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.