John Day was merely an unfortunate trader who got robbed along the river here, but the event was noteworthy enough that this Columbia River tributary was named after him, then the whole region in Oregon. I first explored the area in 2017 when finding a campsite to observe a full solar eclipse, but I skipped the fossils. I really should have visited the museum earlier.

The John Day River flows through a huge volcanic landscape that contains the best Cenozoic fossils discovered in the country. Layers of forests and ash preserved some of the most important fossils used to understand evolution. The Cenozoic is the age of mammals, including the John Day Tiger above and the big entelodont (pig/hippo) behind it on the left. There is a camel skull, a gomphothere (elephant) jaw, mastodon teeth, horns of a giraffe-deer, bones of a short-faced bear previously thought to live only in Asia, rhinos, and some kind of giant dog-bear called a nimravid. There are also fossils of the Dawn Redwood, which still lives in China. The fossils I’ve seen at Fossil Butte, Florissant and Agate are all from periods covered here. If you have time, it’s possible to hike in the three separate remote park units, but the exhibits above are in the Condon Visitor Center in the Sheep Rock unit near the scenic Picture Gorge.