In a remote corner of eastern Oregon, striped hills of red, gold, and black preserve one of the world’s great records of natural climate change — and a lesson for understanding the human-caused warming now reshaping the planet.

SECTION 01

A National Monument, Not a National Park

The Painted Hills are one of three units of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in eastern Oregon, alongside Sheep Rock and Clarno.

The monument is not a national park: Congress authorized it in 1974, and after the State of Oregon transferred three predecessor state parks to the federal government, it was formally established on October 8, 1975.^[1][2] The monument spans roughly 14,000 acres of the John Day River valley, and the Painted Hills Unit — 3,129 acres about 9 miles northwest of the town of Mitchell — is the most visited of the three.^[3][4]

SECTION 02

What the Colors Mean

The hills are striped in red, tan, orange, black, and gold because they are exposed paleosols — fossilized ancient soils — interleaved with floodplain mudstones and lake sediments of the John Day Formation. The red layers are lateritic soils that formed under warm, humid conditions; the gray bands are mudstone and siltstone deposited on ancient floodplains; and the black layers are carbonized plant matter (lignite) that accumulated in swamps.^[5][6]

The unit also preserves the Bridge Creek Flora — a diverse assemblage of leaf fossils between 39 and 30 million years old — and a small outcrop of animal fossils from 30 to 27 million years ago.^[3] Collecting fossils or any natural material is strictly prohibited, and the monument protects the paleosols because ongoing research depends on them.^[7]

SECTION 03

Ancient Climate Change — All Natural

The Painted Hills are, in effect, a climate archive. The wider John Day fossil record spans tens of millions of years of the “Age of Mammals and Flowering Plants,” from roughly 44 to 7 million years ago.^[7] It begins in a very different Oregon: warm, wet, and subtropical, with paratropical forests, lakes, and swamps that resembled parts of today’s southeastern United States or China.^[6][8]

The record preserves a long-term trend of cooling and drying, with a dramatic transition around 34 million years ago at the Eocene–Oligocene boundary — the shift from Earth’s “greenhouse” state to its “icehouse” state. In the fossil soils, the change is visible and abrupt: red, deeply weathered tropical-type soils give way to the gray and tan soils of a cooler, drier, more seasonal climate.^[9][10] Cooling and drying continued in steps afterward: hardwood forests gave ground to grasses and, eventually, to the sagebrush steppe of today’s semi-arid landscape.^[6][11]

The Clarno Unit is the only place in the monument where visitors can examine fossils in the ground. Along the three Clarno trails are multiple leaf fossils and pieces of fossilized wood. In the Painted Hills and Sheep Rock Units, any fossil that weather out of the clay can be destroyed by sun, rain, ice, and wind, so it is quickly collected by park staff for preservation in the lab. In the Sheep Rock Unit, replica fossils were placed along the Island in Time trail in Blue Basin to show examples of fossils that were found there.

Scientists reconstruct these ancient climates from the fossil plants and from the chemistry, mineralogy, and degree of weathering in the paleosols, with datable volcanic ash layers pinning the sequence in time — not from the colors alone.^[8][10]

None of this involved people. The leading explanation for the Eocene–Oligocene transition is a gradual decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide — from roughly 1,000–800 ppm down to 700–600 ppm — which allowed a continental-scale Antarctic ice sheet to grow.^[12] 

Research on Antarctic ice-sheet history finds the large, stable ice sheet took hold as CO₂ fell below about 600 ppm.^[13] Contributing factors included changes to ocean gateways — including the opening Drake Passage and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current — and orbital variability that paced the ice growth.^[14]

SECTION 04

And the Human-Caused Part

The warming happening now is a separate event — and it is human-caused. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment concludes it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,” that greenhouse gas increases since 1750 are “unequivocally caused by human activities,” and that the best estimate of human-caused warming in 2010–2019, relative to 1850–1900, is about 1.07 °C.^[15]

The National Park Service applies this directly to John Day Fossil Beds. The park’s climate action plan identifies greenhouse gas buildup as the leading cause of current warming, warns that rising temperatures and shifting precipitation may alter the monument’s vegetation, habitats, and visitor experience, and draws the crucial distinction in pace: the climate changes recorded in the fossil beds typically unfolded over many thousands of years, while current change is far more rapid — potentially giving species too little time to adapt or migrate.^[16]

The fossil record of the John Day country shows three responses to climate change: species adapted, migrated, or went extinct. The third is permanent.^[16]

That is the deepest insight the Painted Hills offer a visitor: a record of past ecosystem responses to natural climate change, against which the speed of today’s human-driven change stands out sharply.

