with these fields….

….. and their captivating textures.

Off in the distance I could see more wind turbines.

I focused with my telephoto lens…..

….. and it occurred to me that the prairie wind that turns the blades that powers the turbines…..

…. is the same wind that carries away the silty soil of the Palouse into the air behind the blades of the big combines.

We got down to the bottom of the butte and met one of its resident deer skittering across the road.

No doubt it had been eating the apples in the historic old orchard nearby….

…. where no one was there to harvest them.

We laid out a picnic of the deli food I’d bought at the Safeway in Bend, Oregon, two days earlier, still cold thanks to the refrigerator in the well-stocked kitchen of Abeja Inn back in Walla Walla. Some things had even been transported all the way from the supermarket near my brother’s place outside Vancouver ten days ago. No one can accuse us of not being frugal on the road!

Then we headed north towards Spokane. Naturally there was road construction holding things up, but I didn’t mind.

Wheat fields and blue sky.  What could be lovelier for a last stop on the highway in one of America’s most picturesque bread baskets, the Palouse.

Oregon’s Thomas Condon Paleontology Center

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The morning after our visit to the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (JODA), we had a $5 bacon-and-eggs breakfast at the Sidewalk Cafe in Mitchell, then packed our bags and drove away from The Oregon Hotel.

Soon we were driving east from Mitchell (#1, below) on Highway 26 towards Highway 19 and our destination, the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center (TCPC) at Sheep Rock (#2), the second of the three units of JODA. (Click on the photo to see a larger version.) Sadly, we didn’t have time to include John Day’s third area of interest, the Clarno Unit, which features the in situ fossils. Our ultimate destination that day was a one-night splurge at the Inn at Abeja in Walla Walla (#3) about 207 miles away via Highways 395 and 11, where my husband had booked a 3 pm wine-tasting. We didn’t make our appointment (blame geology and highway work) but re-booked it for the following morning (coming up in my next blog!)

It was fine weather on September 10, 2018 and I was enjoying…….

…… sending back jokey phone shots to my friends on Facebook. Might as well get some value out of those roaming fees!  You can see the reddish-brown, wedding-cake palisades of the…..

….. Picture Gorge Basalts in these photos.  “Picture Gorge”, for all its importance in defining a large lava flood, seems a little elusive as to physical definition. It is usually pinpointed on maps as just north of Highway 26 on Highway 19, i.e. very near to this location. So it was fortuitous that I asked my husband to pull over at this spot on the highway where the volcanic rock was beautifully exposed. It recalled for me John McPhee’s writings in Annals of the Former World about road cuts like this one yielding vital information for geologists.

At this point we saw that the basalt has been tilted and mashed up (using very un-geological terminology), but a few yards further on…..

…… we saw the basalt as it was originally formed into hexagonal columns (columnar basalt) while cooling slowly after a geographically local eruption in what geologists include as the “Picture Gorge Basalt Flood” in the Columbia River Basalt Flood (CRBF) event. As defined in Wikipedia, “a flood basalt is the result of a giant volcanic eruption or series of eruptions that covers large stretches of land or the ocean floor with basalt lava”. The broader geologic category covering basalt flood events is a Large Igneous Province (LIP), meaning areas greater than 100,000 square kilometres (38,600 square miles) that occurred within a short geologic time, a few million years. (If you remember your three types of rock from elementary school, “igneous” rock forms from lava or magma.) In this part of western North America, the Columbia Plateau between the Cascade Range and the Rocky Mountains of Washington, Oregon and Idaho is a depression of 160,000 square kilometres (63,000 square miles) formed by successive lava flows. During the CRBF event between 16.6 – 15Ma (Ma = mega annum = million years), massive amounts of magma erupted as basaltic lava (thought to have been fed by the same slowly-moving hot spot that triggered the Yellowstone super-volcano). The CRBF covers seven formations, including the one we’re travelling through: the Picture Gorge Basalt Flood. Beneath Yakima, Washington, the basalt is 15,000 feet thick. Here in the Picture Gorge, it’s about 1,000 feet thick. Got all that?

Less than an hour after leaving Mitchell, we were on the newly-paved highway through Picture Gorge leading to the TCPC. We stopped to photograph pinnacled Sheep Rock with its patchwork formations.

