Saturday, July 29, 2017

Our half mile tour of Hell Creek

Just a short entry
to cover the half day spent in the Hell Creek area of north east Montana.
I will backtrack in my next post because our baculite hunt requires lots of photos of excellent finds.
The most interesting thing about this area was that we pulled of the 2-lane highway, parked the truck, and then spent the whole day within sight of the vehicle.  It seemed that behind every hill was a completely unique set of rocks.
The concretion above was perched on a pedestal of hardened sand.  
Don tried digging into the "dunes" and said they are somewhat hollow inside but he didn't have a flashlight so that's as much info as I got.
Meanwhile, I was poking around
collecting pieces of selenite, shards of petrified wood, and sparkly rocks of all sorts.
I found one isolated rock that was composed entirely
 of large leaf fossils.
There wasn't another rock like it within our half mile range.
Pam found a hill that had a swath of interesting pumice and lava rock.

The close proximity to the truck meant
that I was never more than a few minutes away
from a dry bologna sandwich and a warm can of Squirt.

This marked the turning point of our trip.
It was time to begin the long journey back to the Denver airport,
and since we were worn out, we decided to drive straight through
 without stopping at any more fossil sites.
I had one last excellent find behind the Glascow, MT Shopko.
They were switching brands of seed and throwing away all the packets of NK seeds they had in stock.  Pam and I grabbed as many relevant packets as possible.  I still regret not loading them all in the truck and bringing them home to share.  What a waste!

We spend one night in a very primitive old school RV park.
While I appreciated the cool, old-school signage, I did not appreciate the very old-school showers.  
I chose to stay stinky until we got to our next KOA which was probably the nicest one of the whole trip.
Clean showers AND ice cream?
Love.

Along the way, we stopped at the
T-Rex Natural History Museum and rock shop
in Ranchester, Wyoming.
This is a very small shop with a tiny museum side featuring casts of t-rex and triceratops parts.  The owner, Mike Dawson, charges $2 for a presentation and it was great!  He didn't talk too much which is crucial for holding my attention, and he really knew his topic.  If you're ever in the area, pop in and check it out. 

The end of the road
is apparently inhabited by rattlesnakes but we didn't see any on this journey.

Next week: more baculites than you can shake a stick at!








Friday, July 21, 2017

Tea roses and ticks

I've heard it said that to enjoy this hobby
you've gotta get out of your comfort zone.
Never have truer words been spoken.
In addition to the high winds and blowing dust on my trip to Wyoming and Montana, AND a lack of regular baths, we had to contend with a layer of low, vicious cactus that seems to be ubiquitous to both states.
The dried thorns cover the ground so even in an area that looks safe to sit and hammer on rocks, you're likely to get a painful surprise.  My prized rockhounding pants do not repel cactus thorns so I resorted to layering a large pair of jeans shorts for added protection.
Yeah, I know: pretty!
The jeans shorts did help reduce my "cactus rash" and if that wasn't a "thing" before, it is now.

And there's no WalMarts!
Love them or hate them, WalMarts are dang handy and when you get into an area of the country where they don't exist, you miss them, regardless of your feelings.  
I had to visit 6 stores in tiny Glascow, Montana before I found one that had bubble wrap. 
 BUBBLE WRAP!!!  
I wasn't looking for replacement parts for a 1998 Apple computer.  I was looking for bubble wrap. 

The drive across Montana was difficult with roads so bumpy and swayed,
I felt like I was in a small boat on 2-4' seas.  
I found a decent beer in a gas station in a town so small that only the main road was paved but I was afraid to drink it while I sat in the back seat for fear I'd chip my teeth.
They also had a 6 pack of lime flavored spiked seltzer that I bought because I didn't know when I'd see interesting liquor again, but the taste made me think of a urinal cake dissolved in club soda so I had to take a loss on that one.
The other offerings in that gas station were indicative of the main type of traffic passing through this remote area.

