#Wild life park oregon series

Emigrant nonindigenous settlers began to occupy the area in the late 1800s. The Northern Paiutes referred to the environs of Smith Rock as the Animal Village, a reference to the abundance and variety of plants and animals in the area. Smith Rock is the traditional homeland of several Native American groups, including the Tenino (Warm Springs) and Northern Paiute people. The Crooked River caldera also contributed a significant amount of volcanic material to the Turtle Cove Member of the John Day Formation, which hosts one of the world’s most complete and well-preserved fossil records of Cenozoic terrestrial plants and animals.

Some geologists have proposed that the Crooked River caldera records some of the oldest caldera-forming eruptions related to the passage of the Yellowstone volcanic hotspot from the coast of the Pacific Northwest to the modern Yellowstone caldera in Wyoming during the past 50 million years. Both older and younger rocks at Smith Rock State Park have been deeply eroded, sculpted, and incised by the modern-day Crooked River. All of these volcanic features are now well exposed in the rock walls of Smith Rock State Park.Īpproximately 400,000 years ago, more recent lava flows erupted from Newberry Volcano, twenty-five miles south of present-day Bend, and flowed north, largely covering the caldera-filling tuff and diverting the Crooked River up against Smith Rock. Eruptions from the Crooked River caldera deposited massive volumes (>140 cubic miles) of tuff and rhyolitic lavas, dikes, and domes.

#Wild life park oregon series

This landscape of rock spires, cliffs, and canyonlands lies along the northern edge of the Crooked River caldera, a 26-mile long, 17-mile wide volcanic depression formed through a series of super-volcanic eruptions between 29.7 and 27.5 million years ago. Smith Rock State Park encompasses 652 acres near Redmond and Terrebonne, in the semi-arid High Desert of central Oregon.