Jeanne and Kevin go on a road trip.

These are various moments on our trip that I happened to get pictures of. I love trips with Jeanne. We wander around without too much planning and find so much. Here's an old log church in some eastern Oregon woods no longer in use (by humans).

Hey, I like dirt! This turned out to be a good dirt viewing trip.

Farming the wind. These big fellows were all doing this slow hypnotic dance together. I really love watching things like this that slowly go in and out of sync with each other.

On the first day we ended up at a friend's (Ed Pitman) house in eastern Oregon. He is head of maintenance at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. You can just see a building in the center of this picture. That is where he works (about 2 miles from where he lives). Every inch of this river valley seemed idyllic. They had a lot of rain this last spring making it very green for this area at this time of year.

Right around the corner, and within walking distance of his house, is a place called Blue Basin that we walked up into. It had to be 100 degrees in there. I loved it!

Here's another spot along the river close to his house. One reason the fossil beds around here are about the best in the world for a certain era is that volcanos spewed up ash on a fairly regular basis for millions of years. The ash buried and preserved fossils and also makes it good for accurate dating. The fossils here are all from a time after the dinosaurs when there were more mammals on earth that at any other time. There are different colored layers of earth depending on the chemical composition of the various eruptions. You'll see this better when we get to the painted hills. The top brown layer here is basalt. It was molten when it flowed out so no fossils there.

Ed got us into the lab where they work on the fossils, extracting them from the surrounding matrix which is sometimes harder than the fossils themselves which makes it tricky. They make molds and casts and also work on fossils sent here from eslewhere in the world. Here's the skull of a small saber toothed cat. The teeth are broken off but you can see the areas of the lower jaw that would have protected the long teeth from injury when the jaw was closed.

From here we went to the painted hills.