In June of 2024, the Oregon Field Guide team was following geologist Ellen Morris Bishop through the rugged landscape of far-eastern Oregon when we decided to stop in Hells Canyon for a formal interview. Cinematographer Brandon Swanson had just started the camera on an epic interview setting when something caught my eye.

“Do you have something on your hand?” I asked Bishop.

Most of us react when a bee is in our immediate vicinity, and almost everyone reacts when one lands on their hand. But not Ellen Morris Bishop.

“I do. Hi there!” Bishop said calmly, lifting her hand closer to her face to get a better look at the bee crawling across her knuckles. “It’s harmless.”

Bishop’s low-key, inquisitive approach to things that make the rest of us squirm helps make her a wonderful interpreter of subjects as complicated and abstruse as geology.

During her long career, Bishop has been a geologist, journalist, teacher, rancher and photographer, and is perhaps best known as the author of “In Search of Ancient Oregon: A Geological and Natural History.”

The groundbreaking 2004 book is a survey of the forces that brought what we now know as Oregon up from the depths of a primordial Pacific Ocean. The readable, general audience book won the Oregon Book Award for best nonfiction that year. But it happened almost by accident.

A curious audience

“I was in Portland one evening,” Bishop recalled. “And I was walking past the Schnitz and on the marquee it said, ‘John McPhee tonight,’ and I was a big fan of reading John McPhee’s ‘Basin and Range' and his other books about geology. So, I managed to get one of the last seats in the nosebleed section.”

The fact that McPhee had filled the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for a talk about a book on the grindingly slow processes that formed the landscape of North America blew her mind.

“This is like a whole sold-out thing!” she marveled.

Bishop realized there was a big audience that was as curious about the world around them as she was but likely had no geology background. That insight spurred her to write “In Search of Ancient Oregon.”

The book, as well as our “Oregon Field Guide” tour through the landscape, traces the story of how the land mass we now call Oregon was underwater until fairly recently in geologic terms.

Some 280 million years ago, a chain of volcanoes formed along the subduction zone at the edge of the Pacific tectonic plate. These island arcs rode along as the Pacific plate migrated north and eastward from their original latitude of modern-day central Mexico.

The islands eventually collided with the North American plate about 130 million years ago. As they were pushed up against the vast new continent, some of Oregon’s first dry land took shape in what is now the northeastern corner of the state.

That a subject as esoteric as plate tectonics became a popular science hit was due in part to Bishop’s evocative and beautiful photography.

A confluence of interests

“My parents are both artists,” Bishop explained. Growing up in rural Connecticut, the New York couple’s precocious only child was given free range and learned to feel at home in the wild.

“We would go for walks in the woods and my parents were always pointing out the colors and the patterns and the different varieties of rocks. And so I got interested from an aesthetic point of view.”

Bishop developed a rich understanding of composition, color and balance, which she combined with her instinctive fascination with all things mechanical and love of the natural world.

“To combine the creative thought of art and creative thought of science is a very cool thing,” she said.

But not everyone saw things that way, or thought that girls could make good scientists in the 1960s.

“In sixth grade, I was pestering the local earth science teacher, Mr. Pascarella, to let me into his ninth-grade earth science class and he, of course, wouldn’t do that,” Bishop recalled. Undaunted, she signed up for a college correspondence course in geology from the University of Arizona and was immediately hooked.

In college, Bishop found herself as one of only two women majoring in geology.

“It was a different row to hoe,” Bishop remembered, but characterized her male classmates as “welcoming.”

“We went off on field trips and had a great time. And there would be a much shorter line at the women’s restroom.”

Bishop went on to earn a Ph.D. in geology from Oregon State University. Along with teaching gigs at local colleges and managing Eastern Oregon ranches with her late husband David Bishop, she found herself in the perfect spot for a lifelong exploration of the region’s diverse and complex landscape.

“It’s a science, and we’re always finding out new things in science,” Bishop explained.

Bishop reveals these ideas in photos of wide landscapes as well as macro examinations of rocks, both of which hold clues to Oregon’s earliest origins.

On our tour, Bishop hauled a sledgehammer up a hillside just on the Idaho side of the Snake River and whacked off a hunk of green-gray rock. Inside, she showed us evidence of the geologic process by which Oregon first appeared.

“This is greenstone, and it has little white crystals in it and that’s a mineral called plagioclase,” Bishop explained. “The composition tells us that this came from an island arc, or at least from the same kind of subduction zone process.”

That an ordinary-looking rock can reveal a 280-million-year-old story was no surprise to Bishop.

“They have a superb story to tell if you listen to them with a great deal of patience and fortitude,” Bishop said.

Those characteristics appeared to still be in active use a good two minutes after the bee landed on Bishop’s hand.

“It’s a sweat bee,” she concluded after watching the bee work its way across her palm.

“It’s actually in the wasp family and just having a wonderful time. I’ll have a really clean hand when I get home.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/05/04/ellen-morris-bishop-geologist-oregon-ancient-history/