Fort Rock Cave and the oldest shoes on Earth

In 1938 an archaeologist digging a small cave in the wall of a wave-cut volcanic ring on the Oregon high desert pulled out dozens of sandals woven from sagebrush bark. Radiocarbon later put them at about 9,300-10,500 years old, making them the oldest directly dated footwear ever found anywhere in the world, and they are flat-out beautiful work: twined, sized, some clearly repaired. The cave sits in Fort Rock itself, a tuff ring blasted up through the bed of a Pleistocene lake, and the lake is why there is a wave-cut notch a hundred feet above a desert that now gets nine inches of rain a year. PUBLIC: Fort Rock State Natural Area is open and free; the CAVE is a separate site with guided tours only, seasonal, booked through the state park.