Eastern Oregon is a dry place, but it wasn’t always that way.
As we wind our way through the fossil beds, waving our phones and lifting our feet over the stones, we snap pictures of the striped cliffs that serve as shelves of the archaeological record. Layered in the stones are the clues to a very different world.
Where now there is dust and boulders, there once thrived a tropical paradise. The cataclysmic debris exhibits the trapped-forever luscious vines, fleshy flowers, fruiting trees, nuts, and other big leafy plants, the fossils of a far away time. The mild climate was similar to that in Central America today. Things changed. And now there are thistles, fine grasses, succulents, small annual wild flowers, lizards and buried intrigues.
It’s worth the journey to walk through change and see how it feels.
