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 70º 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.