SECTION 05

The Hills Through Six Eyes

THE HISTORIAN

Thomas Condon, an early Oregon minister and self-trained scientist, was the first person to identify the John Day fossil basin as a world-class paleontological area. He learned of the area’s abundant fossils from soldiers in 1862. At that time, Condon ministered at a church he established in The Dalles, Oregon. In 1865, he visited the basin and started excavating fossils. The specimens he sent to museums on the east coast for verification ignited scientific interest. In recognition of his scientific work, Condon was appointed the first Oregon State Geologist in 1872 and later, named Professor of Geology at the University of Oregon. He held the position until his death in 1907. His work continues to inspire. (He preached..)

“Evolution was simply God’s method of working and therefore not atheistic or infidel.”

Thomas Condon believed that religion and modern science went hand in hand. He originally came to Oregon territory in 1852 to spread the gospel after becoming a protestant minister in Michigan. But after investigating fossils in the John Day area, he developed a scientific passion for paleontology.

Condon believed Science a means to understand the spectacular nature of God’s creation. The Hills from which these evidences were taken, he wrote in reference to the evolutionary record of the fossil beds were made by the same God who made the hills of Judea, and the evidences are as authoritative. The Church has nothing to fear from the uncovering of truth.

THE THOMAS CONDON PALEONTOLOGY CENTER

The region’s fossil record was recognized in the 1860s by Thomas Condon, a frontier minister and self-taught geologist whose discoveries drew expeditions from Yale, Princeton, and the Smithsonian.

Oregon began buying land for state parks here in 1931, and the monument campaign followed in the 1960s and ’70s.^[2][17]The Cant Ranch Museum at the Sheep Rock Unit, about an hour away, covers the homestead and ranching era.^[3]

THE ARCHITECT

The hills are a study in natural layering, color, and horizontal rhythm — an inspiration source for earth-toned palettes and landform-conscious design. The Painted Cove Trail’s boardwalk, built to protect fragile soils, is a restrained example of landscape architecture deferring to its site.^[18] (A creative observation, not a documented architectural tradition.)

THE SCIENTIST

The wider John Day region holds one of the longest, most continuous terrestrial records of ecosystem and climate change anywhere, and the monument remains an active research site with its own paleontology center.^[4][19]Evidence from these soils and fossils documents the shift from wet subtropical conditions to cooler, drier climates after about 33 million years ago.^[8]

THE HIKER

Five short trails, each with its own parking area:^[20]TRAILDISTANCENOTESPainted Cove0.25 mi loop Crimson and gold hills; boardwalk at the trailhead is wheelchair accessible, the loop beyond includes five stepsPainted Hills Overlook0.5 mi round tripLevel old road; classic panorama, best light late afternoonLeaf Hill0.25 mi loopLoop around an extensively excavated fossil-leaf hillRed Scar Knoll0.25 mi trailStriking half-red, half-tan claystone hillCarroll Rim1.6 mi round trip400-ft climb to the best full panorama

THE MUSICIAN

For a musician, the striped bands can read like a visual score, and the quiet, wind-swept basin is a natural place to compose or record — a creative suggestion the landscape invites. The park has hosted sunset and night-sky programs at the hills.^[21]

THE CHILD

The Painted Cove boardwalk through candy-colored hills, spring wildflowers growing in the hill ripples, and a shaded picnic area make it kid-friendly.^[3][22]

For fossils in display cases, the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center at the Sheep Rock Unit is about a 45-mile drive.^[23]

SECTION 06

The Man Behind the Name

John Day (about 1770–1820) was an American hunter and fur trapper, born in Virginia, who joined John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company expedition and reached Oregon in 1812.^[24]In April 1812, near the mouth of a Columbia tributary, he and Ramsay Crooks were robbed of their rifles, equipment, and clothing by Native people — retaliation for a murder committed by another company employee. The men survived, and fur-company employees began calling the nearby stream the John Day River.^[25]

From the river’s name came the monument, the John Day Formation that produces the Painted Hills’ colors, the John Day Dam, and the towns of John Day and Dayville.^[24] The man himself never found a fossil here, or even visited the area.^[26] He died on February 16, 1820, at a winter camp during a fur-trapping expedition into the Snake Country, and was buried there — recent research suggests somewhere below Fallert Springs in present-day Idaho, though the exact site remains uncertain.^[24]

SECTION 07

The First Peoples and Living Communities

The monument sits within the Columbia Plateau culture area, where people spoke Sahaptin languages.

