Our Not-Forgotten Painted Hills Trip
Feeling guilty about doing the Terrell Brothers Road Trip sans Ann, and depriving her of the amazing photographic opportunities Len and I shared, and with Ann itching to get out and do some photography, we decided to do a bit of a road trip on our own, and to do it the right way. So we rented ourselves a Revel from a guy in Eugene and headed out to the Painted Hills for a few days. What a few days they were!
We took no photographs the first afternoon we were there. We arrived later in the afternoon and simply wanted to soak in a place that had become one of our favorites over the year. It was heavily overcast, having seen rain the previous few days so the light was nothing special, so it was the perfect opportunity to just get out, wander a bit and breathe in that wonderful juniper air.
Fortunately, one of the two hidden camping areas we know about was available, so we were able to camp just outside the Painted Hills on BLM land so we could have an early morning start.
The next morning, it didn’t take me long at all to find a subject worth photographing. It seems that the painted hills offers us different opportunities every time we visit, and this occasion was no different.
As you’ll see from the photographs, the April and early May rains (it apparently rained in Oregon almost the entire time I was roadtripping in Utah with Len) left the painted hills as lush in vegetation as I’ve ever seen it. It also meant that, for the most part, the soils were deeper in tone than is often the case. So what caught my eye immediately that first morning as I pulled up into our parking space was the bright protrusion of rocks at the base of one of the larger hills to the west of the main Ridgeline.
It was still pre-dawn, my favorite time of day at the Painted Hills (well, generally anywhere), so the landscape had that ethereal beauty that only comes in certain places at certain times. Somehow under that lighting the grasses at the Painted Hills seem to come alive. I made some other photographs on a small plateau by the parking area but I’m not satisfied with those results. I may need to sit with those a bit more to see if there is something I’m missing in them. Or they’re just bad photographs. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
It wasn’t too long before the sun topped the horizon and the landscape changed completely. Ann and I started walking along the main ridge and it didn’t take me long to stop and start working the landscape.
I changed my working processes somewhat from the roadtrip images where I intentionally focused on trying to make images that captured more of the landscape. At the Painted Hills I would work back and forth between my more conventional focusing on details within the landscape (at various scales) and more broader landscape images. I decided on that approach that first morning, so you’ll see several “pairings” of images from that weekend.
I really don’t think I’ve ever seen the floor in front of the main hills as colorful and rich as it was that weekend.
Ann and I continued photographing as the sun rose. But as usually happens, the timing between images grew longer and longer as the light flattened on the landscape and/or we became mentally tired from the quest for images. Eventually, we called it a morning and headed into town for a big breakfast/early lunch.
We returned to the National Monument (technically the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument) early in the afternoon with the sun high in the sky. We walked around a bit, enjoying different locations, but not seeing anything special. However, while driving from one parking area to another, I saw an image that was worth pulling out the camera for.
I honestly have to say that I don’t think I would have stopped to make this image had it not been for the roadtrip with Len and my effort to try to incorporate more landscape in my photographs. Sure, the billowing clouds added to the effect, but I saw this image from a glance to the left while driving, and something like that comes only after you’ve developed the ability to see that image.
And, of course, I couldn’t leave it at that, so I also made an image that is more in line with the types of images I usually make.
I’m learning that each has qualities that the other lacks. And I still can’t tell when one is vastly superior to the other. Thank goodness that the cost of digital photography (at least in terms of money) is an up-front cost that I’ve already paid and I don’t have to agonize over the $2.00 cost ($10.00 cost for color) I used to think about every time I pressed the shutter on my 4x5 camera. And those are at 1980 - ’90’s prices. The price of 4x5 black and white sheet film is now 7 times what it was back then. I am happy to be living in the age of digital, though I do miss the developing process at times.
It didn’t take very long after making the above images before the storms started rolling in. Once we realized what was happening, we made our way back to a location where we could take advantage of what was happening in the sky.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I totally neglected what was happening on the ground.
But the real performance was above us and we tried to find landscapes that would set the stage for the impressive (and changing) skies above us.
It wasn’t long before we started hearing thunder off in the distance, and then the occasional flash of lightening. I only managed to time it right once.
