That title is just an excuse to post a photo of my old lady dachshund, Schotzie.
My 2 dachshunds are used to riding in the car and see it as another opportunity to do what they are best at: sleeping. That's a good thing because every so often, I have to drive them an hour or 2 down the interstate to hand them off to Mike so that I can follow my fossil passion with abandon. Thank you, Mike!
This was my second Thanksgiving weekend in the Peace River and that's also a good thing. Just when stuffing my face with delicious food and watching football starts to get boring, I change it up for something COMPLETELY different: standing in a river digging through gravel with a shovel for hours. Rock on!
I'm calling the above photo "When in Rome". Fossil Steve likes to do things a certain way and since we were digging in a spot he started, I had to do it his way. He builds a stand out of PVC pipe that can be broken down to facilitate moving it in his canoe. Then he builds a large screen using 1/4" hardware mesh that sits on top of the stand. This set-up is placed on the edge of the river in an area that doesn't have any diggable gravel, thus becoming the dump zone. He takes 5 gallon buckets that he has laboriously drilled full of holes (I know it's laborious coz I made one for myself...never again!), fills them with gravel, then pours them out on his screen in the dump zone to sort for fossils.
I'm easily frustrated (hence our arguments over 1/4" screen vs 1/2" screen) and I hate wasting time putting the stands together so I went out to my shed the day before Thanksgiving and using scraps, built a short stand with 12" legs and a lean profile: it fits inside the large screen Steve gave me last season. It doesn't need putting together or taking apart and I don't mind sitting in the water to sort the gravel. Initially it feels a little wobbly in the muck near the banks but a few buckets of discarded gravel quickly create a more solid base.
Every time I pour a bucket of gravel onto my screen, I expect to see a gold nugget right on top.
Not gonna happen!
That's ok, I'll take a perfect meg or bison tooth or any number of others possibilities.
It wasn't a stellar day but there were items of interest. Clockwise from upper left: giant armadillo scute, shell casts, vertebra, turtle scutes, foot pads, and spurs, mammoth/mastodon scraps, deer antler, etc. and in the middle, 3 worn glytodon scutes, camel TOOTH, and a broken bison tooth.
I found 2 chunks of crystalized oyster shell that I am determined to learn how to cut and polish. Someday.
The best find of the day for me was a very big hemi tooth. There is some root damage but the serrations on the blade are pristine and look at the size! Almost 2"!
Fine...almost 1 and 3/4 inches but I'm telling the story MY way.
And just in case you're wondering about the towing capacity of a 30lb thrust trolling motor from WalMart, I added Steve and his canoe to the lineup. Steering was more involved and I could never have done this going upstream but it sure made a nice return trip for everyone after digging all day.
Fingers crossed! I hope to find the 55lb thrust trolling motor from WalMart under my Christmas tree in the same spot where I found the 30lb thrust trolling motor last year!
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