John Day Fossil Beds National Monument

[UglyScout]

4 Days, 3 nights, 700 miles of good times. I hadn't been to John Day in at least 20 years and my wife has never really been to Eastern Oregon since she moved to Oregon 8 years ago. So this trip was fun and new for everyone! Needless to say the trip was a huge success. Our 18 month old was a perfect traveler, taking naps when we drove and playing hard/nonstop when we stopped for snack breaks. The weather was good with just a sprinkle of rain in John Day and a ton of rain the last hour of our drive home. I have a ton more pics that I need to go through to find the 1% that are worth sharing.

Day 1
Loaded up in Newberg, OR and headed out at a reasonable hour, just in time to hit traffic in Portland. Headed up the gorge with a snack break at Celilo Park on the Columbia River. Headed South on Hwy 97 with a left turn at Shaniko. Just out of Shaniko we meet a Harley chick standing in the middle of the road with her bike on its side. The bike was so heavy and loaded with camping gear she couldn’t get it tipped back up – we were able to get it righted with both of us lifting and she was on her way. Yikes, I’m glad I wasn’t following right behind her.

A few miles later we arrived at our first major stop being the John Day Fossil Beds Clarno Unit.

Hiked all the hikes and saw all the sites. Pretty dang cool! The little guy just wanted to crawl and climb on everything, so he had a great time. After seeing what we could see – we headed on to Fossil and south a little to Bear Hollow County Park – pretty nice campground with ZERO people at it. The campground must have suffered some wind/winter damage, as there was signs of downed trees and an ongoing cleanup effort, but everything was still useable. And did I say we had the whole place to ourselves.

Bear Hollow:
http://www.orparks.org/a_oregonparks/wheeler.htm

Day 2

Left the campground and headed southeast to John Day. We toured the Kam Wah Chung Museum and played in the adjoining park for a while. The museum is well worth the stop. Quite amazing that it is still there and in one piece after all these years. After John Day we headed south the Canyon City and hit the Grant County Historical Museum, pretty old school with some downright creepy stuff in it. After the historical museum we headed back northwest to Clyde Holliday State Park - it is probably the cleanest, most park like landscaped state park I have seen in Oregon, flower beds and lawn edging…. Way to close to the highway – but they have showers and that was a requirement at least one night on the trip…

Kam Wah Chung:
http://www.oregonstateparks.org/park_8.php

Grant County Historical Museum:
http://www.gchistoricalmuseum.com/

Clyde Holliday:
http://www.oregonstateparks.org/park_11.php

Day 3

From John Day we headed west to hit more Fossils. We stopped at the Mascall Formation Overlook viewpoint, then on to the Thomas Condon Museum.

The museum is cool, but the hiking the trails and seeing the stuff in person is much better. Just a short way up the road from the museum is the Blue Basin Area with a few cool trails and plenty of awesome scenery. We hiked the Island of Time trail and it was pretty amazing. After the hike we headed to the Cant Ranch Museum had lunch there and hiked down along the river and saw all the sites there.

After getting our fill of Fossils we headed west towards Prineville and found a cool camping spot up the Crooked River. We ended up picking the Lone Pine campground as it only had a few other campers in it and looked like our style. It really has a lone pine tree. Very nice spot on the river and very quite.

John Day Fossil Beds:
http://www.nps.gov/joda/index.htm

Lone Pine:
http://www.blm.gov/or/resources/recreation/site_info.php?siteid=141

Day 4

We didn’t do much on the last day of our trip. We took gravel roads from Prineville west to just north of Smith Rock State park then headed to the Peter Skeen Ogden rest stop on Hwy 97. We had a snack break there and walked out to the old bridge. Despite the amazing scenery and the engineering of the bridge my son was most impressed with the sprinklers at the rest stop. After that we meet a friend in Redmond for a BBQ and hung around there for a few hours – then made the long, slow and boring drive home to Newberg.

 

[MarkBC]

Cool, thanks, Uglyscout.

I've lived in Bend for 32 years and I've still never really explored the Fossils Bend NM (though I've driven through/around all the paved roads in the area and camped various places in the area over the years).

So, thanks for the inspiration to explore my own (almost) backyard!

By the way: Next time you're in the Prineville area and headed east (or in the John Day/Canyon City area heading west) I recommond taking the highway/road that runs south/east from Prineville to Post (geo-center of Oregon), Paulina, Izee then connects to US395 south of Canyon City. A nice secondary highway to explore (though NOT a shortcut) with a real middle-of-nowhere feel in places. Mostly open country with big views in places. Can be beautiful in spring with wildflowers. Lots of gravel/dirt roads take off into the National Forest and BLM both north and south from that road. I've done it as a day-drive loop from Bend (in combination with the main Highway 26) more than once.

 

[natjwest]

Thanks for sharing scout, that's on a trip list after this fall's Steens/SE Oregon trip.

 

[highz]

Enjoyed the trip report and the info on the museums & campgrounds. Thanks for posting!

 

[UglyScout]

Thanks for sharing scout, that's on a trip list after this fall's Steens/SE Oregon trip.



Steens is next on our list as well....

I've lived in Bend for 32 years and I've still never really explored the Fossils Bend NM (though I've driven through/around all the paved roads in the area and camped various places in the area over the years).