The John Day River watershed was held mostly by the Tenino, or Warm Springs peoples — including a distinct “John Day band” whose seasonal round of river fishing, hunting, and root and berry gathering is described in the park’s historic studies.^[27] The Painted Hills and Clarno units appear to fall within the Tenino culture area, while Northern Paiute people from the Great Basin occupied the Sheep Rock area in the early historic period; territories overlapped.^[28] To the east lived the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla peoples.^[29] The tribal identity of the group involved in the 1812 encounter was never recorded.^[26]

Under the 1855 treaties, the tribes ceded the John Day country, and most of the Sahaptin-speaking people of the watershed likely relocated to the Warm Springs Reservation.^[29] 

Today two federally recognized nations carry these identities forward: the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs (Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute) on a 644,000-acre reservation,^[30]and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla) near Pendleton.^[31]

Two tribal destinations pair a world-class museum with a casino. On US-26 at Warm Springs, the Museum at Warm Springs holds one of the largest and most complete collections of Plateau Native American artifacts in the country,^[32] and across the highway the tribe’s Indian Head Casino was designed to resemble the historic fishing scaffolds at Celilo Falls.^[33] 

Near Pendleton off Interstate 84, the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute tells the story of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla in three acts — “We Were,” “We Are,” “We Will Be” — on the grounds of the tribe’s Wildhorse Resort & Casino.^[34] They lie in opposite directions from the Painted Hills — Warm Springs to the west, Pendleton to the northeast — so choose one along your route, and confirm hours and admission on each museum’s site before visiting.

SECTION 08

Getting There

The unit is about 9–10 miles northwest of Mitchell, Oregon (address: 37375 Bear Creek Road). From Highway 26, turn north on Burnt Ranch Road three miles west of Mitchell, drive six miles, then turn left onto Bear Creek Road into the monument.^[23] Roads inside the unit are dirt and gravel, one way in and out, and large RVs are not recommended past the Overlook.^[35] The three monument units are an hour or more apart by winding roads; Sheep Rock to Painted Hills is 45 miles.^[23]

There is no entrance fee or pass required,^[36] no visitor center at this unit,^[23] and no cell service (wifi is available only at the picnic area). Stay on trails — walking on the hills and collecting fossils or rocks are strictly prohibited.^[7] The colors are most vivid in late-afternoon light, and seasons change the palette dramatically, from spring wildflowers to winter snow stripes.^[3]

