Painted Hills

The bands of the Painted Hills are made of hard claystone, and their story begins with volcanoes. Across the Eocene and Oligocene, roughly thirty-three to thirty-nine million years ago, eruptions from volcanic centers to the west blanketed this country in ash and pumice. That volcanic debris weathered into clay-rich soils, layer upon layer, over an enormous span of time, and those layers are what you see today.

The colors are the key to reading them. The red bands are ancient floodplain soils rich in iron oxide, formed during warm, wet, tropical periods, and the deeper and brighter the red, the more humid the age it records. The gold and tan bands formed in cooler, drier conditions, colored by iron and magnesium. The black flecks and streaks are lignite, the compressed remains of ancient plants that grew along the floodplain, with a touch of manganese as well.

Read together, the alternating stripes trace a long, slow shift in the world's climate, from lush subtropical forests toward cooler, drier grasslands, across the Eocene and Oligocene. Standing at the overlook, you are looking across millions of years of warming and cooling laid down like the pages of a book, each color a chapter in a story far longer than human history.

The Painted Hills are part of a monument famous for fossils, though at this particular unit body fossils are relatively rare. What the hills preserve most beautifully are fossil leaves, pressed into ancient lakebed clays at a spot called Leaf Hill. The leaves record plants like dawn redwood, cinnamon, fig, alder, oak, and maple, tracing the land's slow turn from subtropical forest toward a temperate world of oaks and maples. The dawn redwood is honored as Oregon's state fossil.

The wider monument, best seen at its Sheep Rock unit to the east, holds one of the most complete records of ancient life anywhere, dozens of millions of years of plants and mammals, from early horses and camels to rhinos and saber-toothed predators. Together the units document the great transformation from tropical forests to the drier grasslands that came after.

Much of this came to light through Thomas Condon, a self-taught geologist and minister who learned of the region's fossils in the nineteenth century and worked to publicize them, drawing scientists to the John Day country and helping set the stage for the monument that exists today. The paleontology center at the Sheep Rock unit carries his name.

The Painted Hills lie in the John Day River basin, the ancestral homeland of Sahaptin-speaking peoples. Both the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation recognize ancestral homelands that take in this monument, and they maintain enduring ties to this landscape today. The Northern Paiute, now the Burns Paiute Tribe, and the Nez Perce also have connections to the broader basin.

Traditional life in this river country centered on the seasons and the water, fishing the salmon runs, hunting deer and pronghorn, and gathering roots and riverside plants across the basin. These are living practices and living communities, not relics of a vanished past.

In the 1855 Treaty with the Tribes of Middle Oregon, the Warm Springs and Wasco peoples ceded a vast expanse of land while reserving the right to fish and hunt at their usual and accustomed places. That connection to the John Day River and the country around it endures, and it is right to remember, standing among these painted hills, whose homeland this has always been.

Everything here is reached by short, easy trails, each with its own small parking area. The Painted Hills Overlook Trail is a level half-mile that delivers the classic panorama of the banded hills, while the Carroll Rim Trail climbs a little higher for a sweeping view looking down over the whole scene. Neither takes long, and both reward you out of all proportion to the effort.

Two shorter walks get you close to the colors. The Painted Cove Trail loops on a boardwalk through vivid red claystone mounds, the raised walkway built specifically to protect the delicate, popcorn-textured clay from footsteps. Leaf Hill is a quarter-mile loop past the excavated fossil-leaf site, and Red Scar Knoll, sometimes called Red Hill, leads to a mound of bright yellow and red.

The single most important rule is to stay on the trails and off the hills. The claystone is extremely fragile, and a footprint can scar it for years. As the monument puts it, the ground itself is the exhibit, so walk gently, keep to the paths and the boardwalk, and leave the formations untouched for everyone who follows.

This is high-desert country of shrub-steppe and juniper, and it holds more life than the bare hills suggest. Mule deer, pronghorn, coyotes, and bobcats range the wider monument, raptors and eagles work the sky, and bighorn sheep pick their way across the rugged rock nearby. Rattlesnakes live here too and generally keep to themselves, so simple attention on the trail is all that is needed.

Spring brings a scatter of wildflowers along the base of the hills, purple and gold blooms that soften the stark ground, including a yellow bee plant that is characteristic of the area. It is a fleeting, lovely contrast to the mineral colors of the claystone above.

The seasons here run to extremes. Spring and fall are the most pleasant, with mild air and, in spring, the best of the wildflowers. Summer is very hot and almost entirely without shade, so early morning and late afternoon are the times to come, both for comfort and for the softer, richer light. And whatever the season, the colors of the hills deepen most after rain, so a gray, drizzly day can turn out to be the best day of all to stand at the overlook.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.