So, thanks for the inspiration to explore my own (almost) backyard!


DO IT!! I've been saying "Oh, we will go there someday..." for years. I think we take for granted the amazing things we have right around us in Oregon....

 

[UglyScout]

Kam Wah Chung Museum

One of the things I found the most amazing at the Kam Wah Chung Museum was the story of the metal front door to protect the doctor and other Chinese from being shot in the 1880-1890's (there are bullet holes in the wood door)-- and then the Chamber of Commerce certificate from the 1930's that is hanging on the wall inside -- and THEN the fact that the the Doc was invited to be a Mason and given a full Masons funeral in the 1950's.... WOW how the times changed in one mans life time.

All of Eastern Oregon that we saw was greener than I have ever seen it. These flowers were in the Sheep Rock unit.

From the Island in Time trail:

 

[ski3pin]

UglyScout, thanks for the photos and trip reports. It is so good to see families getting out into the outdoors! John Day, Prineville, Crooked River, great places we need to get back too!

 

[UglyScout]

UglyScout, thanks for the photos and trip reports. It is so good to see families getting out into the outdoors! John Day, Prineville, Crooked River, great places we need to get back too!


I like camping and my son loves anything outside - so it is pretty easy to take him camping. We got very lucky!

Here he is at Lone Pine - playing in the dirt with a little dump truck. He would scoop a handful of dirt into the dumper, carry it somewhere else and dump it. This pic pretty much sums up our camping experience, the adults sitting and enjoying, the lil' guy playing with whatever we can find. He climbed everything, crawled under everything, picked up everything. He skinned both knees, got slivers in his hand, a huge sliver in his butt from sliding off a picinic table, bumped his head a few times, and loved every minute of it. He was sooooo dirty by the time we got home.

 

[Lighthawk]

Ahh yes, the days of camping with little ones. Great you can enjoy it with him. Just think of all the memories and imprints you will create for him. I'm sure my love of the outdoors comes from many family outings growing up in Colorado.

Thanks for all the cool info. Someday we'll get up there

 

[MarkBC]

I like camping and my son loves anything outside - so it is pretty easy to take him camping. We got very lucky!


Ahh yes, the days of camping with little ones. Great you can enjoy it with him. Just think of all the memories and imprints you will create for him. I'm sure my love of the outdoors comes from many family outings growing up in Colorado.

Great points!

I grew up camping (in California), since before I was old enough to remember. When living in the Central Valley we took weekend camping trips in the Sierras -- tenting only -- usually in a national forest c.g. next to a trout stream. My dad hated big crowds, so we never went to Yosemite or other national parks (or Disneyland!). When we moved north to Redding we camped near (but outside) Lassen N.P. or at Patrick's Point S.P on the northern coast. Our full-on week-or-two vacations were also camping, sometimes out-of-state.
I enjoyed it and took it for granted, assuming all families did this -- but they don't. I feel lucky to have grown up with this camping-is-part-of-life bias.

Good to see your kid getting this advantage, too, UglyScout.

 

[craig333]

I loved the big campgrounds as a kid. The rangers in their funny hats. Singing songs at the amphitheatre. Glad my dad did both kinds of camping. Though I prefer the quieter kind now you should never forget our national monuments, parks, etc are there for a reason.

P.S. great trip report

 

[Dughlas Stiubhart]

Thanks for the report and pics, Ugly!

 

[ntsqd]

Great thread! Thanks for calling up my own memories of the area. My grandparents lived in Powell Butte and we went camping at least once every summer. This was back when Walton Lake was unknown and only the fishermen really knew about the Crooked River Gorge section there between Prineville and the dam. We only camped in that gorge once, but it is one of the spots that I most clearly remember.
snipped....

By the way: Next time you're in the Prineville area and headed east (or in the John Day/Canyon City area heading west) I recommond taking the highway/road that runs south/east from Prineville to Post (geo-center of Oregon), Paulina, Izee then connects to US395 south of Canyon City. A nice secondary highway to explore (though NOT a shortcut) with a real middle-of-nowhere feel in places. Mostly open country with big views in places. Can be beautiful in spring with wildflowers. Lots of gravel/dirt roads take off into the National Forest and BLM both north and south from that road. I've done it as a day-drive loop from Bend (in combination with the main Highway 26) more than once.

A little story about that road, as told to me by Pat Miller of Miller Ranch near Paulina and confirmed by Clyde Quigley - log truck driver & former Redmond Coast to Coast owner. The northern of the two 90* turns in that road on the Section Lines about 1/2 way between Paulina and Prineville has(had?) a large tree in the triangle of the current radiused highway turn and the original sharp 90 turn. It is a nice spot to take a break. Back when they were logging the Strawberry Mtn's it was sometimes filled with a log or two. Seems that when the weigh station is open and a driver thinks that he might be heavy they pull down in there and peel a couple off the truck.

You ought to have seen the firewood stack that the ranch house between those two turns had........

BTW, in the Kershaw Knives catalog there is a model called the "D.W.O." That stands for Delly Wade Officer, of the Officer Ranch SE of Paulina at the foot of the Strawberry's. He was killed in a hunting accident of some sort. How exactly the knife came to be I do not know.

 

[Silvertip47]

Thanks for sharing!! I've driven by the signs many times but never stopped. Now I need to do that!!!