Footnotes

1. National Park Service, “Fossils of the 2025 National Fossil Day Artwork” — establishment on October 8, 1975 and 13,944-acre extent. ↩
2. Wikipedia, “John Day Fossil Beds National Monument” — 1974 authorization and state-park land transfers. ↩
3. National Park Service, “Painted Hills Unit” — unit description, Bridge Creek Flora, seasonal colors. ↩
4. National Park Service, “Foundation Document Overview” — 14,000 acres, Painted Hills Unit size and paleosols. ↩
5. U.S. Geological Survey, “Painted Hills Overlook Trail” — paleosol layer colors and origins. ↩
6. National Park Service, “John Day Strata” — cooling and drying trend, ancient environments. ↩
7. National Park Service, “Basic Information” — regulations, services, fossil record timespan. ↩
8. Oregon Secretary of State, “John Day Fossil Beds National Monument” — climate history of the formations. ↩
9. National Park Service, “Geology and Paleoenvironments of the Clarno Unit, Chapter 2” — abrupt Eocene–Oligocene paleosol change. ↩
10. Bestland & Retallack, NPS geology study — hothouse-to-icehouse transition and paleosol evidence. ↩
11. National Park Service, “Upper John Day Assemblage” — spread of grasslands and sagebrush steppe. ↩
12. PNAS, “The enigma of Oligocene climate and global surface temperature evolution” — CO₂ decline across the transition. ↩
13. Science, “Antarctic Ice Sheet variability across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary” — ice-sheet growth and CO₂ levels. ↩
14. Wikipedia, “Eocene–Oligocene extinction event” — ocean gateway and orbital factors. ↩
15. IPCC, “AR6 WGI Summary for Policymakers” — human attribution of current warming. ↩
16. National Park Service, “John Day Fossil Beds Climate Friendly Parks Action Plan” — climate risks to the monument and past species responses. ↩
17. National Park Service, “Historic Resources Study, Chapter 7” — state park acquisitions and monument campaign. ↩
18. National Park Service, “Painted Cove Trail” — boardwalk accessibility details. ↩
19. National Park Service, “John Day Fossil Beds National Monument” — active paleontology research center. ↩
20. National Park Service, “Painted Hills Unit Trails” — official trail list and distances. ↩
21. National Park Service, “Hot Spot Event with Leave No Trace at Painted Hills” — sunset and night-sky programs. ↩
22. National Park Service, “Audio Description, Page 3” — unit amenities and trail descriptions. ↩
23. National Park Service, “Directions & Transportation” — driving directions, no visitor center at the unit, and unit distances. ↩
24. Oregon Encyclopedia, “John Day (1770?–1820)” — biography and place-names. ↩
25. Oregon Encyclopedia, “John Day River (north-central Oregon)” — the 1812 naming incident. ↩
26. National Park Service, “Frequently Asked Questions” — John Day never visited; 1812 attackers unidentified. ↩
27. National Park Service, “Historic Resources Study, Chapter 1” — the John Day band’s seasonal round. ↩
28. National Park Service, “Administrative History, Chapter 1” — Tenino and Northern Paiute connections. ↩
29. National Park Service, “Historic Resources Study, Chapter 4” — 1855 treaties and reservation relocation. ↩
30. Travel Oregon, “Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs” — reservation and member tribes. ↩
31. Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, “Bomb Threat Closes Tamástslikt Cultural Institute” — CTUIR composition and governance. ↩
32. Visit Central Oregon, “Warm Springs, Oregon” — Museum at Warm Springs collections. ↩
33. Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, “Indian Head Casino” — ownership and Celilo Falls design. ↩
34. Travel Oregon, “Tamástslikt Cultural Institute” — exhibits and tribal perspective. ↩
35. National Park Service, “Alerts & Conditions” — road and RV advisories. ↩
36. National Park Service, “Plan Your Visit” — no entrance pass required. ↩

Mitchell, Oregon: Tiger Town Brewing and a Journey Through Ancient Life

A stage-stop town of 160 people in the Bridge Creek canyon has become the favorite base camp for the Painted Hills — with a brewpub in an old tire shop, and a world-class fossil museum 45 minutes east.01

Mitchell at a Glance

Mitchell is the second-largest town in Wheeler County — Fossil is the largest — with a population of 160 at the 2020 census. It sits along Bridge Creek just off U.S. Highway 26, forty-seven miles east of Prineville and sixty-eight miles west of John Day, in the rugged canyon country on the east side of the Ochoco Mountains.¹ Mitchell Rock looms above the town’s entrance, with Black Butte and White Butte rising in the near distance.²

The community began in the 1860s as a stage stop on The Dalles–John Day Military Road, which served the gold-mining operations to the east.

The town’s first postmaster, H.H. Johnson, named it for John H. Mitchell of Portland, a Republican who represented Oregon in the U.S. Senate across three discontinuous terms; Mitchell was incorporated in 1891.¹ Logging and cattle ranching carried the local economy into recent decades, with the Hudspeth Land and Logging Company a major presence until the 1980s.¹

The steep-walled canyon has always had a price. Flash floods severely damaged the town in 1884 and 1904, and in July 1956 a thunderstorm and “gully-washer” in the Ochocos devastated the town, ranches, and roads — each time, the community recovered.¹

Today Mitchell trades on geography. It is the gateway to the Painted Hills unit of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, about nine miles from the monument entrance, and a focal point for rock hounds.¹³ 

The town offers three restaurants, an espresso stop, a historic hotel, European cottages, and a city park with RV hookups and camping.² The Historic Oregon Hotel, built around 1936, preserves its quaint parlor and shared-bath character.⁴ Every Labor Day weekend since 1995, the town has mounted the Painted Hills Festival — a grand parade, races, a quilt show, live music and a street dance.¹02

The boarding program at Mitchell School District #55 is one of the most unusual public-school programs in Oregon. Rather than being a private boarding school, it is a public K-12 school that operates a residence for high school students (grades 9-12).

