Author: Roy Scribner

Travel Oregon has a list of seven natural wonders in Oregon, and the Painted Hills unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument is one of them. The others are Crater Lake, the Columbia River Gorge, Mount Hood, Smith Rock State Park, the Wallowa Mountains, and the Oregon Coast. I am a bit chagrined to admit that I have not been to the Painted Hills, or any of the other areas that comprise the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, so I decided to remedy that with a day trip. 

The John Day Fossil Beds NM is actually three separate locations, with the Painted Hills unit being the popular one that the majority of people visit. In addition, there is the Clarno Unit forty-five miles to the north, and the Sheep Rock unit, forty-five miles to the east. The Painted Hills unit is two hundred miles from Portland, making this a challenging day trip! 

I arrived at the Painted Hills in the morning and headed up the Carroll Rim Trail which gains about two hundred feet, providing one of the best views of the Painted Hills area. There are numerous other trails that branch out along the base of the hills, for equally impressive close-up views. 

I did not have enough time to include the Sheep Rock unit on this trip, but I did visit the Clarno unit on the way home. Unlike the smooth multi-colored hills, the Clarno unit is an ancient volcanic mudflow that has eroded away into tall spires. It reminded me of the Needles District in Canyonlands National Park. Since this was a mudflow, though, there are the fossilized remains of plant material in nearly every rock. For my untrained eyes, the fossils were not always easy to see. The rocks formed by the 45-million-year-old mud are weathered and covered with lichens, camouflaging the fossilized leaves. Fortunately, the park has numerous signage along the trails, pointing-out specific fossils.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The daffodils have mostly come and gone by the first of April, but now the tulips are blooming, telling us the spring really is here, after a number of false starts in March.

Mount Hood is Oregon’s highest mountain, at 11,249 feet, and one of three active volcanoes around the Columbia Gorge; Mount St. Helens last erupted in 1980, Mount Hood in the 1790’s, and Mount Adams around 1000. These mountains are part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc, stretching from British Columbia to Northern California. This arc also forms a demarcation between the Pacific Ocean-facing wester side with its lush rainforests, and the arid eastern side, shown here, with less than 20-inches of annual rainfall.

Jeep runs a fun program called the Jeep Badge of Honor Trail program that identifies a number of off-road trails around the country as “official” BoH trails for Jeeps, and uses a phone app that allows users to “check-in” to these trails and get credit for driving them. Jeep will also send you a nice-looking badge with the trail’s name, that you can stick onto the side of your Jeep, if you are into that sort of thing. As a Jeep owner I had heard of the BoH thing but never paid much attention to it, until my trip across Utah with Dan, Mike and Adam. They wanted to spend a few days in Moab which is Jeep BoH Mecca, and get credit for a number of trails, there. We knocked-out four of the BoH trails while we were there, and several months later I received the little badges from Jeep, and I was hooked! Yes, I am easily amused.

Fast-forward six months and in true Portland, Oregon fashion it has been raining for several weeks. Non-stop. Today, March 22nd however, I awoke to dry weather which gave me the itch to get my Jeep out and flex its new suspension and tires. Moab had convinced me that my Jeep needed to just a little bit taller, and the tires needed to be just a little bit bigger. That was my winter project. With a dry day in front of me, I decided that it would be a great opportunity to go run one of Oregon’s Jeep BoH trails, so I headed west towards the cheese town of Tillamook.

At some point on Highway 6 in the Oregon Coast Range Mountains there is a rather nondescript turnoff called Roger’s Camp Road. Fortunately, there is also a large state DOT gravel storage area at this point, making the road easier to spot. From here, you will need a good offline mapping application, as there is no mobile service in this area of the coast range, in order to find the trailhead, which in my case was called Cedar Tree. The road forks right becoming University Falls Road, and left becoming Beaver Dam Road.

Either road will work, although I took Beaver Dam Road and then turned south onto the University Firepower trail which connects to Cedar Tree. University Firepower also connects to University Falls Road, so that right-fork would have also worked. The University Firepower trail has a tougher rating than Cedar Tree, and I can attest that even the short segment that I did, was a lot of fun. Particularly since it had been raining for several weeks. The trail was very steep and tight, with several very sharp turns, but even without engaging the lockers (because of the sharp turns), the new mud tires performed great.

After a mile of the University Firepower trail, it crosses a regular graveled logging road and the Cedar Tree trail begins. This trail is still tight with numerous trees, stumps, and roots crowding the trail, but there are no three-point turns like University Firepower. It is a fun and relaxing drive through coastal cedars and firs, and nothing that any capable four-wheel drive would have trouble, with.

Towards the end of the trail, it pops-out onto a clear-cut landing where the infamous fallen cedar tree stump is located. Evidently one used to be able to drive under this tree, but the wet coastal mountains reclaim all the things, and the cedar tree is no exception. The trail ends near another Jeep BoH trail called Firebreak 5 and I will be back to run that one, someday.

The Columbia Gorge is one of the most geologically impressive features in North America, forming a deep path through the Cascade Mountains for the Columbia River – the largest river flowing into the Pacific Ocean from North America. The river was not always where it is today, having been pushed north by lava flows on the Oregon side, and more recently, pushed back south and even blocked, by enormous landslides from the Washington side. The layers of lava flows, reminiscent of frosted layers in a cake, form the steep cliffs on the Oregon side of the gorge providing a waterfall-rich environment between Troutdale, at the western mouth of the gorge just east of Portland, and Hood River. From the Portland Women’s Forum scenic viewpoint where this photo was taken, easily-accessible waterfalls along the Historic Columbia River Highway include Latourell Falls, Shepperd’s Dell Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, Wahkeena Falls, Multnomah Falls, and Horsetail Falls. 

Crater Lake is one of several lakes in Oregon that reside inside volcanic calderas. The Newberry Volcano erupted some 75,000 years ago and subsequently collapsed, forming a five-mile diameter caldera. Newberry is much older than the 7,500-year-old Mount Mazama Caldera, containing Crater Lake. The Newberry Caldera is located 20-miles south of Bend, Oregon, and contains Paulina Lake and East Lake. Paulina Lake is the larger of the two, encompassing 1,530 acres and a depth of 250-feet. Like Crater Lake, Paulina and East Lake rely on snowmelt and rain, and Paulina Lake also has hot springs that feed it. Newberry remains active and its most recent eruption formed Big Obsidian Flow, a 1,300-year-old lava flow, the youngest in the state. This photograph is from the top of Big Obsidian Flow, with Paulina Lake in the distance.