Sheep Rock is 3360 feet (1024 metres) and gives its name to the larger area around it. According to the US Geological Survey, “The Sheep Rock unit contains an amalgam of colorful strata and complex geology. From Cretaceous conglomerates to the flood basalts, the geologic features in this portion of the monument are a spectacle to behold. The predominant exposures of green rock seen on Sheep Rock are a multitude of reworked layers of volcanic ash. The rich green color of the claystone was caused by chemical weathering of a mineral called celadonite. This happened millions of years ago as water moved through the alkaline ash beds under high pressure.”

We stopped further down the road so I could photograph it with the eponymous John Day River in the foreground. If we hadn’t been pressed for time, it would have been good to explore the Sheep Rock Unit for a few hours, since there are trails here with startling blue and green formations and visible fossils, including Cathedral Rock and Blue Basin.  You can see some of the other features in this blog.

But time was marching so we were soon parked at the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center.  Mandated in the 1975 legislation that established JODA, it was opened in 2005.

We walked past a chunk of 40-million-year-old petrified wood in the parking lot. This was going to be fun!

The center was named for Oregon’s first state geologist. Born in Ireland in 1822, Thomas Condon immigrated to New York with his family as a child. He became a school teacher then entered a Presbyterian seminary. Like many young educated men of his era Condon was also interested in natural history and collected fossils as a hobby. After moving to Oregon as a missionary, he and his wife later moved to The Dalles as minister of the Congregational church where one pioneer later remembered “that peculiar smile wreathed about his face when he spoke, the tender manner in which he handled the bones and rocks, his quaint manner that is indescribable. He read truths in God’s books of sand and stone.” When the soldiers in his congregation began bringing him specimens from the John Day area, his interested was piqued and in 1865 he travelled into the region with an army patrol. He sent the fossils he collected to eminent paleontologists for identification, and soon experts from Yale, Princeton and the University of California were writing Condon to request specimens (many new to science), or visiting the site themselves. At 49 he published a paper on Oregon’s geological past and gave a series of popular lectures on geology in Portland. In 1870, his first discovery was published by University of Pennsylvania paleontologist Joseph Leidy.

In 1872 Thomas Condon was named Oregon’s first state geologist; the following year, he resigned his church position to become a professor at Pacific University. Three years later, he moved to the new University of Oregon, below, where he taught for almost 20 years until his death in 1907. It’s a mark of his early influence that “by 1900 over 100 papers had been published on the geology and paleontology of the John Day basin”, according to the center.

In fact, the John Day Basin was the first site to help scientists understand the historic global context in which fossils appeared in rock strata. Said John C. Merriam who led many expeditions to the region for the University of California in the early 1900s: “By observing the distinctive characteristics of the layers and of the associated forms of life, we discover the record of amazing series of changes in the appearance of the country through a period so vast that relatively man’s sojourn on the earth seems no longer than the click of a camera shutter.” One of the young scientists who visited John Day with Merriam was Ralph Weeks Chaney (1890-1971), far right in the upper photo below.  A geologist, paleobotanist and ecologist, his collections helped to define the Tertiary flora (66-2.6Ma*) of ancient Oregon. At 35, he had published papers on the local Mascall 15Ma (see later in this blog) and Bridge Creek Flora 33Ma. At 41, he was named Professor of Paleontology at Berkeley and Curator of Paleobotany and Museum Paleobotanist at the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

I would not connect the photo above with the photo below until a year later, i.e. right now, as I did my research on the region. When Chaney worked on the fossils of the Bridge Creek flora in the 1920s, specimens like the one below were initially identified as fossil Sequoia. But in 1941, a Japanese paleobotanist named Shigeru Miki found fossils of a conifer believed to be extinct in clay beds at Hondo on Kyushu. Because it looked like a sequoia in many respects but was not, he named the fossil Metasequoia. Then in 1944, a young Chinese forester named Zhang Wang went to a town called Mou-tao-chi in a valley in Hupei Province and collected branches and cones of a conifer that was thought to be a common Chinese species, the water-pine (Glyptostrobus pensilis). It was later determined to be an undiscovered species that matched the fossils found in Japan five years earlier: the dawn redwood. In 1947, collections of seed were financed by Dr. E.D. Merrill of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, who sent them to botanical gardens throughout the world. Ralph Chaney, through his own communications with the Chinese geologist Hsen Hsu Hu, learned about the new species at the same time, and suspected it might be the same “sequoia” fossil he had studied in the John Day Region. Accompanied by Dr. Milton Silverman, science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, he travelled to Hupei in 1948; together they made an arduous 10-day trip into the region (one of Chaney’s 9 collecting trips in Asia), later leaving China with seeds and four small seedlings of dawn redwood.  (If you’re not bored to death yet, there are layers of intrigue and professional misunderstanding in the Metasequoia saga, as described in this 2016 story in Landscape Architecture Magazine.)

