(wind howling) - [Jule] Oregon has one of the most varied landscapes anywhere.

There are mountains, deserts, (wind howling) gentle valleys, and miles and miles of coastline.

But it wasn't always like this.

- So, here we are at Baker County, Oregon, the Elkhorn Mountains, and importantly, the place where Oregon began.

The rest was the ocean, Idaho was the beach.

You could have been right there with sand and plesiosaurs jumping out of the water, and there was no west coast other than Idaho.

- [Jule] When it comes to Oregon's ancient beginnings, Ellen Morris Bishop is one of the best time travelers around.

(camera shuttering) So, we asked her to show us where these early origins have been uncovered and what they reveal.

- [Jule] So, tell me how the Elkhorn fit into this.

- The Elkhorn Mountains are all part of a set of volcanic islands and arcs, and they crashed into North America and become the first inkling of Oregon that we have.

- [Jule] A couple hundred million years ago, North America looked at nothing like it does today, but there was about to be a tectonic shift.

Arcs of volcanic islands riding the edge of the ancestral Pacific plate traveled north, slowly sideswiping and adding land, known as terranes, onto the North American plate.

Some of these terrains got wedged behind a peninsula on that continental plate.

This ancient mashup, including the Wallowa Terrane, makes up much of the current landscape of Northeastern Oregon.

(birds chirping) - And today, we can see the different chunks of island arcs in the Wallowa Mountains, in Hells Canyon, and then we'll see what happens to them when they end up smashing into a continent.

- [Jule] Perfect.

Let's go.

- Yeah.

All right.

(gentle music) - [Jule] Ellen always had an interest in geology, but coming to Oregon State for grad school ignited a passion that has never gone away.

- And this is 1974, I think.

Plate tectonics is beginning to become really a thing, and the idea of islands and land masses that smashed into one another.

And, you know, the grand game of global bumper cars was something that was, you know, really pretty interesting, exciting to me, - [Jule] Drawing on a lifelong love of photography, Ellen also leads photo geology tours, like this one to Leslie Gulch in 2011.

- What you're looking at here is final squeezing of the volcano.

(camera shuttering) Rocks don't usually run away from you when you're trying to take pictures of them, (camera shuttering) but they have a superb story to tell if you sit down and listen to them.

I can just take out a camera and spend some time worrying about angles and light.

And I think to combine the creative thought of art and creative thought of science is a very cool thing.

- [Jule] Today, she's the author of several books, including the seminal "In Search of Ancient Oregon" which won the Oregon Book Award for nonfiction in 2004.

Traveling east gives us our first glimpse of the ancestral island arc that became the Wallowa Mountains.

So, those are the Wallowas?

- [Ellen] Right.

They represent the Wallowa Terrane and they extend all the way into Idaho.

(car whooshing) - [Jule] Our next stop is Hells Canyon, where this ancient Oregon road trip takes us into Idaho.

- So, we're going to go up here and look at a greenstone.

(rock shattering) Got it.

Looking at this rock, you can see it's still kind of green, but it has little white crystals in it, and that's a mineral called plagioclase, and it tells us that this came from an island arc, or at least from the same kind of geologic process.

So, for a 280 million year old rock, this tells quite a story.

(rocks crashing) - [Jule] A little farther down the canyon.

- Okay.

Oh, there they are.

Those are the holes I was looking for.

- [Jule] We find clues about where these rocks came from.

Oh, I see them.

- Yeah.

They're not very deep.

- [Jule] Those are natural.

- No, they're not natural.

They were made by a person with a drill.

(Jule and Ellen Laughing) These are holes that are drilled to figure out where these rocks came from, and they do that by looking at the magnetic field in these rocks.

- [Jule] Without getting too technical, our relationship to the earth's magnetic field varies according to where we are on the planet.

When these rocks were forming a couple hundred million years ago, magnetite grains, like tiny compasses, aligned with that magnetic field as they sank to the ocean floor, preserving their location information forever.

- The orientation of the magnetite grains, tell us the latitude that it came from.

So, it came from probably 25 degrees north, and that's about where Central Mexico is today.

