The Calvin Klein fossil line

They said there'd be days like this.

I have been very lucky for only being in my second year of fossiling on the Peace River.  When I discovered the amazing honey hole last year, Jack tried to prepare me for the reality of the long haul by pointing out that there were going to be days where I found nothing.  NOTHING.

I cannot accept this.

     This weekend, on my only day to fossil, I found myself digging, and digging, and digging with very little to show for it.  A series of words was running through my mind and it was beginning to sound like a Calvin Klein ad:

     I have an Obsession with looking for fossils.

         Maybe I'm suffering from Delusion, trying so hard.

                                         Any minute now, Euphoria when I finally find that mammoth tooth.    

     As the weekend reports trickled in of other hunters' luck and fabulous finds, I mostly had a feeling of Depression, surely CK's least popular fragrance.  I felt like I did my first weeks on the river as the old guys called out, "Horse tooth! Meg! Gator scute!" and I called out, "Zilch!"  

     Maybe my luck had run out.  Maybe I never had luck, just brute determination.  Or maybe, I was having a normal slow spell and my fossil hobby would be marked by such ebbs and flows during the ensuing years.

     I started trying to photograph my meager finds this morning.

     It was not improving my mood.

     So, by way of a personal attitude adjustment, I poured a year and a half's worth of hemi teeth on a plate for a picture.

     Mike looked up from his coffee, saw the mound of fossilized shark teeth, and said, "Wow!"

     "Wow!" is right.  It's really pretty amazing.  These are the teeth of only one kind of shark.  I have several more jars full of teeth.  And these aren't even the good ones; I keep those in the curio cabinet or in riker boxes.  I remember spending hours at Venice Beach and feeling ecstatic to find a few teeth, so worn you could barely tell they were shark teeth.  

I'm spoiled!

      

How to save a slow day

     We didn't find the rest of that animal.

Pam and I both hoped to find an entire mastodon in the hole we started last week but it was not to be.  

Honestly, we didn't really think we'd find a whole mastodon but we did expect to find some good fossils and that didn't really happen.  Sigh...

     Pam wins the fossil of the week award with the best of the 3 vertebra we found in our hole.

I was jealous, OF COURSE, but very happy for her!

     Other than the big vert, we couldn't seem to pull much else out of the gravel so we distracted ourselves with the scores of paddlers on the river, enjoying Easter weekend.  Normally, the groups pass us by, each and every person asking, "Have you found anything?"  I'm going to be honest; regardless of what I've found, I always say the same thing, "Nothing too exciting but enough to keep us interested; small shark teeth, turtle shell, etc."  It's not a lie but then again, it doesn't encourage the asker to pull their canoe over and start digging right next to me.  This weekend, we were barely even finding that and there were lots of paddlers that wanted to try their hand at fossiling for the first time.

Big tiger shark tooth

     Pam is extremely patient and nice.  I am less so but I'm mostly obsessed with my own digging.  I did assist a Chinese family and the language barrier kept their fossiling lesson on the short side.  All the first time fossilers has so much fun looking through the gravel.  There's something to be said for having a very low bar.  Every rock was an adventure for them.  

     The Chinese family called us over to help them ID their finds.  Pam and I looked into their container of discoveries and I didn't say a word as I was pondering the proper way to handle the situation.  Pam dove right in, ever the kind, gentle, fossil diplomat.

     "This one is a rock, " she said, then, "Rock, rock, rock.  Actually, these are all rocks.  But THIS..." pointing to an almost microscopic shark tooth, "this is a very nice tooth!"  They beamed with excitement.  We added some manatee rib, turtle shell, and mastodon enamel to their collection and sent them on down the river.

Beauty in the details: back of a small turtle scute.

     We finished our digging a little before 2 as we had a long, slow ride back to the boat ramp which was only the midway point for me in an extremely long day: wake up at 4 am, drive for 2.5 hours, kayak for an hour, dig for 5.5 hours, kayak for another hour, drive 2.5 hours home, THEN collect my dogs and drive another 2 hours across the state to see Mike and the boys.  I have an excuse for sleeping until 10 am the next morning!

Not much to show for such a long day.

     I'm sure the saying "It's not the destination, it's the journey" works here, somehow.  Maybe it's enjoying all the interesting things I see when I'm on the river, including the various types of rocks I dig up.