Ralph Paley wrote his own story about the trip (which would overturn significant parts of North American taxonomy as nine fossil Sequoia taxa were renamed Metasequoia), which is included in a 1998 edition of Harvard’s Arnoldia. At the end is an epilogue on his return to the U.S. with the samples he had collected. “Chaney himself brought back seeds and four seedlings from China. Concerned that his prizes might be taken from him by customs in Hawaii, he tucked the seeds and twigs into an inner pocket and requested intercession for the seedlings from a former student at the Department of Agriculture in Washington. Word did not reach the inspector at Plant and Economic quarantine in Honolulu, however, and he demanded that the four seedlings be handed over for incineration. Chaney’s protestations that the trees were priceless, more than a million years old, were of no avail. According to Milton Silverman, the ensuing argment grew louder and louder until Chaney, close to hysteria, was shouting defiantly and citing, ‘millions of years, tens of millions of years, a hundred million years’. Suddenly the agitated inspector asked a question: ‘Are they more than a hundred and fifty years old?’ And so, officially declared antiques, the seedlings continued their journey to California”. Ralph Chaney would grow dawn redwood in his “Tertiary garden” in Berkeley, in a collection marking 100 million years of geologic time. I made the photo below in the Sarah Duke Garden at Duke University in North Carolina.

Oregon was so proud of the renaming that it declared dawn redwood its state fossil.

A fossil species of hornbeam from 33Ma is in the center’s collection, below. It is named Paracarpinus chaneyi after its discoverer. The maple fossil Acer chaneyi is also named for Ralph Chaney. These ancient ancestors of our modern-day trees, including katsura, elm and alder – and of course dawn redwood – are displayed in the Bridge Creek Flora section of the TCPC.

The Bridge Creek Flora was collected in the spectacular Painted Hills Unit of JODA, which I wrote about in my previous blog.

I loved the colourful displays showing an imagined scene from the Bridge Creek era some 33 million years ago (Oligocene). Check out the “painted hills” stripe in the wall.

But the Bridge Creek Flora is not the oldest formation in the region. As you can see on the interesting display below, that honour goes to the the Clarno Nut Beds which make up the third unit of JODA (which alas we did not have time to explore).

The Clarno Formation is made up of volcanic mudflows called “lahars” that formed 54-40 million years ago, engulfing the forest and its plant and animal inhabitants. Fossils are visible in the cliff walls here.

The Clarno Nut Beds contain 76 species of wood, more wood than any other fossil assemblage in the world, including ancient relatives of walnut, chestnut, oak, sycamore, maple, linden, dogwood and meliosma.  The region was a semi-tropical forest in which grew ancient forms of cycad, palm, avocado, banana, grape and horsestail.  Because of the sudden nature of the formation, there are even rare fossil assemblages of leaves, wood and fruit in the Clarno, below.

The Hancock Mammal Quarry 40Ma is part of the Clarno Strata. From the interpretive signage: “Within the depths of the Clarno Strata is a layer of volcanic sediments deposited by a river. Seasonal flooding swept a large variety of dead animals and plants to an existing point bar. A point bar forms when  sediments such as silt, clay, sand and gravel drops out as water rounds a bend and loses energy, building up a spit of land. With each successive flood, more sediment layers were added.” Animal species in this semi-tropical forest included wolf-like creodonts, tapir-like hyracyus, and rhino-like herbivorous brontotheres.

This is the tusk of an amynodont, a marsh rhinoceros.

 

The next younger formations after The Bridge Creek Flora above are The Turtle Cove 29Ma, the Kimberly 24Ma and the Haystack Valley 20Ma. These four formations are referred to as the John Day Strata and yield more fossils than any other area at JODA. By the late Kimberly and Haystack Valley, the climate here had cooled down and dried out. The Haystack Valley assemblages are found in the youngest rock before the Picture Gorge Basalt Flood.  Grasses and grazers were now on the scene.

The Picture Gorge Basalt Floods 16Ma occurred as a series of molten lava floods streamed over the land like icing on a cake. As it cools, basalt (pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, like “assault”) forms polygonal columns, often hexagonal. These are seen throughout the world, especially here in Oregon. The most famous is the Giant’s Causeway 55Ma on the Antrim Coast in Ireland. I was there in 2008, below, when I visited my grandfather’s childhood home.

