The Ochocos were forged by fire.

I’m clacking around on a sidehill jumble of boot-sized rocks leading up to a couple of pinnacles that poke out above the conifer canopy deep inside the Mill Creek Wilderness. From what I’ve read, I must be standing very close to a ”volcanic throat,” a mile below the original summit. All that’s left of the volcano are these Twin Pillars looming above.

Underfoot are crumbling andesite and ”vent agglomerate” that spewed from the volcano’s maw some 40 million years ago.

Forty million years.

I’ve just startled (and been startled by) a small fawnlike creature that looked enough unfawnlike to count as a mystery sighting. Elk? Sheep? Eohippus? Running each through my mental templates, I’m coming up empty.

Three seconds of blur as the animal bolts downhill in front of me reminds me of that footage of Bigfoot lumbering off into the tules. But why would anyone dress up as a small hoofed animal?

According to ”Hiking Oregon’s Geology” by Ellen Morris Bishop and Joan Eliot Allen, I’m scrambling upward on rock fragments and cemented ash that are part of Central Oregon’s John Day formation.

Forty million years ago, this place, which was to become the Ochoco National Forest, lolled in a subtropical torpor. It was the Eocene era. Palm trees shaded slithering prehistoric crocodiles and galloping little horselike creatures called eohippus or dawn horse.

Vulcan was active upon the land.

Getting to this place of explosive ancient upheaval, I hiked through a fire zone of more recent origin. Several summers ago, the Hash Rock Fire raged across 19,000 acres, most of them inside the Mill Creek Wilderness.

The Twin Pillars Trail begins on the northern boundary of the wilderness and snakes through areas of charbroiled devastation interspersed with large swaths of pine and fir forest that escaped most of the fire’s ravening fury.

Despite all the black, hiking the Twin Pillars Trail is far from depressing. Everywhere are signs of nature’s resilience and unquenchable fortitude. Grasses are making a comeback (as are noxious weeds), wildflowers pour forth from the ash, woodpeckers drum, chipmunks dive for cover beneath the fallen snags. Fire – every bit as natural as lizards and lupine and big mule deer bucks – has scarred the land here but hasn’t snuffed the life from it.

As debate flares about forest thinning, controlled burning, old growth, second growth and no growth, life goes on.

About two miles up the trail, I crest a ridge and wound back down the other side. The biggest pillar, which rises about 200 feet from the hillside, doesn’t pop into view through the trees until I’m within spitting distance.

I climb onto a little saddle with a commanding view (but still well below the top of the sheer pillars) and rest a few minutes, scanning the wilderness below where I’d seen the unfawn.

Forty million years.

The eohippus is gone, but the rocks remain.