We had a wonderful Rosh Hashanah and Shabbos with the Portland community. It was great to see all of our friends from the “old neighborhood” again!
Today we’re hanging out at the synagogue for the Fast of Gedaliah. We are planning to head out tomorrow morning, but we’ll be returning for Yom Kippur through Simchas Torah.
The RV is settled in the synagogue parking lot, and I’m finishing off updating this blog as Trish cooks up a storm for the upcoming three day holiday. The next blog post will be posted this coming Sunday.
A sweet and happy new year to all!
Today we visited the Sheep Rock unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument:
The visitor center, built in the last 15 years, is so much better than the old facility and does a great job of explaining the rich fossil record found here:
Since I used worked at Hancock Field Station in the Clarno Unit of the Monument (we also spent a weekend there on this trip), I was especially interested to see the portion of the visitor center that dealt with the Hancock Mammal Quarry:
Research continues on-site:
The kids received their Junior Ranger badges:
We continued on to visit the Painted Hills unit of the Monument. There’s no visitor center here, just great views of the multi-colored hills:
Continuing on, we drove over Mount Hood to arrive in Portland where we will be for the next three weeks for Rosh Hashanah through Simchas Torah. See the trip map for driving details.
Today we visited Hageman, Idaho to visit the visitor center for Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument. The Monument includes a portion of the Oregon Trail, so the visitor center had an Oregon Trail dress-up station:
Hagerman Fossil Beds are of the Pliocene Epoch, so they’re quite recent, relatively speaking:
The visitor center also houses an interim exhibit for Minidoka NHS. Like Manzanar and Heart Mountain, both of which we’ve visited (here and here), Minidoka is one of ten sites in the US where nearly 11,000 Americans were imprisoned during World War II for being of Japanese descent:
The kids completed workbooks and received Junior Ranger badges for Hagerman Fossil Beds NM and Minidoka NHS:
Continuing North and West, we are overnighting at a gas station in John Day, Oregon. See the trip map for driving details.
Today we reluctantly left our amazing Shabbos camping location at Magic Reservoir and drove North and East to Craters of the Moon National Monument. The monument preserves a number of lava flows, the youngest of which are about 2,000 years old. We first visited the spatter cones:
Looking down into the spatter cone:
The terrain is other-worldly, and was used for lunar surface training for the Apollo astronauts:
We hiked up to view a couple larger cinder cones:
Pumice is highly aerated, so it’s much lighter than you might expect. Some pumice even floats!
Looking into another spatter cone:
Next we drove out to the trailhead for a lava cave:
We explored a short section. The kids are off to the left exploring a tight little side passage:
In the visitor center parking lot, Trish befriended our neighbor:
The kids completed their Junior Ranger books and received their patches:
While Trish made a late lunch, I took the kids to another trailhead for a short hike:
It’s easy to imagine the lava flowing across the land:
Eventually, wind-borne soils settle into crevasses and plants begin to grow:
This 3” long praying mantis blended right in:
After leaving the monument, we drove South and West to overnight at a truck stop in Bliss, Idaho. See the trip map for driving details.
Update: The kids produced a podcast for today’s adventure:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Facebook
Instagram
Email