Basalts with their incredible temperatures exclude fossils. Once the Picture Gorge Basalt flows ceased, life returned to the region, as illustrated in the beautiful mural by Roger Witter, below. A moderate climate along with abundant rainfall and fertile volcanic soil encouraged the growth of mixed deciduous forests and lush grasses. Bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) surrounded lakes and replaced dawn redwood. Hoofed animals appeared, including six types of horses, camelids and peccaries. True cats crossed over from Asia, along with elephant-like gomphotheres. The Mascall Formation 15Ma is 290 metres (950 feet thick) and consisted of several broad basins with lakes and meandering streams that formed atop the last of the basalt flows. They were later covered with successive layers of ash from volcanoes to the west and much closer Strawberry Mountain volcanics. Alternating between the layers of tuff (volcanic ash) are siltstones and sandstones related to stream deposits.

Among the fauna in the formation are birds, turtles, fish and 33 species of mammals, mostly found in the Mascall Tuff, including an early mastodon called Zygolophodon, whose molars are shown below.

For 8 million years, life in the region was peaceful. Then, as the NPS says:  “Life in the Rattlesnake came to an abrupt end seven million years ago as a stratovolcano in the Harney Basin (near current-day Burns) erupted, as pictured in the mural below (by Roger Witter). Tephra was expelled from the mouth of the volcano, coming down like a fiery hail on the land. The eruption created a pyroclastic flow which attained speeds over 400 mph and spewed hot, ashy gas that reached nearly 1,800 °F. This event caused nearly 13,000 square miles of Eastern Oregon to be covered in an ashy tuff that destroyed everything in its path.” Known as the Rattlesnake Ignimbrite or the Rattlesnake Ash Flow Tuff (RAFT), it is the youngest major formation in the area and forms the dark red cap atop certain mountains, but is largely eroded in much of the region.  However, we would soon be seeing remants of the RAFT at a nearby viewpoint of the Mascall Formation.

As we made our way out, I stopped at an interpretive display featuring an impressive evolutionary record of the horse from 54Ma to 5Ma.
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A display case showed the fossil-collector’s tools. More than 45,000 fossils are now in the John Day collection.

Another display showed how fossils are prepared.

Then we were outside with that spectacular view of Sheep Rock.

But who was this?  Yes…. proponents of ‘Intelligent Design’, below, were sitting right outside a secular government building.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Despite what the majority of scientists think about mixing God with creation, Thomas Condon squared his own faith with paleontology: “The Hills from which these evidences were taken“, he wrote in reference to the evolutionary record of the fossil beds, “were made by the same God who made the hills of Judea, and the evidences are as authoritative. The Church has nothing to fear from the uncovering of  truth.” Unsurprisingly, for an ordained minister contemporaneous with Charles Darwin, he had given the matter some thought.

And what do I think? Well, I’ll just insert this little clue here….

******

At the risk of courting a little controversy… while writing this blog I looked at the online version of the Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet “Was Life Created”.  In a series of questions and answers, the viewer is encouraged to think of the verses of the bible as a kind of moral support that the creation of the universe and its creatures could not have come about as the result of natural forces and unguided evolution. Here’s a bit of it:

“Many who believe in evolution assert that God does not exist or that he will not intervene in human affairs. In either case, our future would rest in the hands of political, academic, and religious leaders. Judging from the past record of such men, the chaos, conflict, and corruption that blight human society would continue. If, indeed, evolution were true, there would seem to be ample reason to live by the fatalistic motto: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we are to die.” (1 Corinthians 15:32) By contrast, the Bible teaches: “With [God] is the source of life.” (Psalm 36:9) These words have profound implications. If what the Bible says is true, life does have meaning. Our Creator has a loving purpose that extends to all who choose to live in accord with his will. (Ecclesiastes 12:13) That purpose includes the promise of life in a world free of chaos, conflict, and corruption—and even free of death.(Psalm 37:10, 11; :Isaiah 25:6-8)  With good reason, millions of people around the world believe that learning about God and obeying him give meaning to life as nothing else can! (John 17:3) Such a belief is not based on mere wishful thinking. The evidence is clear—life was created.”

