Painted Hills in John Day Area
Eastern Oregon
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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.
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It's been a long eye opening journey all these many years. What time was it better to be alive than this? Well I have the answer! Only I'm going to keep that to myself for now. If only I had a magic time machine to put my suspicions to the test.
Anyway, this image was made using Rollei Crossbird 35mm film. I miss this film stock and I used it pretty extensively for a while. Basically it was slide film designed to be cross processed. Only I always found it fun to process in E-6 chemistry like any other slide film. The results were always grainy, but very punchy!
Location: Painted Hills, Oregon
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Moonrise, Painted Cove - Painted Hills, Oregon
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