Glass Buttes: Oregon's Obsidian Hills

Rising from the high desert between Bend and Burns, the Glass Buttes have drawn people for thousands of years, long before US Twenty cut through this empty stretch of central Oregon. The buttes are volcanic, and their slopes are covered in obsidian, the volcanic glass that ancient peoples prized above almost any other raw material for making cutting tools.

Native trade networks carried Glass Buttes obsidian across much of the Pacific Northwest, and archaeologists have traced it hundreds of miles from its source. Today the Bureau of Land Management administers the site and allows visitors to collect reasonable amounts of obsidian for personal use, one of the few places in the country where that is permitted. On a clear day the black glass glitters visibly on the hillsides.