Technology is grand. Using the wireless signal at my
campsite last night I found a motorcycle shop in the next town of Ontario, made a computer
phonecall, got a map showing where to find it, and badaboom badabing I was set.
I showed up on their doorstep at 9:00 and by 10:30 The Bruiser had a brand new
rubber boot.
(Now we are both retired. Ha!)
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| A serious rear tire. But not mine. :) |
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| "City Park" reads the sign. A fairly liberal interpretation of both terms. My lunch stop in a cottonwood snowstorm. |
Almost every year for the last six when I have taken my
solitary motorcycle tour for a week in the summer, I have found myself driving
through this area in central Oregon around the
town of John Day.
It has everything a geologist biker could ask for. The roads are lacquer smooth
with sensuous curves and very light traffic. Scenery is colourful and stunning,
owing in large part to the outstanding geology. People are down home and
friendly, and the history of the place is written in the old homesteads and
barns that are in regal decay around every bend.
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| This place has everything. Scenery, geology and twisty roads. Playland for a geo-biker. |
Everything here is named for John Day. A town, a river, a county, and a large hydro dam. It would seem that he is a heroic historical character that figures highly in the formative years of this region.
Not exactly. The story goes like this.
John Day was a nerdy
settler in the pioneer days who was out riding one day and was ambushed by the
local Indians. They didn’t scalp him or anything like that. Seems they had a
sense of humour. They took his horse and all of his clothing and sent him loose
to find his way home barefoot and buck naked. The as yet unnamed river near
this alleged incident occurred now bears his name. The town, county and dam are
all named after the river, not the frontier dweeb.
The river valley is unspeakably gorgeous. Steel blue water
flows through emerald green groves of grass and trees, and the surrounding
hills are all the flavours of that gelato place on Commercial Drive. I would have taken more
pictures to show you—as it was I stopped many times, and was making slow
headway!—but it was just tremendous fun riding through the canyon. I was glad
that I decided to change that tire this morning. It was fresh with a rounded
rather than a flattened, worn profile, and once I made a few careful turns to
scuff the slippery resin coat off the surface of the new rubber we were
throwing sparks off the floorboards. This beats the heck out of those flat Texas raceways!
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| View from a height. The John Day River cuts through the cleft in those hills... |
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| ... and looks like this. It is called the Painted Gorge. |
One of the most important fossil localities in North America is the John Day Fossil Beds. (again, named
for the river, not the dweeb). I would bet that most fossils you have seen are
of shelled marine critters. When an organism dies, it is almost always
destroyed by decay or scavengers or weathering. It helps if the critter has
‘hard parts’ such as shells, bones or teeth, and if it lived in an environment
where it is likely to be buried and thereby preserved. That describes marine
shellfish quite well. Landlubbers are not as easily preserved since they are
not as likely to be buried and are correspondingly rarer as fossils. The John
Day area is unusual because of all of the mammals and land plants of about
20-30 million years ago that were buried, not by water sediments, but by
repeated deluges of volcanic ash that followed a multitude of eruptions in this
area.
A collection of fossils at the interpretive centre here displays
a variety of early mammals, some of which I never knew existed. There are huge
rodents and tiny horses, camels, rhinos, cats and elephants, a great many of
which never made it on the Ark.
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| Fossil skull of huge rodent |
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| The colourful layers exposed on the cliff faces are lava flows and volcanic ash layers, the latter of which buried and preserved fossils of forest critters. |
I decided to camp at a lower and hopefully warmer place than
my favourite spot near the town of Fossil.
Spray has a population that runs into the dozens, but put a decent little park
together near the river.
I made a little friend.A beautiful young border collie
cross just came bounding over to me, jumped in my lap, and is engaging me in a
perpetual game of ‘fetch’. So if you
will excuse me I must sign off now as I have a pair of big paws on my arm and a
stick at my feet.
