HUNTING FOR ANIMALS OF PAST AGES 23 



supplies and fossils, and the others for sleeping 

 quarters. I did not care for a tent, so slept out 

 under an overhanging rock by the north canon 

 wall. We were perhaps sixty miles south of 

 the Columbia River and about fifty miles south- 

 west of Mount Hood. 



The Fire Mountains, as the Indians called 

 volcanoes, had long, long ago covered the region 

 with thousands of feet of ashes and lava. 

 Mount Hood, Mount Mazama the wrecked 

 remnant of which now is Crater Lake Mount 

 Shasta, and other volcanoes with ash showers re- 

 peated at long intervals, covered thousands of 

 square miles deeply. For ages, between these 

 showers, trees grew in the ashen region, and 

 thousands of prehistoric animals roamed over it. 

 Then these showers, or the wind, buried both 

 trees and animals, and their skeletons were 

 changed to fossils. The layers of ashes, due to 

 their own weight and natural cement, were 

 changed into stone; and water and the chemicals 

 in the ashes changed the bones also into a kind 

 of stone into fossils. Where not crushed or 

 broken these bones, though stone, still look much 

 like old bones. 



These geologic changes took place two million 

 or more years ago. More recently the entire 

 region was capped with a lava flow more than a 

 thousand feet thick. This is one of the largest 



