Painted Hills

This is in the high desert north east of Bend. It's part of the John Day fossil beds (named after the man who went mad looking for a safe land route over to the north west coast). These hills are volcanic ash and the different colours are from different metals in the ash (red for iron, magnesium and iron for the yellow and manganese for the black). They're very fragile - close up they look just like baked clay. At another part of the park there's a wooden walkway so you can get close to the hills without standing on them. Luckily we were leaving this site before a family arrived with two boys who they just allowed to wander about with an ice pick hacking lumps out and leaving great boot marks everywhere! As Mr MT pointed out: the hills survived for 33 million years, and then along came little Johnny...

Very hot day today with lots of amazing things to see, like fossils in huge rocks just left lying about on the side of a trail (where in the UK I'm sure they would have been scooped up into a museum). We also had the chance to find our own fossils in a town called, appropriately, Fossil.

It was an amazing set up: just a scruffy looking hill at the back of a high school football pitch. There was a paleantologist there who - once convinced we weren't likely to destroy her site with our boisterous children - showed us lots of leaf fossils in a layer of rock she was in the process of uncovering. We also had the chance to take a few rocks and split them to find our own fossils to take home. After totally not being fooled by me scratching the outline of a leaf on a couple of rocks, my daughter was pretty blown away to find a metasequoia fossil on her own.

I do love National and State Parks in America - they're a great combination of wild and organised and always worth a stop. This was a different kind of experience altogether - really low tech (what, no gift shop!) but very memorable. There's interest in the site from the National Parks people and I really hope that the woman running it at the moment gets the support she needs to keep the site safe and explore it properly.

Maybe I'll go back and get a blipable photo of it one day!