Ann kept asking whether it was safe for us to be out there and I kept saying yes, finding no correlation between the flashes we were seeing and the thunder we would hear many, many, many seconds later, if they were even related. A few minutes after the forth or fifth time Ann asked, a crack of thunder started way off of my left ear, and ended somewhere off past my right ear. “Hon, I think it’s time to go!” Right as I closed the rear doors to the Revel, the drops began to fall. By the time we both climbed into the vehicle, we were in a downpour. We sure timed that one right!
It was shocking how hard the rain fell. We knew the photography was done for the day/evening so we headed out to our favorite camp areas only to find both were occupied. Disturbingly, the ground was already flooding. So we headed out the main entrance of the monument, hoping to take advantage of any number of other locations on the road between the Painted Hills and Mitchell. We quickly wondered whether any of those sites would be accessible given the rivers of water flowing on and across the road. Several of the potential locations were under water, and the last area, large enough for a half-dozen campers and occupied by 4 already, had three main gushing torrents through the camping area and other portions under water. We decided that our best option for getting back into the Painted Hills early the next morning was to grab a spot in Mitchell, if one was open. Sure enough it was, and we settled in for a stormy night.
The rains stopped overnight and the cross-road rivers has stopped by the time we made our our pre-dawn drive from Mitchell to the Painted Hills. That doesn’t mean we didn’t hit several pools of standing water or silt deltas left by the flooding waters, but that’s why one drives carefully regardless of the conditions. We pulled up to the the main parking area and headed up the ridge to where we ended the night before.
Again, the landscape was lush with plant life and we even found flowers on the hillside. I didn’t recall them from the previous days’ wanderings, but regardless, I had to include them in at least one of the images I made that morning.
We spent that morning working our way back down the main ridge line towards the parking area, enjoying the possibilities before us.
We took a breakfast break in the parking area at the entrance of the monument, and then headed back in to see what was available that morning. The sun was popping in and out of the clouds, which was nice for a set of hills right at the beginning of the drive into the hills. We were able to take advantage of stark shows cast by the sun and hill forms,
and then focus less on the forms and more on the subtle colors and plant life that often escape unnoticed.
Eventually the clouds decided to dominate the sky, so we decided to drive around the area, taking a route we’d taken before that runs along the John Day river and then back towards Mitchell.
It was mostly just a pleasant drive through a very different landscape. We stopped a few times in a narrow valley that cuts down to the river to explore a bit and, at one location, I pulled out the camera gear. Again, I came across a subject that I realized I should photograph at the different scales I’ve been working on.
The broader, landscape image, reminds me why we really need to keep a short step-ladder in the vehicle at all times as Charlie Waite does. I really could have used another 6” - 10” of height for this image to get the tree tops below the horizon and the top of the foreground juniper bush below the pine behind it.
That juniper - pine juxtaposition doesn’t seem as troubling in the higher-framed image, which I think shows off the attributes of the juniper and the water fall better than the other image.
Eventually we returned to the Painted Hills and continued our photography there. The skies were still overcast, but it was breaking up a bit, so we decided to take advantage of the subtle light changes that provided ever-changing shadows along the hillsides.
Even when the sun was obscured, the clouds were thin, offering a diffuse light that was very much appreciated for an early summer afternoon since the cloud screen removed much of the harshness that clear afternoons usually provide.
By late afternoon the skies overhead were breaking up, even though afternoon storm clouds, again, obscured the sun’s rays from the east.
When it became obvious that the western clouds were not going to break, we headed out the back road to, thankfully, find one of our spots open and settled in for a nice evening of relaxing.
While it wasn’t raining the next morning, the cloud cover was heavy and complete. We drove up to the main parking area, but after waiting a bit, we realized that it was not going to break. There was no lovely morning light to work with and everything was flat as could be. As any landscape photographer will tell you, you’re at the whims of Mother Nature. Sometimes she giveth, and sometimes not.
Glad we had an interesting couple of days given the ever-changing weather and lighting conditions, combined with the fact we had to have the rig back in Eugene by noon, we were content to call it a trip and headed home. I think I still need to review some of the images I made to figure out what I was thinking when I made them, but overall it was a good trip - both for the soul and for the photography.