Why the program exists

The dormitory opened in 1992 as rural population declined in Wheeler County. The district created the boarding residence to help maintain enrollment and attract students from outside the immediate area. Some students were also drawn to the more structured environment of a small rural community.

Who can attend?

The boarding program serves students in grades 9 through 12. The school’s current application materials describe it as a co-educational boarding program that welcomes students from Oregon, elsewhere in the United States, and from other countries. Historically, students have come from places including:

• Germany
• Spain
• Thailand
• Hong Kong
• Mexico

as well as from communities across Oregon.

Living arrangements

According to the boarding residence application packet:

• The residence can accommodate up to 14 students. – Students live in shared rooms with up to four students per room. – Rooms include an in-room bathroom. – There are common areas for:
  • studying
  • recreation
  • laundry facilities The town itself is extremely small, with a population of roughly 150 people, creating a very intimate community environment.

Supervision and structure

The residence is supervised by dorm staff. The district’s boarding handbook states that residence parents or supervisors are responsible for students while they are in the dormitory and are empowered to enforce residence rules and discipline. The application packet states that students receive:

• 24/7 staff support
• supervised weekend activities
• off-campus excursions
• a balance of structure and personal free time

School life

Students attend the regular public high school and participate alongside local students. Despite its small size, the school offers:

• college-preparatory courses
• career and technical education pathways
• dual-enrollment opportunities
• athletics
• academic competitions and skills contests Sports are particularly important in rural Oregon. Mitchell joins with neighboring schools to field teams in:
• football
• volleyball
• basketball
• track and field

with transportation provided between communities.

Daily experience

Because the school is so small, a boarding student’s experience differs dramatically from that at a large urban high school. The district reports roughly 55 students in the entire Pre-K through 12 school, with only about 25 students at the high school level. That means boarding students become highly integrated into local life. They attend class with the same classmates every day, participate in community events, and live in a town where virtually everyone knows one another. The setting is surrounded by ranch country, the John Day Fossil Beds region, and Oregon’s high desert landscape.

Why families choose it

The district describes the boarding residence as providing a safe, supportive, and engaging environment in which students can experience small classes, close staff attention, extracurricular opportunities, and life in a rural American community. In many ways, it resembles a modern version of the old frontier boarding schools of the American West, except it is attached to a public school and intentionally kept very small, creating an experience that is quite different from the large boarding academies most people imagine when they hear the term “boarding school.”

Tiger Town Brewing: A Brewpub in an Old Tire Shop

At 108 W Main Street stands the town’s most unlikely institution. Tiger Town Brewing Co. is a small craft brewery that, along with its beer, offers family dining, a diverse cocktail list, and a top-shelf whisky selection — open year-round for lunch and dinner.⁶ The chamber of commerce notes it is open 363 days a year and hosts a number of music festivals and events through the summer.⁹

The name is a direct nod to the gritty, colorful history of Mitchell’s main street, where loggers and miners once descended to spend hard-earned wages with predictable results.⁷⁵ The building itself is local history: the historic Cannon family building originally operated as Cannon’s Tire Center. When the tire business moved to its highway location in 1969, the original building sat vacant for decades until the family helped transform it into the brewpub.⁷

Tiger Town is owned and operated by two local partners who wanted to breathe life back into a piece of local history — among them Robert Cannon, a fifth-generation Mitchell native whose family building it occupies.⁷⁸

Shawn Hawkins, one of the co-founders, serves as the brewery’s General Manager, and Rex oversees the beer as Brewmaster.⁷The beer is brewed on a small two-barrel system, with a rotating seasonal tap list that ranges from a watermelon wheat in summer to a smoked porter in winter, alongside a full food menu year-round.¹⁰¹¹ The kitchen covers pub standards, including vegan-friendly meatless “wings.”¹³ If you find a beer you like, the staff will can it for you on the spot.¹²

