Irma's sandy highway to hell

It seems like it's been so long since I've posted but really it was only about 6 weeks; 

just enough time to get through the holidays and wait for water levels to drop.

I was PSYCHED to get back to my amazing dig site of last season and check out all the new gravel Hurricane Irma had uncovered. 

Imagine the depths of my disappointment and sorrow when I arrived to find

that Irma had paved the entire area flat with sand and not just a little bit of sand.  What was originally a large area of medium to deep holes now looks like a highway freshly paved with sand; so much sand that areas at the current higher water levels that would've been 2' deep are now ABOVE the water's surface and the rest of the place is now about knee deep.  In case I'm not fully expressing my own personal fossiling tragedy,

My fossil paradise is buried under several feet of sand.

I will probably not see this area uncovered again in my fossiling lifetime

and it's wrong to pray for another terrible hurricane. 

...very wrong...

So, back to square one.

Irma did leave several new sandy beaches all along the Peace River so we have more comfortable campsite choices than last season.

We started the season off in the usual manner,

and if I really had created a Molotov Moscato cocktail, it would've been in everyone's best interest.

Temps are sketchy in January but we braved it.

In recent years I've started setting up everything to make coffee right outside the door of my tent so I can stay completely snuggled while brewing a warm beverage.

Even though we had to start from scratch in other areas, we managed to find a few fossils.  It was hard to have so little for 2 days of effort but I kept reminding myself that I've been knocked out of the range of extraordinary fossils and back into normal fossils.

Four glyptodont scutes to add to my haul from last season:

Three giant armadillo scutes:

When we ran them under a black light, we discovered that the algae on the top one fluoresced a brilliant red. 

A sweet little critter canine, maybe raccoon:

Gator teeth:

A couple of decent hemis:

A plate of blah, blah, blah:

And a worn but interesting mystery tooth:

I'll be posting on different forums to see what I can learn.

And here's a beautiful ring a jewelry artist made with a hemi I gave to her:

And for your further reading pleasure, here's a local Fox News report from September talking about what happened to the Peace River after Hurricane Irma.

ARCADIA (FOX 13) - The worst of Hurricane Irma is the flooding in some local communities.

The Peace River is out of its banks in Arcadia. Residents there say they were expecting the Peace River to crest 17.8 feet. But Irma had a surprise for them.

The storm and the flood brought a double whammy at the Peace River Campground.

“The storm kind of scared me more than the flood and then the flood kept coming and coming. And coming," resident Don Boyce said.

Coming up and up, at least a foot more than anyone expected. The river was supposed to crest at 17.8 feet. The gauge broke at 20 and rising.

Kim Gill lives there full-time and her canoe comes in very handy now.

“What's it been like? Wet,” she described. “We have 14 inches in the living room."

The family that owns the park has seen flooding four times previously, but never like this. 

“That much water in my TV room and about a foot and a half in the camper. But we happen to have a motor home so we made it," Summer Lempenau said.

Lempenau’s “Florida Strong” t-shirt will get some more writing.

"I think I'm going to put something on the back, ‘I survived Hurricane Irma and Peace River flood 2017,’” she joked.

The good news is, everyone got out safely when the peace river took over.

“We [will] rebuild, this is my home, I'm not leaving," she said.

The good news is they didn't have the wind damage they did with Charlie, but they'll have to wait for the water to recede to see just how much damage Irma left behind.