John Day Fossil Beds National Monument

After our two-night stay in the city-owned campground in Prairie City, Oregon, we are heading further west to our next destination. But on the way, we are visiting a new-to-us national monument. The John Day Fossil Beds National Monument actually has four parts, and the first one requires a drive through a majestic enclosed canyon named Picture Gorge. So of course, we took plenty of pictures in Picture Gorge.

This is the Sheep Rock Unit of the park, and we passed by Sheep Rock on our way to the national monument visitor center. We're not sure if this mountain got its name from big-horn sheep that once populated its slopes, or the sheep ranch that once populated its valley.

We arrived at the visitor center and parked the motor home in one of the long RV spaces. Then we unhooked the pickup for the drive further down the road to the Blue Basin.

This is where the fun begins. The Blue Basin is a maze of eroded claystone walls that make Denisa look very small this morning.

It's a 1.3-mile trail that crosses about a dozen of these metal bridges.

It leads into a valley that the website describes as an "amalgam of colorful strata from Creataceous conglomerates to flood basalts." We describe it as another of God's wonders.

As we got to the end of the trail, it opened into a grand amphitheater that deserved one more picture.

After conquering the best hike in the park, we should have called it quits on this hot day. But we aren't that smart. So we started the 3.25-mile Blue Basin Overlook Trail. Before you can overlook the basin, you have to climb up and up on switchbacks.

There are a few interesting rock formations at the top,

but the real star of the show is getting to look down on the blue basin where we hiked earlier.

We took the trail counter-clockwise to get the elevation gain over quickly. Then we plodded along through this dry Oregon desert. They haven't gotten any measurable rain here for over 45 days, and we can certainly understand why they are in extreme fire alert.

Denisa likes to take pictures of flowers on our hikes, but all of them are as dry as the grass on these hills

We had to chuckle at the sign that accompanied this bench at the top. Instead of describing this view, it congratulated hikers that they had made it to the half-way point, and had climbed 760 feet in elevation.

The next bench has a sign that lets us know that this is the only shaded bench on this trail, and we're certainly needing that shade.

We got a few more close-up views of the Blue Basin on our way down in elevation to finish up our loop.

The Cant Ranch Historic Home and Museum is another part of the national monument, and it has been closed to visitors since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. But visitors can walk the grounds and see the outdoor machinery and barns. Denisa headed straight to the orchard where signs let us know that visitors were welcome to pick any ripe fruit from the 100-year-old trees. We found an apple tree where the fruit was falling, so we picked enough for an apple crisp later.

We decided to wait for our time in the air-conditioned visitor center until the hottest part of the day. So now we drove the pickup back to where we left the motorhome in the Thomas Condon Paleontology Visitor Center parking lot. We found that they are requiring masks inside, and only allowing visitors to enter every half-hour and in limited numbers. Instead of waiting longer outside in the heat, we joined the current group of visitors inside for a 13-minute quick look at the museum. Then we headed back through Picture Gorge.

We're heading now to another unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument on the other side of Mitchell, Oregon, where we are camping for the next two days. We would include that in today's blog, but we had such a splendid time in Mitchell that it deserves a blog of its own tomorrow.