Orange blossom season

     This is a wonderful time of year to be in the river because all the orange groves in this largely agricultural area are in bloom and the smell is amazing!  Much better than the smell of the dead cow we dug next to last season.
     The only constant thorn in my side is the cost of filling my gas tank for the 4 hour round trip every week.

Ouch!

    And I drive a very small pickup truck.  At least the rest of the hobby is inexpensive.  

     I am trying to capture the mural painted on a grocery store in Wauchula but there are always trucks parked in front of it so I will share it in segments.

Part 1

     So I had an amazing day on Friday and it was made possible by friends who shared knowledge and experience and access to an otherwise difficult to reach part of the river.  I am serious when I say, "I would be nothing without them."  I did have to paddle in a canoe and I think I've made my feelings regarding paddling abundantly clear, but it was a small price to pay for a stellar day.

     We got to the area where the guys were going to dig in holes they had already started.  Hmmm....Where to dig?  Since they had previous success, I moved a little downstream and tried to imagine the line of gravel they were working.  It seems funny now that Steve kept telling me to go to another area and I know he was doing it to improve my chances of finding good fossils but as usual, I stubbornly stuck to my guns and got to work in my chosen spot.

And it really paid off...

A baby mammoth tooth!

     It's so tiny and perfect and even has some of the root.  Hard to believe how big the teeth were in adults by comparison.

     That is my hand on an adult mammoth tooth; not one that I found as I have yet to find anything that big, but I'm cleaning up on the little stuff!

     

     I also upped my meg game by finding my NEW best river meg to date.  This one measures 2" on the diagonal and has almost perfect serrations all the way around.  Two perfect tapir caps exactly doubles my collection of tapir caps (being a newbie, I only had 2 in the fossil cabinet).  There is also a lower mako in the above photo but its root is damaged.

     I could have ended my day right then and there but I aspire to be a human excavator so I kept digging gravel and had a full bucket of goodies for the first time this season.

     Variety is the spice of life and my Friday was plenty spicy.  Glyptodon scutes, turtle puzzle pieces, TWO horse incisors (one with most of the root) as well as other horse, deer, and camelid teeth, loads of various armadillo scutes, garfish scales, a tiny toe bone (not sure which animal it came from), tortoise spurs and foot pads...

     ...and lots of other goodies including loads of smaller shark teeth.

     What a banner day!  I don't know when the opportunity to return to that area will arise again but I'll jump at the chance if it comes.

      The perfect day was rounded off by the discovery of the last 2 bottles of $5 clearanced (but excellent) wine, languishing on the bottom shelf of a rack at the Wauchula WalMart.

      No complaints.

Dig deep

     After a week off due to house guests, I was anxious to get back to the peace of the river.  I lent my spare kayak to a fellow club member and we started paddling (or motoring in my case) about 7:15 AM.  I followed him to an area where he had been finding some good megs in deeper water.

     He kept calling me over to dig in a fissure he had discovered a few days earlier.

     I, of course, stubbornly poked around in shallow areas with nil results.  Finally I conceded and waded over to see what he was doing.  What he had uncovered was a long, deep, twisting crack through the bedrock of the river.  Very interesting!  BUT it was too deep for my regular shovel and for some reason, I was having trouble in the narrow space with my long handle shovel.  My mind kept drifting to thoughts of expensive fossil scoops...

   

 I kept digging...

Near miss!

Fail!

Success!

     I found it interesting that we separately described our day to a fellow fossiler and I was the "glass half empty" person while my digging partner was the "glass half full".  I'll work on my attitude. :-)

     I go to sleep each night thinking about where I will dig the next time I go to the Peace River and I keep thinking about the BIG rocks I found a few weeks back.

     Look at those suckers!  Why, oh why, isn't one of them a mammoth tooth?!

Maybe it's still there...

     On the homefront, I finally fixed up the curio cabinet a client gave me for my fossils.  It needed some new shelves and a door replaced.  I spent 3 mornings transferring and arranging my fossils.

Not a job for the over-caffeinated!

    

Long, involved fossil weekend. Sweet!