That kind of circular logic to arrive at a rationale for putting creation in the divine hands of an Intelligent Designer is astonishing to me. However, more liberal versions of the creationism concept run throughout organized religions and even among people who don’t practice religion, but feel there “must be some cause” or “reason” why we’re here. Even long after the idea of a 6,000-year old universe created in 6 days was jettisoned in the face of fossil discoveries that proved earth was much, much, older, most of the faithful still believe that the notion of a god-created universe is more comforting than the truly frightening concept of not knowing the “why” we are here, even if we can work out the “how”.

I do have a bible, as it happens – a high school reminder of the life of faith I lived for 50 years, beginning with my christening as an infant, my attendance at parochial schools, the baptism of my own three children, and decades spent in thoughtful prayer in churches and cathedrals.  I am now 72 and I have lived purposefully without faith for more than two decades. I no longer believe in God or deities. I am an atheist. In my personal library are books as illuminating to me as the bible is to its most fervent adherents. They were my way of deprogramming myself but also of understanding the scientific facts about our universe and its “creation”. For this blog, I’ll just look at five of them from the photo below that bear on this discussion.

 

  1. Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection – 1st Edition (1859)
  2. David Quammen – The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006)
  3. Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene (1976)
  4. Richard Dawkins – Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1998)
  5. Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion (2008)

1) Darwin’s magnum opus changed everything. It became the foundation of evolutionary biology. When The Origin of Species was published in 1859 Thomas Condon was still working as a missionary in Oregon; three years later he would have his own congregation in the Dalles. In England, as Wiki says: “Natural history at that time was dominated by clerical naturalists whose income came from the Established Church of England and who saw the science of the day as revealing God’s plan.” Charles Darwin, after decades of his own experiments and research, including five years as naturalist on HMS Beagle, had also communicated extensively with other scientists, including the pioneering Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, “who demonstrated the power of existing natural causes in explaining Earth history.” Darwin acknowledged Lyell’s work in The Origin. “He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural science, yet does not admit how incomprehensibly vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.” Yet, much to Darwin’s disappointment, Charles Lyell, like Thomas Condon, struggled “to square his natural beliefs with evolution”. (Wiki)

2) Why did it take Charles Darwin 20 years to find the courage to publish his findings? Why was he so reluctant to share the idea that species are “mutable”? Perhaps for the same reason that Thomas Condon felt the need to defend paleontology as perfectly aligned with his faith. Darwin knew, in his core, that his theory would conceivably negate the God of Creation in Genesis that so many of his contemporaries took as fact. David Quammen’s book explores the mid-19th century environment in England in which Darwin worked and his own personal qualms at publishing, including his relationship with his very Christian wife, Emma.

3) The photo of me with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, above, contains a jokey reference to his seminal 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, which described the gene as the evolutionary survival machine, a process he explains in this video. As to the photo, we were photographed at a fundraiser breakfast in Toronto put on by the Centre for Inquiry Canada. It was the morning after the Hot Docs Festival gala screening of The Unbelievers, which I had also attended, about the campaign by Dawkins and his colleague, partical physicist Lawernce Krauss to fight for a wider acceptance of atheism. (You can watch the entire documentary here.)

4) In Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins writes his own response to the Romantic poet William Keats who objected to Isaac Newton’s scientific deconstruction of the magic of a rainbow into prismatic hues. In this video, Dawkins expands on that with the first beautiful verses of his book.

5) After authoring numerous scholarly books and papers on evolutionary biology, Richard Dawkins took on organized religion in this stunning book, which won him as much criticism as it did praise. It was time to take a very public stand and carry the flag for atheism, to accomplish very concrete things such as enabling those with no declared religion to run for office in the U.S. without hiding their atheism or agnosticism. You can glean his intent in this brief video summary of the point of the intent of The God Delusion on BBC4.

Finally, do I think Thomas Condon’s reverence for the “hills of Judea” has any special significance? Of course I do. As Wikipedia says (and I have no reason to doubt it): “The Judaean Mountains are the surface expression of a series of monoclinic folds which trend north-northwest through Israel. The folding is the central expression of the Syrian Arc belt of anticlinal folding that began in the Late Cretaceous Period in northeast Africa and southwest Asia. The Syrian Arc extends east-northeast across the Sinai, turns north-northeast through Israel and continues the east-northeast trend into Syria. The Israeli segment parallels the Dead Sea Transform lies just to the east. The uplift events that created the mountain occurred in two phases one in the Late Eocene-Early Oligocene and second in the Early Miocene. In prehistoric times, animals no longer found in the Levant region were found here, including elephants, rhinoceri, giraffes and wild Asian water buffalo. The range has karst topography including a stalactite cave in Nahal Sorek National Park between Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh and the area surrounding Ofra, where fossils of prehistoric flora and fauna were found. In ancient times the Judean mountains were the allotment of the Tribe of Judah and the heartland of the former Kingdom of Judah.”  (I’m assuming those last two Wikipedia “facts” are Thomas Condon’s biblical point of reference.)

