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.