Steins Pillar

Steins Pillar is a 350-foot natural skyscraper that rises out of the gentle slopes of the Ochoco mountains in central Oregon just east of the town of Prineville. With its overhanging bulbous summit, it towers impressively over the Mill Creek Valley just outside the Mill Creek Wilderness. The farm structures lying at its base provide the onlookers with the correct sense of scale. The pillar is composed of rhyolite ash produced by eruptions from the Cascades that settled in an inland sea and compacted to stone – a natural process that apparently also spawned another impressive pillar in central Oregon, specificallyMonkey Face. What is more directly relevant to climbers is that the rock is not terribly solid. Large swaths of it are in fact are quite chossy. This however does not take away from one’s desire to scale this impressive formation once seen from the overlook point.