*******

Well, that was quite the detour. Back to our road trip now. We drove south from TCPC to Highway 26 and turned east towards the town of John Day. A little later, we turned onto a rustic road leading to the spectacular Mascall Overlook. I think this is quite a new feature, and definitely worth taking time to do……

…. because the view is simply thrilling. An interpretive sign dramatizes the sudden, terrifying cause of the Rattlesnake Formation and the resulting ignimbrite formation: “Imagine standing at the bottom of a long mountain valley, here, just over seven million years ago. A lush blanket of grass covers the length of the valley…… Nearby,four-tusked elephants graze playfully, ignoring a passing hyena hunting prey. The sound of munching grass comes from a wary herd of horses. Suddenly, a distant thundering explosion shakes the land. Birds burst from the grasses into the sky. Soon, the inhabitants settle down, as you wonder about the source of the explosion. Less than an hour later, the valley to the east quickly fills with a glowing tidal wave of fiery volcanic ash, gases and debris. This onrushing cloud of death flows down the valley toward you at high speed, engulfing and incinerating all life. It is well you were not here. Successive ashfalls from the volcanic eruption, 80 miles to the south, covered the region. A fiery deposit, an ignimbrite, settled into that ancient valley bottom. The mountains and hills that held that valley have since eroded down, leaving the hard, resistant ignimbrite and valley bottom high in the sky.” If you were an ancient Roman, this could be the god Vulcan enacting his wrath. An early Christian might indeed consider this spectacle of “fire and brimstone” as hell on earth.  But science knows it was the release of liquid magma from the magma chamber underlying the region. A tiny blip in the dramatic chronicle of earth science.

It’s the stunning panorama that takes your breath here, of the fanned Mascall formation……

….. and that iron-oxidized ignimbrite (ash tuff) layer capping the ridge (which is why it’s called caprock here) which would have formed the fiery layer 7 million years ago, before erosion carved out this valley.

For that I needed my zoom lens.

With that, we took our leave of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, driving east on Highway 26 over the John Day River towards…..

…. Highway 395 north. We drove up alongside the North Fork John Day River on the Ukiah-Dale Scenic Corridor through the Ulmatilla Forest, always aware of the tiers of columnar basalt decorating the hills like layered frosting.

The highway twisted over hills and through valleys….

…. and forest fire remnants that were far enough in the past to allow what I believe are red  huckleberries (Vaccinium parvifolium) to grow in the charred earth, their colours reddening as autumn neared.

This would be our last view of a creek forming a tributary of the John Day River, because…..

….. we were heading north into farm country along Highway 395, then Highway 11 into Walla Walla.

On September 10th, the grain was golden and the sky was dramatic.

Wire fences snaked across rolling farm hills like delicate embroidery.

It was comforting to see the 16-million-year-old basalt peeking out of the highway shoulders here and there.

We weren’t always alone in the rolling hills.

As we veered slightly northeast onto Highway 11, the hay bales were piled six-high…..

….. and grain elevators dotted the landscape.

At 5:02 pm, we pulled into Walla Walla. We were 2 hours late for our wine-tasting at the nearby inn, but there would be wine for us anyway in our lovely room (next blog). Because although we had started our day just eight hours earlier in the little town of Mitchell, it felt like we’d been awake for 44 million years.

The Painted Hills of Oregon

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This week last September, we were cruising across Oregon, where we had earlier visited Ecola State Park on the coast and I’d had the pleasure of touring both the Japanese Garden and Chinese Garden in Portland. Golf with my husband’s college friends took up a few days in Portland and Bend and then we were on our own. We drove northeast from beautiful Bend through the high desert, below, towards some fascinating geologic sites I’d researched for our road trip itinerary.

Once upon a time, some 400 million years ago or so, what is now the state of Oregon lay under the Pacific Ocean. Idaho formed the western coast of the continent and Oregon (and Washington and parts of California) consisted of volcanic island arcs, i.e. “exotic terranes” on the ocean floor that were too big to slide under the subduction zone as the Juan de Fuca (Pacific) plate slowly moved under the North American plate. As this excellent page from the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries states: “Instead, they remained in the subduction zone and welded themselves to the edge of the growing plate. The result we see today is a fascinating array of varied rocks; thick slices of the oceanic crust, limestone with tropical corals, volcanic seamounts, shiny blue-green serpentinite, and large areas of totally crushed and broken rock called mélange, produced by the incredible forces of two tectonic plates smashing together.”