     I can't even guess how the top 2 rock formations are made but they are crazy looking.  I always keep   the small round rocks I find (trying to fill a large jar) and I added 3 to my collection.  The 2 black rocks are pieces of fossilized bone that have been worn round by the action of the river water.

     Luckily it only takes a few good teeth to create some fun jewelry for my Etsy shop, SolOpsArt.

The Morning After

     I am no spring chicken

and continuing to refer to myself as "middle-aged" is starting to sound desperately hopeful 

but I'll keep going to the river as long as I can.  The morning after a day of digging is no picnic; every muscle is sore and either cramped up or falling asleep.  The jury is out on which feels worse.

     This weekend, Pam and I headed out on another prospecting trip, probing the sand for gravel as we move along the river. 

It was bound to happen.

     I had the probe buried in the sand when it slipped out of my hand and my kayak kept going.  Crap!  I hope Mike can bend it back for me.

 We were getting bored with the prospecting so when we found what looked like a popular digging spot, we jumped right in with our shovels.

fossil coral

    I was surprised to immediately start finding good stuff in such a well-dug area.  One of my first loads of gravel yielded this 3" meg:

     It is not perfect but I would call it a 90% meg and it's the largest megalodon tooth I've found so far!

I found some big bones, too.

     Now that's a big vertebra!  I have no idea what animal it might be from so I'll take it to the next club meeting I attend and see what the other members think.

     Another big bone, possible part of a foot bone from a mammoth or mastodon.  An hour of Googling didn't bring me any closer to a definite ID.  I'm calling it "Big Bone".

     I would love to think that an ancient human wore this around their neck but a much more plausible answer is a type of worm that bores holes through a lot of the fossil material we find.  The hole is actually a little too perfect to have been made by a human.

     This is a nice chunk of mastodon tooth with part of the chewing surface on top.

Here's a perfect shell cast that I found:

top

side

     The shell filled with mud which eventually turned to stone and the shell, itself, wore away.

Group photo of the good stuff

My 3" meg is on the right and the broken meg on the left measures 4".

If only it was whole!

     It was a beautiful day on the river and even though we overdid it with the digging, I still had enough energy to try and take some photos.  I don't have the best camera to convey the beauty of the river but you get the idea.

     Unfortunately, the beauty is marred by too  much of this:

     These beverages got to the river in a plastic bag, a cardboard box, or a cooler and it was probably fairly heavy when all the bottles and cans were full.   The cans and bottles are lightweight after the contents are consumed so why are they not loaded back into the bag, box, or cooler, and tossed in a trash can or recycling bin?  It confounds me that, in this day and age, people will still walk away and leave their garbage on the ground.  

     That's my lecture for the day.  Now, back to sleep to try and recover before next weekend!

The parlance of fossiling

     Once again, the distance of 3 miles was mentioned to reach a fossiling location and once again, the actual distance was just over 1 mile.  I'm still learning the language of fossiling, where paddling upstream against a swift current can make 1 mile feel like 3. 

 These are the times when I feel thankful for my trolling motor.  

      I know, I know, it's all about the journey and not the destination, right?

     Still, I want to get where I'm going!

     My journey last Friday was unique in a number of ways.

     I was pulled over by the law for the first time during 2 years of long drives to the Peace River.  

No, I wasn't doing 80 in one of the many 0-mile-per-hour school zones.  My offense was pulling out of the Hess station at 6:45 AM without headlights.  The sheriff's patrol car did such an urgent U-turn to nail me, I started to have a panic attack.  I couldn't imagine what I was doing wrong but I suspect the officer imagined something far more intriguing inside my beat up old Ranger than the reality of a middle-aged woman with no makeup and "morning hair" nervously gripping a cup of coffee.

No ticket.  Just a warning.

     I arrived at the boat ramp, ready for a grueling (read "sloooow") journey upstream so when Pam and I quickly reached the landmark we were looking for, it was with light hearts that we went ahead and completed the 3 mile trip; the worst that could happen is we would have to turn around.
     We found lots of gravel and while we didn't find much in it, I really enjoyed the variety of rocks we were dealing with:  all sizes, styles and colors of rocks, clays and sand which heightened my sense of "any minute now!"

     Slim pickin's still yielded a great fish mouth plate, a meg measuring 2⅞" (and I don't even care that one corner of the root is gone!) and 3 garfish scales, unusual to catch in a screen with ½" mesh.

