You wouldn’t think much of them, not at first glance. The hills outside Foss are low and quiet, rust-colored humps under an open sky. They rise gently from the plains like the backs of sleeping bison, blending so easily into the landscape that you'd be forgiven for driving past without a second look. But that would be a mistake. These hills are far older than they seem—more ancient than the plains they sit upon, older even than the dinosaurs that once roamed their slopes. Their dusty red hides, worn by wind and rain, tell a story 280 million years in the making.
The Red Beds of western Oklahoma are a geologic time capsule from the Permian Period. Back then, before birds or flowers or mammals, this region lay near the equator—part of a vast inland basin in the heart of the supercontinent Pangaea. Shallow seas came and went, evaporating in the sun and leaving behind layers of salt and gypsum. The land swelled with river deltas, mudflats, and brackish marshes. Iron minerals oxidized in the tropical heat, staining the sediments red. And over millennia, those sediments hardened into rock.
Geologists call this particular set of formations the "El Reno Group," named after another Oklahoma town to the east. It includes the Cloud Chief Formation, which underlies much of the Foss area. These beds are composed of mudstone and shale, soft to the touch and easily eroded, which is why the hills are so rounded—like time has been using sandpaper.
The name "Red Beds" is more than poetic; it marks a major chapter in Earth's climatic history. The Permian was a time of drying continents and shifting ecosystems, a slow turn toward extinction. The red rocks capture a world in transition—where amphibians still lingered, but reptiles were rising. Trace fossils have been found in nearby outcrops, hinting at ancient creatures that left clawed footprints in soft mud that later fossilized. If you're lucky, and the light is just right, you can still see their paths.
Foss itself is a small town now, mostly bypassed by the interstate, a few grain elevators and gas stations anchoring it to the present. But beneath its soil lies a prehistoric memory. That’s what draws me in—not the size or grandeur of these hills, but their silence, their stillness, their patient endurance. You can stand at the edge of a wash and hold a chunk of red clay that once belonged to a lost continent. It feels like crumbling history in your hands.
What I love most about places like this is how they resist our hunger for spectacle. The Grand Canyon shouts. The Red Beds whisper. They ask you to slow down, to bend close, to listen. And if you do, they tell you that the land we walk is older than our names for it—that every hill is the memory of an ocean, and every stone, the afterlife of mud.