The Painted Hills, Oregon

Finally the weather has broken and it's worth going outside. It has been my wish to show Brenda some of the splendors of Oregon . It has been a long long winter and now we seem to be going from nasty to full summer. 

The first on my list of Brenda's introduction to Oregon, was to visit the Painted Hills in the central part of the state. I have never gotten around to going there, so this was a trip for me as well. The area is about 250 miles North, so we planned to spend three days total. I looked it up on the web and found that there were really no RV camps close to where we wanted to be, but a nice couple had visited the area and told of a chunk of ground owned by the Forest Service that was open to camping and unregulated.  Sounded good to me!

There were two ways to get there so I intended to go one way and back the other. The first leg of our trip went from Burns Or, to John Day, then West to Mitchell. John day is at a much lower elevation than here at the house, so we dropped off down a long steep Canyon about 20-30 miles in length. As we came around a sharp curve, near Canyonville, a tree weakened by all the recent run off of melted winter snow had fallen across the road. The signs were plentiful that the water had been over the road in many places. It was still quite a surprise and I had an interesting time getting all that weight stopped. We sat there as traffic built up in both directions, (Probably 5 cars either direction. Its kinda of remote) before someone with a chainsaw came by and cut it out of the road.

Once past John Day, it was about 77 miles to our turn off. Winding roads, through a narrow sliver of a Canyon, eventually coming to the town of Mitchell. The turn off is about 5 miles past the town.

We found the camping spot with no trouble at all. At the time there were only cows there and it took us no time to get set up. We spent the evening checking out the scenery and even though it was still raining lightly I made a couple of short trail hikes and took a lot of pictures.It had been really pouring the rain, so everything was muddy, as well as water over the road in a few places. The mud was what I call "tallmud", the more you walk in it, the taller you get.

In the four days that we were there we had about 15 different campers stay there. We had a parade every morning when the cows came out of the hills to drink.

I took a LOT of pictures on this trip and have included all of them worth seeing, in an attempt to give you some idea of what the place is about. So this will be short on narration. 

The area is actually pretty small as far as Parks go, but long on beauty. Almost all the hiking trails are about 1/2 mile. It is a lesson and view of time and the changes that have and will occur, apparently quite naturally. Unless the Neanderthals were much more destructive than we thought.

This is the end of the public road. The area beyond this and the lake in the background are all private.

I took a few pictures of the rocks, as all of them were different.

The signage was a bit hard to see, but there was a lot of information on them.

While it rained often the drops were not thick, but they wee big!

The Painted Lady of the Painted Hills!

I let Brick out of the truck to pee while I looked at this large boulder. I was amazed to find that there was a Cholla, "Jumping Cactus", at the base of it. True to its name, a chunk of it managed to get in the hair of Bricks leg. It was only stuck in the hair, so I managed to get it out with a stick.

And last but not least was an outcropping of Rhyolite ( Such as occurs at the Pillars of Rome. just down the road here at the house.)

After all the scenery we decided to do a little scouting around and of course went into the town of Mitchell to see what was there. I neglected to take pictures, but there was a General Store and a Gift shop there. Brenda cannot go past a store without searching it for things she cannot do without, and the little "country Store" in Mitchell is a treasure trove. I saw things in there that I had been searching for, for years. This is a little town serving probably less than a 1000 people within a 50 mile radius. If they didn't have it you didn't need it. Great people too. Brenda found some Strawberries that were almost as big as apples. She made me go back the next day to buy some more.

We stayed a total of four days, and just relaxed. Brenda loved the area, much different from what she is used to. The "park" is small by most standards, but well worth the visit.

All the pictures are shown small in the body of the story, but if you click on one of them it will open up full screen and you can scroll through them.