- Wow.

So, this came from the latitude.

- [Ellen] This came from the latitude of Mexico.

This is not a true Mexican rock.

(Ellen laughing) - Okay.

Okay.

- [Ellen] Mexico wasn't there at the time.

- Right, right, right.

Okay.

It was just moved along up the coast.

- Just moved along.

It's like a very, very inept tractor trailer driver.

(Jule laughing) You know, just sort of scraping along the side of the freeway, leaving little pieces of their truck behind.

(camera shuttering) (wind gushing) - [Jule] Our next stop takes us deeper into Hells Canyon to see some more rocks.

But these particular rocks tell us not so much where or how they formed 230 million years ago, but what the climate was like and who was around then.

- Okay, so, so this is a Triassic limestone, and these rocks were deposited during a time when the dinosaurs were just appearing, cute little things that would've been running around, about the size of chickens.

And it's important because limestones only form in warm waters.

And so you get all these little dimply textures in them.

They're like little pimples.

And there are a few fossils, mostly little shellfish.

But what interests me about this particular outcrop, there's some really interesting textures over here, but I think what they are is kind of like miniature stalactites or stalagmites.

So, this is kind of like caving without having to be in a cave.

(air whooshing) - [Jule] The road deeper into Idaho takes us closer to the big impact zone where the Wallowa Terrane crashed into the North American plate, and the front end of that careening tractor trailer.

(rocks crashing) - Uh-huh, yeah, that's a greenstone, all right.

We're finding the same kind of greenstones that we saw in Hells Canyon.

And as you can see, they're a little more deformed.

They have some joints developed, and that comes from being under more stress.

But these rocks here weren't heated all that much.

And so consequently, instead of sort of melting and bending and folding, they just fractured.

(motorcycle whooshing) So, this tells the geologist that we're getting closer to something that had a lot of force behind it.

(wind whooshing) - [Jule] As we get closer to that continental crash zone, the local rock starts to show the effects of rising temperatures and pressures.

- These rocks are highly squashed outcrop of greenstones.

- So, this is kind of getting closer to the front bumper of that tractor trailer.

- [Ellen] Yeah.

It's really more like we're sitting in the cab.

- Oh, okay.

(rock thudding) (car whooshing) - [Ellen] We look at how shiny these rocks are.

- [Jule] Oh, I can see 'em glittering.

- So, these micas are a diagnostic clue that this is a high pressure, high temperature rock, where one thing smashed into another.

(water gushing) - [Jule] Traveling at the Salmon River Canyon takes us right into the zone where the two land masses sutured together.

Here, the heat and pressures rise to the point of creating actual gemstones.

- These are garnets, the red rocks in here.

And this one is a good example.

So, see, it has a little spiral arm coming off here and another spiral arm coming up off here.

- [Jule] Yeah.

- So, those are called rotated garnet, and they show how the whole fabric of the rock has been twisted.

So, there's been a lot of uplift involved here.

Really hot, a lot of pressure as this was forming.

So, we are basically in the heart of the suture zone right now.

- [Jule] While it's hard to top twisted gemstones, our last stop in this ancient mashup of heat and pressure does not disappoint.

Wow!

- This is sort of the ultimate in what we've been looking for.

Here, as all of this suturing is happening, it's also doing its sideswiping motion.

- [Jule] The rocks here melted, allowing them to bend and fold and stretch into remarkable shapes.

- [Ellen] Kind of like having chocolate taffy, vanilla taffy, and strawberry taffy, kind of mush them up and down and back and forth.

There's just been a lot of compression.

- [Jule] So, right at the crushed bumper here.

- This is the crushed bumper, yes, so that's what happens when a series of islands runs into a continent.

We literally suture it with granites.

- [Jule] Wow!

Okay.

Well, I guess that about sews it up.

Suture zone, get it?

A little suture humor.

(Jule and Ellen laughing) Very good.

Great people just doing their thing in their own northwesty way.

We love bringing you stories like this.

Support what you love.

Opb.org/video.

(no audio) (no audio)