     The biggest surprise of the day was the cluster that greeted us when we returned to the boat ramp.  There were at least 2 groups of people on fossiling trips and assorted individuals in kayaks and canoes milling around and we all wanted to leave at the same time.  

     In the midst of this chaos was a face familiar to me from FaceBook, Mark Renz, author of the first book I bought about Florida fossils.  I'm probably the only person in my fossil club who hasn't met him but it was still surreal to cross the bridge from laptop to life.  I introduced myself but there was too much commotion for chitchat so I just called out, like the #1 nerd that I am, "I'll continue to follow your adventures on FaceBook!"

Security!

     

     

Club camp-out: Tonz of DRAMA!

Not!

     Just thought it would get more people to read my blog.  :-)  The reality of the fossil club camping trip was a group of really nice people getting together to indulge in a shared passion for fossil hunting.

Day 1

     My fossil-digging buddy, Pam, arranged the weekend for us at the Payne Creek State Park primitive camping area.   I liked the "Youth Camp" sign and there were actually a couple of "youths" in our group.  And what a group of prepared campers!  Everyone was completely set up to be lost in the woods for a month.  

I think it speaks to the success of the backyard chicken movement that everyone had at least a dozen eggs from their own hens.  I calculated a gross of happy hen eggs in the campground.

     I kayaked and dug with Pam and 2 other ladies on Friday but a wet winter has kept the river level frustratingly high and we didn't find much.  I worked an area that yielded tantalizing fragments of megalodon teeth with light brown roots (not the usual black of the Peace River) but I never found a complete tooth.

     A camping caution:  don't be a hero and try to find your toothpaste without turning your headlamp on.  It could go terrible wrong.

Day 2

     Day 2's selfie shows I am still smiling, feeling good after a solid night's sleep to the sound of gentle rain.  The only problem was, the gentle rain was forecast to turn into a monsoon later that afternoon but I shelved my concerns to focus on the river.

     The group went downstream of me for some distance as I was already embedded and I spent the day digging alone which doesn't bother me.  What bothered me was not finding any fossils.  By 1pm the thunder was rolling and clouds blowing in and I was ranting out loud, "Could you people (previous diggers) not have left me one single good fossil?!"  I was mid-curse when I saw this in my screen:

     Not perfect but a pretty darn good meg by my standards, measuring 2.75".  My work for the day was done so I packed it up and headed back to camp where it was starting to rain and get dark from storm clouds.  The ranger showed up to tell us that very bad weather was coming and we could hang out in the visitor center if needed.  

     And so I made the executive decision to leave.

     True to my nature, I have stubbornly been hanging on to one of the oldest 2-man tents in continuous usage.  It's tiny and the UV-ravaged fly is about as waterproof as cheesecloth.  I own an almost brand new 4-man tent and I was suddenly wishing, very badly, that I had it with me.

     I announced to the group that I was packing it in and heading to a hotel for the night and was amazed at the amount of ribbing I got.  I'm thinking they were trying to make themselves feel better about the tornado watch and maybe a little bit jealous.  Either way, I've earned my chops camping in inclement weather so I didn't waste a second waving goodbye.  The storm was horrible and I would have been terrified and miserable so, no regrets!

Day 3

     I started day 3 clean and refreshed and very determined to find something good.  I didn't bring my new GoPro on the trip but, as I made my way down river, I pondered how it would do with slow, plodding activities.  Fossiling is the opposite of, say, snowboarding.  I'll test it out in the near future.

     The group stayed together to dig.  There is plenty of gravel in this area and we found a few little things but for all the work, there wasn't much to show.  The water and wind were both cold and only Pam and me were outfitted in wetsuits.  Spirits were flagging.  We called it a day by 1pm but I admired them for sticking it out that long.  I hate being cold and I wouldn't have made it without my thick neoprene skin.

     

Conclusion

     First, I'd like to apologize for the hole in the butt of my favorite camo shorts.  I didn't realize it until I got home so I'll mend those before I bring them out in public again.

     I found 4 interesting small teeth in addition to the meg.

     The top tooth is either from a manatee or a baby mastadon, both exciting possibilities.  The teeth below it, from left to right, are (probably), small bison, porpoise, and deer.  All 4 are curio cabinet-worthy.

     The rest of the haul was a bit bland as everything was very worn or broken.  

     I'm back home and running around like crazy playing catch up so I probably won't do a 2 night camping trip again.  But I'm still open for the occasional overnight on the river.