Painted Hills OR Boondocking?

This is great looking country. I'm putting this on my bucket list, once the danger passes from meteor strikes.

Here is an aerial view of the Painted Hills taken from my ultralight.

Hugemoth, I thought that my little trailer was a semi-offroad ultralight, but yours can apparently fly, too! What are you using for a tow vehicle -- a 747? ;)

Seriously, though, that is an amazing and thought-provoking shot! You've got to wonder how those alternating layers were deposited. The red stuff is iron-bearing, and the tan is not. Clearly, these hills were carved from sedimentary rock that accumulated underwater. So that means that sometimes (but not all the time), the shallow sea or lake formed the drainage for a mountain range that contained iron.

Then, somehow, the river that carried the iron into the sea was diverted for a very long time, and the layer of tan sand covered the layer of iron. Then the "iron river" came back. And was shut off. And came back. Judging by those badlands, this happened at least eight times, at irregular intervals. (Sometimes, geology can be like a time-lapse movie.) How could a river turn on and off like that, for thousands or millions of years at a time?

Alternatively, the reddish layers could be beds of volcanic ash. Maybe that is more plausible -- perhaps from successive eruptions from Mt. Hood? But Wikipedia says that the red stuff is not ash -- it is "laterite," weathered iron-rich soil. Quite a puzzle!

hugemoth wrote:
Here is an aerial view of the Painted Hills taken from my ultralight.

WOW!! That picture is AMAZING!!

Here's one I took from ground-level:

profdant139 wrote:
Hugemoth, I thought that my little trailer was a semi-offroad ultralight, but yours can apparently fly, too! What are you using for a tow vehicle -- a 747? ;)

Seriously, though, that is an amazing and thought-provoking shot! You've got to wonder how those alternating layers were deposited.

The hills are actually the result of a massive volcanic ash fall from the Cascade Mountains over 33 millions years ago. Natural processes changed the deposits into a type of clay (Bentonite) that expands as it absorbs water creating the close-up popcorn-like appearance. The colors are the result of minerals -> red from iron oxides, yellow from iron & magnesium oxides and lavender from rhyolitic lava.

These threads give me wanderlust.