Practical notes: check the brewery’s website for current hours and menus.⁶03

Sheep Rock and the Thomas Condon Visitor Center

The Sheep Rock Unit, between the towns of Dayville and Kimberly, is the hub of monument operations: it holds the park’s headquarters at the Historic Cant Ranch and its main visitor facility, the Thomas Condon Visitor Center.¹⁹ The center is named for Thomas Condon, the 19th-century Oregon scientist who first recognized the significance of the fossil beds and made the first scientific collection and study of specimens.⁴

The center is a working National Park Service research facility as much as a museum. Opened to the public in 2004 with exhibits following in 2005, it houses the monument’s paleontology laboratory and museum collections, offices, and the visitor center and fossil galleries — all under one roof.²² The lab’s scientists are usually either making replicas, preparing fossils, or working on display pieces, and the field program continues across more than 750 fossil sites in the John Day Basin.²¹

The fossil gallery is the monument’s single best stop for understanding the whole region — it displays fossils from the entirety of the John Day Fossil Beds, including some from fossil-bearing layers inside the basin but outside monument boundaries.¹⁹²¹ It is also the best place to see and learn about fossils in the monument, and rangers recommend starting there.¹⁶

Getting there from Mitchell: drive east on Highway 26 for about 31 miles, then turn left onto Highway 19 toward Kimberly and the Sheep Rock Unit, and continue about two miles north to the visitor center.²³¹⁴ The drive takes about 45 minutes.²⁴VISITOR CENTERDETAILSAddress32651 Highway 19, Kimberly, OR 97848 (Sheep Rock Unit)¹⁴Hours10:00 AM–4:00 PM Sunday, Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Grounds and trails remain open when the building is closed.¹⁴Phone(541) 987-2333¹⁴Distance from MitchellAbout 31 miles east on US-26, then 2 miles north on Highway 19 — roughly a 45-minute drive²³²⁴Nearest gasDayville, 9 miles south of the visitor center; also Mitchell and Spray²⁵AccessibilityWheelchair accessible, with accessible restrooms, a tactile exhibit, assistive listening systems, and wheelchairs available¹⁴

Check current hours before you go — the schedule above reflects the center’s posted hours at publication, and holiday closures apply.¹⁴04

Exhibits Not to Be Missed

These are the highlights of a visit, based on what the National Park Service itself showcases at the center.

THE FOSSIL GALLERY

A walk through nearly 50 million years of the Age of Mammals, with hundreds of specimens on display — more than 500 in total — ranging from tiny plant seeds to large rhinoceros skulls.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁷

THE EIGHT MURALS

Eight large, scientifically accurate murals depicting the plants and animals of each era and the environments they lived in — from subtropical forests to open grassland.¹⁴¹⁷

THE FISHBOWL PALEONTOLOGY LAB

Picture windows into the working laboratory and the collections room, which holds over 60,000 specimens — visitors watch scientists actively studying and preparing fossils.¹⁴¹⁵

THE PARK FILM

“Layers of Life: Stories of Ancient Oregon,” a 20-minute film that travels through nearly 50 million years of fluctuating climates and explosive volcanoes, with 3-D animation showing how Sheep Rock, the Painted Hills, and the Clarno Palisades formed.¹⁸

THE SOUND OF EXTINCT SPECIES

Speakers in the exhibits provide an audio representation of what extinct species may have sounded like — a small touch that brings the murals and mounts to life.¹⁴

JUNIOR RANGER PROGRAMS

Junior Ranger and Junior Paleontologist booklets are available at the front desk for visitors of all ages; complete the activities, take the pledge, and earn a badge.¹⁶¹⁵

One thing you will not find: dinosaurs. This part of Oregon was beneath the Pacific Ocean during the Age of Dinosaurs — the land rose during the Age of Mammals, which is exactly what the fossils record.²¹

A note on the lab: there is often someone working, but the paleontologists may be in other offices or out in the park looking for more fossils — the windows are the feature, not a scheduled demonstration.¹⁵05

