We packed up our campground early in the morning on day two of our Central Oregon exploration, and drove off in search of new adventures! Yesterday we spent the day in the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, and we are devoting today to exploring the Sheep Rock Unit. We want to try to see everything over here that we can because we are heading into Bend tonight for the remainder of the week.
Our first stop was the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center:
They had fossils on display from all three units of the park, as well as those from other federal lands in the area. I have never seen so many dinosaur and small mammal fossils in one place before - it was really cool!
From the visitors center, we went on a short 1.3 mile hike to the Blue Basin - an area of blue-green rock layers from millions of years of volcanic ash accumulation. The rocks were absolutely stunning in color!
Even the pools of water that we found along the hike were colored!
The kids along side a display of a fossilized turtle - they had neat little informational areas like this spread all along the hike:
The little friend we found along the way:
Our next stop was the James Cant Ranch - a late 1800's homestead near the John Day River. The area is all farmland, and the lush green fields stood out beautifully among the colored hills and scrub brush:
The house itself was built in 1917, and beautifully restored in the 1970's when the National Forest Service purchased the ranch.
The inside of the house is set up as half educational displays, and half restored rooms showing what it looked like when the family lived here. In the display section, there were hands on activities for the kids, like this big pile of wool to play in:
And these neat displays with artifacts from the history of the ranch, like this one about Sheep Herders:
This is from the restored section of the house, and while the old furniture and accessories were interesting, all I could see was that wallpaper! I can't imagine having to look at that pattern every day!
The grounds around the house were much better - THIS is a view that I could definitely get used to seeing each day!
And the back porch! I would love to have a house with a beautiful wrap around screened porch like this one...someday!
It was quite a large area that the house, barn and outbuildings covered, and it was cool to see a map of how things used to be set up and how each building was used (click picture to make it bigger).
The sheep barn was gigantic and in really great condition considering it was built in 1920!
I love visiting places like this because its so fun to think about what life must have been like for this family in the early 1900's, and to imagine what their day to day activities would have been.
We had a nice picnic lunch at the ranch before heading back towards Bend to the campsite we would be staying at for the rest of our trip. We found a great little campsite at Lava Lake, in the Deschutes National Forest. There was plenty of room for both tents at our site, a walking trail into the woods right behind us, and all the trees gave us quite a bit of privacy from our neighbors, which was good because this campground was packed!
There was also lots and lots of dirt. I have never camped somewhere so incredibly dirty and dusty before! Every time someone took a step, a puff of dust would shoot up into the air, coating everything in sight. The kids thought it was great fun to play in it, and got right to work creating race tracks for the hot wheels that Killian had packed along:
All that playing cars in the dirt let to one very dirty little girl - within the first 30 minutes of being at camp! I think we are in for a very dusty and grimy week!
