John Day Fossil Beds, OR

With as many avid outdoorsmen living throughout the Pacific Northwest, more than my fair share make their way into my barbershop. As such, I hear about a lot of great day trip spots and camping locations. One of the spots that has been on my bucket list for a while now is the Painted Hills in Oregon.

Located inside the John Day Fossil Beds National Park, the painted hill units is about a 4 hour trip when you account for time to walk your dogs, but it will be closer to 5 hours if you take a wrong turn around Fossil, but we don’t need to talk about that.

Ever since I took the Subaru off the lot, we’ve been looking for more excuses to take more day trips. It was 100% the reason I went with a Forester. I wanted capabilities and comfort in a vehicle that would be going across the country. We had already gone on a handful of day trips to a few areas outside of the treasure valley. Idaho City, German Creek, Shaw Mountain to Robbie Creek, and once we accidentally discovered the trinity lakes, but none really tested our endurance for how much time we could spend in the car at any one time.

We quickly learned the dogs need a break every hour or two. When they were in the scion, they had the whole back area with the seats folded down as feee range to walk back and forth to look out a ton of windows, and they were able to make it closer to 3 hours between breaks. Now, they’re trapped behind a TravAll pet barrier in what will be designated as “DoggoLand”. The TravAll is great for a few reasons, but mainly how secure it fits into the back of the forester. Since each barrier is built specific to your car’s make and model, I have yet to hear it rattle a single time, in spite of all of the rough roads we’ve already driven over. Additionally, with how rugged the build is, I can set up MOLLE bags on either side of it, so I have easy access to our IFAK as well as our fire extinguisher.

The space fits sumo’s orthopedic bed perfectly, but they have so much more pent up energy without the ability to walk around and surf the corners and turns like they could in the scion, so they need to get out every hour or two to stretch their legs and replenish water. We’ve also learned that Hailie and Tesla don’t enjoy being separated from one another in dad’s car, not one bit.

I don’t remember when I first heard about the Painted Hills, I just remember a client had introduced me to them a while back. Other clients had mentioned them in passing as being a cool detour to check out. The inherent problem of ever visiting the painted hills was that the trip would always take a minimum of 10 hours, 8 of which would be spent in the car. That never seemed worthwhile in the scion, but this seemed like the perfect location for me to stress test how long I could drive in the new Forester.

We would need to leave super early if I could hope for any good shots with the new drone, so I made sure our lunch, snacks, and supplies were all packed up the night before so we could just wake up and go. We left Wednesday morning at 6:45 with the hopes of making it there before noon.

Pit Stop #1 for the dogs happened around the same time we finally started to see the sun peek up over the hills. We had another 2 and a half hours in the car ahead of us.

A morning drive through rural Oregon is definitely a reminder of what conservative America looks a lot like. It’s beauty in a way that urban development and vertical lifestyles will never be able to offer. A lot of people think that most of Oregon is similar to Portland, and that is very much not the case. Portland, Seattle, and Boise are all the liberal, densely populated capitals of what are three largely conservative states with a lot of small agriculturally driven towns. In between these scattered towns, there are miles of autumn colors throughout the portion of the drive through the Malheur National Forest. It truly was a serene drive to listen to the audiobook I downloaded for the drive.

The subtle art of not giving a fuck, by Mark Manson, is at it’s core, a self help book. It’s a book that talks about finding the things you don’t give a fuck about, so you can understand what things you do give a fuck about, and how in life, you only have so many fucks to give, so give your fucks to something you give a fuck about. It speaks to my heart, and we were 7 minutes away from finishing the book when we finally arrived at the painted hills unit.

To start, the painted hills are so much more visually stunning to see in person than I can ever show on a blog. The coloration of the hills is due to a volcanic eruption that occurred millions of years ago that forever changed the landscape. We parked at the main parking lot, and took the dogs on the short hike to the highest elevation point on the trail before walking back down to the car.

After the brief 20 minutes walking to the edge of the trail and back, we headed to the next section of the park, the painted cove. This was an area that had a boardwalk with plaques that talked about the history of the formation of the park. There were some beautiful colors, but only 10 minutes of walking around. Off to the final portion of the painted hills unit, Red Hill.

Once again, we had about 10 minutes of walking around a red hill that had been aptly named, Red Hill. At that point, we had finally seen what we had driven 5 hours to see. We were still early in the afternoon, but we mostly wanted to make sure we would get home before 8, so we had a little time for me to fly my drone after we left the park.

The hills were absolutely beautiful to see in person, there is no question about it. But to say they are worth a 10 hour road trip might be a bit of a stretch. We hiked and drove around the painted hills for roughly 90 minutes, so the juice would be much more worth the squeeze if we had more time doing a few other things as well.

During our drive up, we had noticed a ton of camp sites along the drive through Malheur National Forest. If we had the opportunity to do this trip again, I would drive the 3.5 hours to set up camp in the forest so we could spend the evening enjoying a campfire, and then we could wake up early to see the sunrise come over the painted hills. That time following the hour of hiking would give us a few more hours of sunlight to explore the rest of the John Day Fossil Beds before our drive back home. There were so many amazing things that we only had the opportunity to see through the car window, and having the drive back get broken up by more hikes would make so much more of an impact to the way we experience the weekend.

I’m glad we waited for autumn colors to drive through the forest for our first visit, but I think the next time we go up will be closer to the spring so we can see all the wildflowers in bloom on the hillsides. I also think I’ll hold off on going again until we can have more ability to stay overnight.

Go vote.
-Chris