Pairing Your Visit

The Sheep Rock Unit rewards a full half-day or more beyond the visitor center. The Cant Ranch Museum at the historic James Cant Ranch tells the human and ranching history of the valley, and the unit’s trails and overlooks include the Blue Basin canyon, carved from blue-green claystone.¹⁹²⁰Travelers making a loop should budget about an hour of driving between the Sheep Rock and Painted Hills units — 45 miles apart — so Mitchell sits conveniently between the two.²⁰06

Practical Information

There is no entrance fee for John Day Fossil Beds National Monument,²⁶ and no reservations are needed for the fossil gallery, which the park describes as a 10–60 minute activity.¹⁷ Collecting fossils or other natural items is not allowed anywhere in the monument.¹⁹

For a day trip out of Mitchell: fuel and food are limited, so fill up when you can — gas is available in Mitchell, Dayville (9 miles south of the visitor center), and Spray (30 miles north).²⁵ Cell coverage in the canyons is unreliable; download directions before you leave. The visitor center’s phone number, (541) 987-2333, is the best line for current conditions.¹⁴

Links for planning:

Tiger Town Brewing Co. · Thomas Condon Visitor Center · Sheep Rock Unit · Directions & Transportation · Mitchell, Travel Oregon ·Mitchell, The Oregon Encyclopedia

Footnotes

1. The Oregon Encyclopedia, “Mitchell” — town founding, floods, festival, and Painted Hills gateway role. ↩
2. Travel Oregon, “Mitchell” — population, location, and visitor amenities. ↩
3. Travel Oregon, “Journey to the Painted Hills” — gateway description and area attractions. ↩
4. Visit Eastern Oregon, “Mitchell to John Day to Prairie City” road trip — Historic Oregon Hotel and area history. ↩
5. Visit Eastern Oregon, “Easy Days in Eastern Oregon” — Mitchell’s rowdy main-street history. ↩
6. Tiger Town Brewing Co., official site — brewpub description, family dining, and year-round lunch and dinner. ↩
7. Tiger Town Brewing Co., “About” — partners, Cannon family building, General Manager and Brewmaster. ↩
8. Tiger Town Brewing Co., “Our Story” — Robert Cannon’s fifth-generation Mitchell roots and family building. ↩
9. Oregon Frontier Chamber of Commerce directory, “Tiger Town Brewing” — open 363 days a year with summer music festivals. ↩
10. Untappd, “Tiger Town Brewing Co.” beer list — two-barrel brewpub and beer lineup. ↩
11. Travel Oregon, “Eastern Oregon Brews Byway” — seasonal tap rotation and full food menu. ↩
12. Willamette Week, “A Trip to the Painted Hills” (July 2025) — canning beer on the spot. ↩
13. Travel Oregon, “The Painted Hills, a Gift for All” — vegan-friendly meatless wings. ↩
14. National Park Service, “Thomas Condon Visitor Center” — exhibits, hours, address, directions, and accessibility. ↩
15. National Park Service, “Indoor Activities” — fossil gallery, murals, lab windows, and Junior Ranger programs. ↩
16. National Park Service, “Top Tips for Visiting John Day Fossil Beds” — starting at the fossil gallery and visiting tips. ↩
17. National Park Service, “Fossil Gallery” — 500+ specimens across the Age of Mammals. ↩
18. National Park Service, “Layers of Life: Stories of Ancient Oregon” — the 20-minute park film and its showing schedule. ↩
19. National Park Service, “Sheep Rock Unit” — unit description and fossil-collecting ban. ↩
20. National Park Service, “Directions & Transportation” — distances between units and the loop drive. ↩
21. National Park Service, “Frequently Asked Questions” — lab work, 750+ fossil sites, and the absence of dinosaurs. ↩
22. National Park Service, “Scope of Collection Statement” — research facility opened in 2004 with exhibits in 2005. ↩
23. Oregon Hikers Field Guide, “Blue Basin Trailhead”— drive distance from Mitchell via US-26 and Highway 19. ↩
24. Painted Hills Oregon, “Plan Your Stay” — drive time from Mitchell to the visitor center. ↩
25. National Park Service, “Basic Information” — gas at Dayville, Mitchell, and Spray. ↩
26. National Park Service, “Plan Your Visit” — no entrance pass required. ↩