First, some warnings. If you plan to visit John Day Fossil Beds, be prepared. Road maps might make it look as if the national monument is plunk in the middle of pretty well-inhabited country with towns frequent along the roads.

Wrong.

It’s beautiful country for sure. Lush farms and ranches line the roads, and some awfully happy looking cattle roam the fields. Towns spot the road maps every few miles, but if someplace can be crowded and remote at the same time, this is it. It’s apparently considered a big town if it contains more than ten buildings. Facilities most of us have come to take for granted elsewhere simply don’t exist here.

A map of facilities and services that’s handed out at the visitor center at Thomas Condon Paleontology Center carries the following warnings: Plan to purchase fuel before 5 p.m. There are no 24-hour gas stations in the region except Prineville. Gas stations close between 5 and 8 p.m. Motorists may not pump their own gas in Oregon. Some gas stations have reduced hours on Sundays. Towns labeled with the gas station icon should have fuel available seven days per week in summer.

I read somewhere that you should carry extra gas in cans in Oregon. Good advice. Never pass a gas pump if you have less than about 2/3 of a tank. I wound up in Dayville, just west of John Day, needing at least some fuel. I stopped at a little place with a sign outside advertising “Cheapest Gas in Town.” At $3.89 it was. Also the only gas in town. I got five gallons.

And that’s where I bought a loaf of bread. Before he handed it to me, the storekeeper looked it over carefully. Looking for mold? So I looked it over carefully, too. No mold. But it had expired July 2 and it was now July 12. Ah, well. A testimony perhaps to the power of all those preservative chemicals they pump into our foods these days. It did taste good, though.

A look at a map will show you that John Day Fossil is spread out over a very large area with three distinct units separated by miles of beautiful and very mountainous landscape. Speed limit is 55, but that’s pushing it sometimes. So now comes Warning Number Two — allow plenty of time if you really want to explore this place.

The big visitor center at Thomas Condon Paleontological Center in the Sheep Rock Unit of the park is the logical place to begin. But you’ll have to be a late riser, because they don’t open until ten in the morning.

When they do finally open the doors, however, the wait is worth it. I’ve always found more recent fossils to be of greater interest than dinosaurs and brachiopods. Hagerman’s Pliocene relics and the Cenozoic here at John Day seem to have more reality or something and have captured my imagination easily. Maybe it’s because these critters seem a little more in tune with my own life experience as a member of the age that’s coming to be known as the Anthropocene.

Murals help you try to envision life here during the Cenozoic Era/Lee Dalton

Whatever it is, the fossils and exhibits in the Thomas Condon center demanded a good chunk of my time. The center, by the way, is named for a pioneering geologist who was also a minister. Thomas Condon found himself defending Charles Darwin and tried to point out that science and religion are not mutually exclusive. He maintained that whoever created this Earth simply used evolution and other natural processes as tools while He or She or Whatever went about the job of creation.

John Day and the surrounding area of Oregon — the national monument preserves only a tiny fraction of all the Cenozoic fossil deposits in the state — provide the most complete collection of Cenozoic remains on Earth. Not only are animals of all kinds preserved in the rock layers around here, so are plants. Often the plants are preserved in their entirety, including pollen and seeds.

One of the highlights of the center is a set of large murals depicting what paleontologists believe the scene may have been 65 million years ago. Even understanding that any representations are 90 percent conjecture, I found the murals added a compelling dose of interest to my experience there.

Another fascinating feature is a working paleo lab where visitors may watch as technicians work to remove matrix of stone from around bones and plant remains. Painstaking work, much of which is done working with microscopes. A video feed allows visitors to see the same microscope view the technicians are seeing as they work.

Fossilized remains of tortoises can be found along the Blue Basin Trail/Lee Dalton

A large selection of hiking trails invite exploration in all the park’s units. Not far from the visitor center are two trails reaching out into Blue Basin. Along the way are several dome-covered exhibits containing replicas of fossil remains that were found in those very spots. The presence of these really helped bring the place to life (if such a term may be used in reference to fossils). The only problem is that the plastic domes reflect sun and make photographing them very, very difficult. A canyon wren sings to me with its cascade of musical notes as I work on some photos.

Just down the road from the visitor center is the Cant Ranch. A historic home built in the early 1900s by the Cant family. (My fingers keep wanting put an apostrophe in their name.) Today there’s a museum on the first floor and park headquarters offices occupy the second. The Cants were one of a large number of Scottish settlers around here who came to raise sheep as they had in Scotland.

As I said earlier, it’s a long way to anywhere, and my trek to the outlying Clarno Unit was a washout. Heavy rain and clay trails discouraged doing anything more than trying to see its outlines from the parking lot.

It’s rather a long way from the park to any lodging or camping. I wound up about 20 miles away at Barnhouse on the Ochoca National Forest. No water, so staying at the small campground is free. And quiet. As I type this, it looks like I’ll have the camp to myself tonight. Last night there were some others here, including a bunch of rather noisy young men who left a huge mess.

I hauled about six bags of trash to the visitor center where Ranger Michelle Ordway and Jan Bolton put me in touch with facility manager Mike Rueben. I took the bags to the maintenance yard, where he set them aside for John Day's law enforcement ranger, Sean Carothers. They plan to go through them and see if they can find anything that might let them find the slobs.

In an interesting side note, I learned that Carothers is actually a Bureau of Land Managment law enforcement ranger who doubles as LE for John Day.

Every day for the last four days, I’ve been under some big dark clouds that dropped prodigious amounts of rain. Raindrops are already tapping on my roof as I type. Flash flooding has been a problem in a few places around here, but that rain also put the dampers on some very large fires. One not far from here went to 30,000 acres.

Extreme drought has Oregon tinder dry and dangerous. One of the fires was right along the monument’s Blue Basin trail. That one, believe it or not, started when a Portapotty for use by firefighters on another fire nearby somehow caught fire on June 29. They’re still investigating. Likely no one else has heard of instances of spontaneous combustion in a Portapotty. At least I haven’t. (Maybe a natural gas explosion? Sorry . . . . . couldn’t resist.)

Heading west toward Prineville, Painted Hills is just a six-mile side trip. Time your visit for morning or evening when light is good for photography. Even though I arrived at about nine in the morning, light had already started to go flat. But it’s still a beautiful sight. Layers of soft clay are painted with red and yellow iron oxides.

Besides animal fossils, these rounded hills also contain many plant remains. Although the handout says you won’t see leaves along the Leaf Hill Trail, I think I did manage to spot some parts, but none that were complete.

There is a very small visitor contact station and delightful picnic area at Painted Hills. The station was closed when I was there. Not far away is a ranger residence that made me nearly green with envy. It looks like Painted Hills may be a one-person operation. I’m guessing that the ranger may do double duty as maintenance worker, too. If whoever lives and works there now ever gets tired of it, I’d love to replace them.

Tomorrow, I’ll head west into the Cascades, but I think I’ll need to plan a return to John Day some day.

With a can of extra gasoline.