Near Billings, MT, Pam and I took a quick side trip
hoping to find fossilized fish scales in the Mowry shale formation (more info at the end of this post).
The GPS coordinates from our rockhounding book weren't as useful as we would have liked but we could feel we were in the right area: the middle of a field with a creek visible in the distance with rocky sides.  
Now...to get to that creek.
I looked at this muddy mess and said, "This is what 4WD is made for," and gunned it.
Success!
I got the truck as close to the creek as possible and then we hiked the rest of the way with our backpacks and rock hammers.  The field was pretty, with wildflowers including little wild roses and I came across a meadowlark nest,
but, as you can see at the top of this photo, there was poison ivy EVERYWHERE.
We settled on a rock bank and started hammering, but there was no way to get to the rocks without pushing poison ivy out of the way.
And then there were the ticks.
Lots and lots of ticks.
(I know you're freaking out right now)
Luckily we were camping at a KOA that night so we took all of our tick infested, poison ivy dosed clothing and gear and dumped it right into a hot washing machine and then de-ticked ourselves in hot showers.  Remember what I said about your comfort zone...
It all resulted in a successful fossil hunt.
We each found several nice fish scales with great detail and opalescence,
and a couple of small, compressed ammonites.
Check another goal off the list!
Then we continued our journey north, towards the Canadian border...


Mowry shale info from archives.datapages.com
Isolated, lens-shaped accumulations of fi sh bones, scales, teeth, and coprolites in a sandy matrix occur along a few bedding planes within the Cretaceous Mowry Shale. These accumulations have previously been interpreted to be large coprolites or regurgitate material, but are actually storm lag deposits in a sediment-starved basin. Accumulations (lenses) vary in size: the largest measured is 15 × 10 cm in plan view and 2 cm thick. Matrix in these lenses consist of fi ne-grained, well-rounded quartz grains that are absent in the surrounding shale layers. The disarticulated fossil material is the size of coarse sand, with some bone fragments and fi sh scales over 1 cm. The material is compacted, but poorly cemented. Jaw fragments, teeth, and vertebrae found within the lenses are mostly from teleost fi sh, commonly from the genus Enchodus, an alepisauroid. Teeth from Carcharias amonensis, a lamniform shark, are also present. Phosphatic pebbles (1-5 mm), which are likely teleost microcoprolites, are also found in these lenses. The lenses were deposited by bottom, winnowing storm currents and trapped in bottom scours in an area of limited coarse sediment supply on a gently sloping shelf.








Friday, July 14, 2017

But first, a word about my pants

When I started doing my desert rock hounding
I wore jeans.
Most unpleasant.
It would only take about an hour of digging before the material
had dug numbing ridges into the backs of my knees, the ever-shifting waistband would give me a sunburn where someone my age should've just had a tramp stamp, and the stretched out sagging fabric would make me look like I was emulating Lil' Wayne.  Every change of position was accompanied by an equal adjustment of my jeans.
Stop the insanity!
I got the bright idea to try digging in a pair of rock climbing pants.
I immediately  decided against the skin-tight, "yoga" style pants that many women have currently adapted as their daily uniform.
Luckily, I was still left with a huge array of choices.  
It seems that most of the pants I looked at are geared towards an Asian audience,
with unfamiliar sizing increments, but Amazon includes a feature where purchasers can rate if the item fit as expected.  Very helpful.
My favorites are this pair of pants made in China for the Korean market.  The material won't easily snag or rip, is light, breathable, wicking, air dries in about 5 minutes,  and is stretchy while maintaining its shape.  I love them!  
And just so you know, I've been asked more than once if they keep me warm and the answer is "no."  I'm using them in the desert so warmth is not a goal.  I'll need to find other pants to wear when I start rock hounding in the Arctic.

On with the 3rd annual rock hounding tour to the west!
Having achieved my primary goal of collecting Blue Forest wood, I told Pam,
"You'll probably never hear me say this again, but whatever you want to hunt for from here on out is fine with me."
So our next destination was the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area on the Wyoming/Montana border near the town of Lovell, Wyoming.
We started with some light off-road driving in the Pryor Mountains.
Pam wanted to find dry Dryhead agates.
I was aggin' it.
While they are certainly beautiful to behold, I couldn't forget reading one seeker's account stating that he had been looking for 20 years and hadn't found one.  
Sometimes I get lucky, but not "lottery lucky."
Still, it was a gorgeous drive and the cold windy weather just enhanced the beauty of the scenery...
...until we got out of the truck and the reality of my non-warming climbing pants kicked in.
Don stayed outside long enough for a quick photo but later said he finally understood the concept of wearing buffalo skins.  He described his lightweight blanket as being rated for 70ยบ and feeling like he was wearing a thin sheet of ice.

