Fort Rock

The board's earliest date, thirteen thousand years, is the one archaeologists could not stand behind. It came from a hearth that Stephen Bedwell, Luther Cressman's graduate student, found in Ice Age gravels inside Fort Rock Cave in 1966, and when he published it in 1970 most researchers dismissed it as too old. A team went back into the cave in 2015 and 2016 to test the claim and found evidence of people there by about 10,500 years ago, but nothing earlier. The older evidence for this country is real; it lies some fifty miles southeast, in the Paisley Caves.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Rock — 5.7 mi
  A ring of volcanic rock standing alone on a dry lakebed, born when rising magma hit water and later carved by the waves of a lake that surrounded it as an island.
• Big Obsidian Flow — 24 mi
  Oregon's youngest lava flow, a square mile of black volcanic glass and gray pumice that poured out inside Newberry's caldera about 1,300 years ago.