#Painted Hills

[barneybrittonphoto]

Painted Hills, Oregon. June 2024.

[climbhighsleeplow]

Painted Hills in John Day Area

Eastern Oregon

[bettergeology]

Colorful Clays of the Painted Hills area

The Painted Hills are one of the most popular and well-known of Oregon's scenic treasures. The towering ridges of yellow, red, and black clays reveal part of the complex geologic story of Oregon when the area was a tropical rainforest, or a hardwood temperate forest, or a volcanic hellscape at different times. The different bands and layers are folded, warped, and faulted by complex plate tectonics. Here though, at Painted Cove just behind the main Painted Hills viewpoint, the story is just a little different.

Painted Cove is a couple of shallow gullies linked in a loop by a boardwalk and trail. In here, you pass through areas of bold red and yellow clays before reaching a gully flanked with a light purple rock. The light purple is of a completely different origin than the clays, which are effectively fossilized soil layers.

This is a weathered outcrop of rhyolite lava, a lava composition that is mostly quartz by mass. This area grades from purple to brown to red. This is an actual preserved soil horizon. If you dig a hole, you go through different soil horizons - or chemical and physical conditions - before you reach bedrock. Commonly these are O (for organic-rich), A, B, and C. B and C are closest to bedrock and include chunks of weathered, eroded source rock. Here, the purple is that C horizon, then the brown layer is B, and the red is an A horizon mantling the rhyolite lava flow. This whole stack of soil is somewhere around 25 million years old!

This is one of my favorite rock outcrops in all of Oregon because of how elegantly and simply it displays soil development processes from more than 25 million years ago!

(A note for other geologists: my soil horizon analogy isn't completely accurate since these paleosols have different classifications than regular young soils do, and I'm not very well-versed in those at all)

If you're in to photography, these are (with the exception of the 2nd to last shot) shot on Fuji Color 400 with my Nikon FM2.

[williammarksommer]

The Painted Desert

Arizona

All The Time In The World

Hasselblad 500c/m

Kodak Ektar 100iso

[dazzlingvastness]

Painted Hills, Oregon Model: RayLynn Photo: @dazzlingvastness Patreon: patreon.com/dazzlingvastness

[kvetch19]

x

[6ghassan]

In Between Painted Hills - Oregon, USA by Jos Buurmans Via Flickr: The last rays of sunlight on the mountain plateau in between layered, deep red hills of the John Day Fossil Beds.

[thetruthhurtsbro]

oh oregon, how i miss you.

i want to move back someday.

[cecibeanz]

“in sickness and in health”

[thesockdrawersblog]

Had an idea and needed to make it a reality

[climbhighsleeplow]

Painted Hills, Oregon

[omurizer-draws-things]

my favourite miserable man

[theartofanimation]

Rudy hill  -  https://www.facebook.com/Rudyhillart  -  https://rudy-hillart.tumblr.com  -  https://www.behance.net/rudyhill  -  https://twitter.com/Rudy__hill  -  https://www.instagram.com/rudyhillart  -  https://www.deviantart.com/rudy-hill

[breakfast-at-9]

Silent hills most iconic tweaker (me too girl)

[soreho48]

"James, honey, did something happen to you?"

[possiblyweedfart]

silent hill painting hello