Part of the next generation

     I know I will never find a complete mammoth tusk or the full skeleton of a sabertooth cat; those days on the Peace River are over.  Do I wish I was hunting the river back then, at least a couple of decades ago?  Part of me wishes for that, but the other part of me realizes that now I would be a couple of decades older than I already am so I'll stick with what I've got.

     I hear many stories about this first generation of fossilers and it sounds like most of them sold off the bulk of their collections, excuses ranging from making money (of course), trading for other items (a Camaro in one instance), or the simple fact that a mastodon leg bone and skull takes up an enormous amount of space in the house.

     I joined the search after the finds got smaller but are still just as beautiful. I never come home with an empty bucket and it will take decades for these little treasures to jam up my house.

     I helped guide a club field trip early this summer.  I ended up only having 3 people to look out for and they pretty much knew what they were doing so I started poking around and found a pocket of gravel under the mud that everyone else was avoiding, understandably because it's very mucky and slick and not much fun to force through a screen but I figured it was my best bet for finding anything in a well-dug area.  My newbie luck held and I uncovered a little mud hole that kept me busy all day, not petering out until right before it was time to go.  Here's a laundry list of my finds:

sloth tooth

deer tooth

fragment of beaver (?) tooth

6 decent megs

3 makos

dolphin ear bones (2 bullas, 1 periodic)

alligator scute, vertebrae, and teeth

glyptodon scute

pieces of deer antler

big joint bone

big chunk of mammoth tooth as well as little fragments

chunk of mastodon tooth

turtle and ray parts inc the big chunk of shell in the photo above

fragments of horse teeth

dozens of shark teeth inc. great hemis and tigers

The Zookeeper powers on! (Albeit, more like a petting zoo with small, common animals)

     Right now the most beautiful photo of all is this:

     I've gone back to checking the river gage every day and this graph shows that it is almost at a manageable depth for me.  Last season I learned to extrapolate the depth shown at this one spot to the areas where I would normally dig but for the most part, when it's down, it's down.  I finished out last season digging in this deeper water but it was even more exhausting than usual, harder to find much, and I ended up losing my prescription sunglasses, although I was surprised it took me that long as I had a bad habit of pushing them up on my head and forgetting about them.

     It will be a while before I can afford new sunglasses but I do have a new battery for the trolling motor and I finally got a little thermos for a good price so I don't have to be jealous anymore while I watch Jack sip steaming hot coffee from his kayak.

     I've been working out and realize I can't slack off on that.  I got lazy last season and was completely shot by June; if I'm not bounding out of bed on fossil day, something's wrong.

     I'm already dreaming of all the amazing little things I will uncover in my second season on the Peace River...