Over the next 270 million years, magma from deep within the earth was injected into these rocks, fusing them together. After that, sediments were deposited on top in the form of sandstone and mudstone. The Coast Range (including the Cascade Mountains) emerged from this collision of plates. Fifty two million years ago, as the subduction zone between the two major plates moved west, hundreds of volcanic eruptions formed a large volcanic shield (the Ancient Arc) under two-thirds of the eastern part of Oregon. These major volcanoes, including calderas, continued until 20 to 6 million years ago, forming thick layers of lava flows and tuff. Much younger volcanoes continue to erupt in the region today. I saw vivid evidence of this while my husband was golfing in Bend, when I drove to Lava Butte nearby. Formed 7,000 years ago from a cinder cone associated with the Newberry Caldera (80,000 years ago) sending fluid basalt over a huge region, it was eerily beautiful. Here’s a look at the landscape, with the volcanic mountains on the Cascade Range in the distance.

But we were an hour northeast of Bend now on Highway 26 as we drove through the remnants of a 2014 forest fire, the Waterman Complex, that devastated almost 12,000 acres of the Ochoco National Forest.

An hour later, the landscape ahead became more dramatic.

Geology is one of my great fascinations in life. Though I’m not an expert at all, it is so interesting to travel in and among these rugged artifacts from deep time – or, as author John McAfee called them in his wonderful Pulitzer-prize-winning book, these “Annals of the Former World”.  Just three months earlier, we had visited friends in Utah who had toured us through Zion Canyon National Park where the Virgin River has scoured a gorge through a canyon of Navajo sandstone estimated to be 175-250 million years old……

….and Bryce Canyon National Park, below, with its thousands of hoodoos carved via erosion from 50-million year old iron-rich, limy, sedimentary rock (Claron Formation). Both Zion and Bryce are part of the Grande Escalante of the American West, the “grand staircase” of rock formations leading down to the Grand Canyon, which is still on my bucket list. One day there will be a blog!

Yellowstone Park with its spectacular volcanic history…

…. and the Grand Tetons (9 million years old) were a thrill to visit and blog about back in 2016. Click on those links, especially if you love geothermal features!

Even when I drive on Highway 169 to Gravenhurst, the town near our Ontario cottage a few hours north of Toronto, to buy groceries I sometimes stop to photograph particularly good specimens of “banded gneiss”. below. Roughly 1.4 billion years old and part of the Grenville Province of North America’s Precambrian Shield, i.e. the stable, non-volcanic, boring part of the North American craton, it is metamorphic rock that was twisted and roiled and compressed as it formed part of an ancient mountain system, now long eroded away.

As I “stop for rock”, I sometimes ponder that we take for granted visits to museums to see cultural artifacts of our human history, but are less interested in these rocks that bear witness to ancient geologic events and render our own stay on the planet as a mere dust mote in time. I suppose it gives me a sense of existential perspective. So it was a given that when we drove through Eastern Oregon, the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument with its three far-flung “units”would be on my “must-see” list.  Almost two hours out of Bend, we turned off Highway 26 onto Burnt Ranch Road (aka Bridge Creek Road), and as we rounded a curve I snapped my first phone shot of a “painted hill”. In the late afternoon light, the colours were spectacular.

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) is the predominant shrub in the high desert here and I waded in to get a better shot.

Annual sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), the grandparent of all our colourful, tall sunflowers, grew by the side of road.   But this wasn’t the main show – that was still a bit down the road.

Minutes later, I made my husband stop the car on the entrance road to capture the wide view.

We pulled into the small parking lot at the Painted Hills Overlook…..

……. and visited the interpretive signs in the rustic shelter.

The Painted Hills form one of three “units” of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. National Monuments are similar to national parks, but generally smaller, with less focus on recreation and more on some notable natural feature.  The Painted Hills are considered one of the Seven Wonders of Oregon.  This late in the afternoon, we would only be able to get to this site, but hoped to visit one more on our drive north the following morning.  Who was John Day? Turns out he had nothing to do with geology, but was a fur trapper sent out by John Jacob Astor (Astoria Oregon) in 1811 who had the misfortune of being robbed on a river that meanders through the area, the Mah-Hah. When people passed the spot, they said that’s where poor John was robbed, so it became the John Day River. (Not the most auspicious naming for a national monument, but… oh well.)

