Central Oregon

East of the Cascades the rain stops. The Deschutes runs north through basalt canyons to the Columbia, and the Wasco and Warm Springs bands who fished it and the big river signed a treaty in June 1855 that gave up some ten million acres and kept a reservation of about 640,000 between the Deschutes and the crest of the Cascades. In 1879 thirty-eight Northern Paiute released from army custody after the Bannock War were sent there, the first of the Paiute families who joined them, and in 1937 the three peoples organized as the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. In 1980 they bought back the old fishing place at Sherars Falls on the Deschutes.

Bend became a mill town in 1916, when two of the largest pine sawmills in the West opened on opposite banks of the river, and the ground south of it is young — cinder cones, raw lava and the obsidian of Newberry Volcano, a national volcanic monument since 1990. North, at Smith Rock, the Crooked River bends below cliffs of welded volcanic tuff, and in the early 1980s a young climber from Madras named Alan Watts began bolting the blank faces between the cracks. The routes he put up there are generally counted as the start of American sport climbing.

East over the Ochocos, the John Day country holds a fossil record running some forty million years, spread across the three units of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument: the red and gold bands of the Painted Hills, the palisades at Clarno, the blue-green rock at Sheep Rock. In the town of John Day, two Chinese immigrants, Ing Hay and Lung On, ran a store, clinic and meeting place out of a stone building called Kam Wah Chung for half a century. It sat locked and untouched for decades after they were gone, and opens now as a state heritage site with Doc Hay's herbs still on the shelves.

What to See in Central Oregon

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

Big Obsidian Flow

La Pine

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.

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Painted Hills

Mitchell

Hills banded red, gold and tan that are not painted rock at all but ancient soils, formed on volcanic ash over millions of years as the climate changed.

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Smith Rock State Park

Terrebonne

Ridges of welded tuff from what geologists call Oregon's greatest eruption, cut by the Crooked River into orange walls and a 350-foot spire called Monkey Face.

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Historic Sites

Kam Wah Chung

John Day

A stone store in John Day where a Chinese herbalist practiced for sixty years and died leaving $23,000 in patients' checks he had never cashed.

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Towns & Gateways

The Museum at Warm Springs

Warm Springs

Oregon's first tribal museum, built because the three tribes of Warm Springs watched their families' heirlooms leaving the reservation and decided to buy them back.

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Stories from Central Oregon

Central Oregon rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.