We followed the GPS to coordinates from a rock hounding book which led us to an inconspicuous trench in the middle of nowhere.
It was disconcerting to hear the Garmin voice say,
"Navigate off road,"
but it got us right to the spot.
Pam did her best but came up empty handed.  
We retreated back the way we had come, stopping to take photos along the way.

Our remote camp site was by a boat ramp on a reservoir.
That's a floating outhouse next to the camper.  
When the camp host finally found us to collect our $10 camping fee, I admired his young border collie.  I wanted to pet him so I asked, "Is your dog nice?" to which he replied, "He's nice to me."
I held off on the petting.

This was another blustery camping area but I kept things cozy by managing to bake a decent apple pie in the pint-sized propane oven.

The next day's adventure took us down out of the foothills to warmer territory.
We had 3 different locations to check and I had so much fun navigating the twisting gravel roads.
This was all marine Jurassic deposits on top of the bright red Triassic Chugwater formations that give the area such a unique look.

The first hilltop
yielded the small pieces of coral shown in the book.
The second location was a bust so we moved on to the third site where the goal was star crinoids.
I didn't know much about star crinoids and I definitely didn't know that they are TINY.  It took me over an hour before I spotted one.
 I would've put something in the photo for scale but I didn't have any hummingbird eggs handy.

I found a really cool little seam of...selenite? crystals.
I need to join a mineral club now, just to help me ID some of this stuff.

The book also said that there was a shelf of thin, easy to split, shale that occasionally revealed insects.
It revealed insects but not the fossil ones I was hoping for.
Next stop, fish scales near Billings, MT!

Here's some crinoid information from kgs.ku.edu.
Crinoids flourished during the Paleozoic Era, carpeting the seafloor like a dense thicket of strange flowers, swaying this way and that with the ocean currents. They peaked during the Mississippian Period, when the shallow, marine environments they preferred were widespread on several continents. Massive limestones in North America and Europe, made up almost entirely of crinoid fragments, attest to the abundance of these creatures during the Mississippian. Mississippian rocks crop out only in the extreme southeast corner of Kansas, but crinoid fossils are common in Pennsylvanian and Permian rocks in the eastern part of the state. 
Crinoids came close to extinction towards the end of the Permian Period, about 250 million years ago. The end of the Permian was marked by the largest extinction event in the history of life (see mass extinctions). The fossil record shows that nearly all the crinoid species died out at this time. The one or two surviving lineages eventually gave rise to the crinoids populating the oceans today.
In general, crinoids have three main body parts. The first, the stem, attaches the animal to the ocean floor and consists of disk-shaped pieces stacked on top of each other. These stem pieces come in a variety of shapes--round, pentagonal, star-shaped, or elliptical--and each stem piece is perforated in its center.
At the top of the stem is the cuplike calyx, which contains the mouth, the digestive system, and the anus. The lower part of the calyx is made up of rigid, five-sided plates, arranged radially in rows of five.
These plates form the base of the third part, the food-gathering arms. The arms, which are also segmented, have grooves with cilia, or tiny hairs, that capture suspended food particles and direct them back towards the mouth. The number of arms varies from five, common in primitive species, to as many as 200 in some living species. The number of arms is always a multiple of five.
Based on the fossil record of crinoids, especially the details of the plates that made up the arms and calyx, experts have identified hundreds of different crinoid species. Though most crinoids had stems, not all did. Today, stemless crinoids live in a wide range of ocean environments, from shallow to deep, whereas their relatives with stems normally live only at depths of 300 feet or more. These modern crinoids are an important source of information about how the many different extinct crinoids lived.
Rarely are crinoids preserved in their entirety: once the soft parts of the animal decayed, sea currents generally scattered the skeletal segments. By far the most common crinoid fossils are the stem pieces. These are abundant in eastern Kansas limestones and shales. Only occasionally is the cuplike calyx found. Kansas, however, is home to a spectacular and rare fossil crinoid called Uintacrinus, which was preserved in its entirety. These fossils, which were discovered in the Niobrara Chalk of western Kansas, lived during the later part of the Cretaceous Period, roughly 75 million years ago. Uintacrinus is a stemless crinoid, and specimens of these beautifully preserved crinoids from Kansas are on display in many of the major museums of the United States and Europe.













Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Logistics of Travel to the Stone Forest

It ain't easy getting to the Blue Forest.
It's not a matter of needing 4WD.  You can get there in a car.  The problem is finding a major airport to fly into and the best bet is Salt Lake City, UT, about 180 miles away.  This year, I tried to save money and flew for the first...AND LAST...time on Frontier.  I don't like trying to fit everything I'm going to need for an 18 day trip into a backpack that fits under my seat and dammit, I'm too old to not recline for 3 hours.  I hate middle seats and I want a plastic cup of watery Diet Coke! By the time I add all the extras on to my ticket, I might as well go with a carrier that uses newer planes.
I sent all my rock tools and buckets on ahead with Pam and Don but I won't always have that luxury.
And what's with the price of 5 gallon buckets out west?!
Highway robbery, I tell ya!

Once you get to the "forest,"
you want to maximize your time.
One of our fellow club members, Shirley, from the Fossil Club of Lee County, FL,  met us there. She was visiting relatives in Idaho so she grabbed a rental car and drove on over.  She only had a short time to find some wood so she focused on the excellent surface hunting.  

We had planned to sit around a lot of camp fires
but when the sun is still this high in the sky at 7:45 pm and you've been digging all day,
dinner and bed win out.  Don made a fantastic fire ring but it was so windy and we were so tired, he didn't get to enjoy it very much.

Our remaining time digging was productive.
Here's a stack of pieces I uncovered.  They don't look like much in the photo
 but they clean up reeeeaaallll nice.

Pam was getting her groove on
following a couple of large, solid branches under the ground.  Don came in and gave her a hand with the overburden on the last day.  She kept saying, "The overburden's not bad.  Only about 3 feet."
B*tch, please! 
I chalked it up to too much time at altitude with too little sleep: it's easy to get confused. :-)

In addition to the wind and the altitude,
the sun is merciless.
I'm not just posing in the hole I dug for effect.
I'm trying to get some shade!
I dug this hole at the end of a pit that someone else dug at some point in the past.
I know he found amazing wood 
because the wood he threw away (and I gratefully gathered) was fantastic.
There wasn't much left buried in the ground but I managed to score a beautiful segment of log (just barely shining through in the photo on the left) that has a perfect pocket of clear druzy crystal.  
I can't wait to cut and polish it.

We have to leave time on the last day
to get organized.
Everything has to be packed in 5 gallon buckets, labeled, and stacked carefully in the back of the truck to evenly distribute the weight.  Bubble wrap protects pieces that are more fragile.
I'm just so grateful that I didn't have to ship anything this year.  Lots of savings on flat rate postage.

And here's the happy crew:
Tired and sore but ready to head to the next adventure.
Only 300 miles and then we get to hammer on rocks again.
More to come!

Here's a little info about the Eocene from www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/tertiary/eocene.php.
The Eocene Epoch

Dentary of Viverravus acutus, a small, civet-like Eocene mammal, collected by Malcolm McKenna, Big Horn County, WY, 1950.
The Eocene is the second of five epochs in the Tertiary Period — the second of three epochs in the Paleogene — and lasted from about 55.8 to 33.9 million years ago.* The oldest known fossils of most of the modern orders of mammals appear in a brief period during the early Eocene and all were small, under 10 kg. Both groups of modern ungulates, Artiodactyla and Perissodactyla, became prevalent mammals at this time, due to a major radiation between Europe and North America.
Tectonics and paleoclimate
The early Eocene (Ypresian) is thought to have had the highest mean annual temperatures of the entire Cenozoic Era, with temperatures about 30° C; relatively low temperature gradients from pole to pole; and high precipitation in a world that was essentially ice-free. Land connections existed between Antarctica and Australia, between North America and Europe through Greenland, and probably between North America and Asia through the Bering Strait. It was an important time of plate boundary rearrangement, in which the patterns of spreading centers and transform faults were changed, causing significant effects on oceanic and atmospheric circulation and temperature.
In the middle Eocene, the separation of Antarctica and Australia created a deep water passage between those two continents, creating the circum-Antarctic Current. This changed oceanic circulation patterns and global heat transport, resulting in a global cooling event observed at the end of the Eocene.
By the Late Eocene, the new ocean circulation resulted in a significantly lower mean annual temperature, with greater variability and seasonality worldwide. The lower temperatures and increased seasonality drove increased body size of mammals, and caused a shift towards increasingly open savanna-like vegetation, with a corresponding reduction in forests.