The next signs explained the significance of the colours of the soil in the hills, which span a period roughly 39-30 million years ago. Technically, they’re called “paleosols”, which means “ancient soils that have been re-exposed.” The red, iron-oxide-rich “laterite” soil originated in floodplain deposits when this part of Oregon was warm and humid with rainfall of 33-51 inches per year and lots of ponds and lakes.

The yellowish/tan/grey soils are mudstone, siltstone or shale which formed from sediments deposited on an ancient river floodplain. Drier than the red soil eras, rainfall would have been 27-37 inches per year, as compared to modern rainfall year of 12 inches annually.

The Google Earth view of the Painted Hills shows the swirls of red laterite soil.  According to the National Park Service: “The green colors may indicate the clay celadonite (blue), the zeolite clinoptilolite (yellow) or reduced iron. The buff colors are close to the original color of the ash*. Almost all of these layers have been reworked and altered by pedogenic (soil-building) processes.”  (*ash from Oregon’s volcanic past)
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Because of the lateness of the day, we only viewed the hills from the main viewpoint, walking just a short distance to get some slightly different vantage points.

But visitors with more time can take a number of hiking trails at the Painted Hills, some of which give you a high-angle view and others that bring you very close to the soil itself.  I loved the “elephant foot” look of the formations here, which is simply the product of erosion from rain and snow.  The black layers are lignite, which is the fossilized or carbonized residue of vegetative matter that once grew on the floodplain.

 

 

I assume that the other mountains and hills in the background, once they erode over thousands of years, will also expose these older layers lying far beneath their tree-studded surfaces.

It’s tempting to think these layers happened over a short time, but the coloured strata would be separated by many thousands or millions of years. It’s hard to get one’s mind around the time scales of deep time.

I could have photographed here for hours (and now wish I had, of course!)

Vegetation is extremely sparse on the Painted Hills, as you see below, where some of the western junipers have died. According to the US Geological Survey, the Painted Hills’ “surface weathering relatively quickly breaks down these rocks into a clay-rich surface coating that easily erodes during summer flash floods and/or winter storms. The high clay content and rapid erosion during infrequent storms prevents plants from becoming established in the badlands areas”. But whereas nothing seems to grow in the iron-rich red soil, I put on my zoom lens to capture the little….

…. bunchgrasses at the top of one of the hills featuring the yellowish, silty soil. With some help from my botanist friends on Facebook, I believe this is bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata, syn. Agropyron spicata).

As we headed out, I photographed a large mountain with a flat ridge. Later I discovered it is the Carroll Rim. According to the US Geological Survey: “The hill (about 500 feet high) is called Carroll Rim and was the source of many fossils early in the exploration of the John Day region. The Picture Gorge Ignimbrite (a massive volcanic tuff deposit) caps the hill (technically called a cuesta). This massive volcanic deposit overlies sedimentary beds of the middle Turtle Cove Member of the John Day Formation.” The Turtle Cove member is dated to about 29 million years ago and the ignimbrite capping to 16 million years ago, so you can see how the younger rock formations are higher than the Painted Hills. The next morning, we would see very dramatic evidence of the Picture Gorge Ignimbrite en route to Walla Wall. That’s in my next blog!

Time was getting on, so we got back in the car and drove nine miles southeast past teetering columnar Picture Gorge Basalt formations…..

….to the tiny town of Mitchell (population 124), where we had reserved a room at The Oregon Hotel.

It is pretty funky, little Mitchell, with the standard feed store to supply the local farmers……

…… and a gift shop dressed up for autumn…..

…… and an eclectic rockhound/fossil dealer who’d left his inventory unattended and driven off somewhere in his truck. Clearly there’s not a lot of crime in Mitchell.

This painting at the feed store captured the 1860s gold rush in Oregon – perhaps when prospectors arrived in Bridge Creek nearby.

That morning in Bend, while Doug played his last golf game, I shopped for deli dinner supplies at Safeway and packed them in a cooler with a nice bottle of Oregon wine. We ate at a patio table outside the cabin…..

….. while watching a five-point buck eat the hotel owner’s garden and listening to the sound of California quail in the forest nearby as the sky darkened.

Then it was time to hit the sack, which was a very comfortable, clean sack.  For tomorrow would present more geologic discoveries from this fascinating part of Oregon!