     It was time for my quarterly attendance at my fossil club meeting.  Since it's about a 4 hour drive for me each way, I think that's reasonable.  I make a weekend out of the club meetings and pack in as much as possible.  On the drive down to Ft. Myers, I arranged to visit a club member's home and see his fossil collection.  He has been fossiling for 8 years and his finds are truly amazing!  But there's never enough time so after a short hour, I took my leave and continued driving to the hotel where I would spend that first night:  Crestwood Suites, which I have now renamed Crestfallen Suites.  Oh well...

     The club meeting was very interesting, as always.  Our speaker was Sharon Holte from the Florida Museum of Natural History.  She is working on the Thomas Farm Fossil Site in Florida and her talk inspired me to volunteer to sift through dirt with a microscope in search of tiny fossils.  Now that's inspiration!  It was stated that 75% of all new fossil discoveries are made by amateur hunters.

     A fellow club member let me pose with the giant megalodon tooth he found while diving in the Venice Beach area (compare its size to the one on my necklace!).  This photo caused some amusing confusion when I posted it on FaceBook as it created an optical illusion with the man in the background.  I love it when the creative comments start flowing on FaceBook!

     I fossiled by myself all day Friday but I never felt too isolated as I was within walking distance of my truck and there were a couple of ladies fossiling just upstream from me.

     The first part of the morning was frustrating as I wasn't finding ANYTHING, but I stuck with it and eventually got in a good area.  I found a small meg, decent mako, hemi with nice color, 3 glyptodon scutes, fragments of teeth from a giant beaver and capybara, 2 horse teeth, and a very nice molar and slightly dinged packing tooth from a 3-toed horse.

     I called it quits in the early afternoon because I wanted to set up my campsite and enjoy the campfire for a few hours but when I got to Pioneer campground, they were completely filled due to the Pioneer Days celebration that was taking place that weekend.  I was so bummed.  I couldn't get enough phone connection to see if Highland Hammocks in Sebring had availability (the usual phone message instead of a real person) so I crossed the highway and ventured into Thousand Trails RV Campground.

     Thousand Trails RV Campground is great for some people, but I'm not one of those people.  

     Since they don't cater to tent campers, there are only 5 sad tent sites tucked into the weeds behind the office.  I want to be dramatic and call it the camper's hell but it was more like the camper's purgatory: just waiting around, hoping things will get better and praying they don't get any worse.

     

     I was all too happy to leave EARLY the next morning for the fossil club's meet-up on the Peace River.  This was the 2nd year in a row that I was "leading" the kayak/canoers and Jack was leading the walk-in diggers but since everyone had boats, we all headed upstream together.  I'm still a little too obsessed with my own digging to be a good group leader but it's an enjoyable experience.  Everyone was fairly well-acquainted with the river so the group quickly dispersed.  

     While I was digging, I started hearing a lot of movement in the brush across the river and finally spotted a herd of goats feeding.  

     I don't know anything about goats but the goats I've seen in the past have been fairly small.  These Peace River goats were so big, I initially thought it was a group of calves passing by except that they were jumping to reach leaves over their heads.  

     Determined digging yielded one of my best river megs to date.  I was so excited!

     I also found a beat up mako, big fat tiger, worn horse tooth, sweet barracuda tooth, earbones, turtle scutes, fragments of mammoth and mastodon enamel, etc.

Success!

     It was a great weekend and would be even better if I didn't have to deal with the aftermath of using my truck as a command center.

At least it's a small truck!

Off the grid

     I understand the benefits of gridding an area and digging for fossils in an orderly manner

however

I don't have that kind of time (only getting 1 visit to the Peace River per week) and it seems a moot point when the majority of fossilers are potholing (digging willy nilly).

     Friday before last, I found a nice little spot and I potholed the hell out of it.

     Look at all the fun stuff I found!  Lots of megs (none perfect, of course), alligator and crocodile teeth, glyptodon and giant armadillo scutes, makos, horse tooth, etc., and lot of excellent small teeth.

Location, location, location...

This last Friday, I crossed the river (same area) to dig with Jack. 

     Yup, that's the best for the whole day.  My favorite piece is the large antler butt.

     The texture of it is fabulous and it looks like it was shed last year instead of tens of thousands of years ago.  I let my mind wander while I examined it and tried to extrapolate the size of the buck that lost it.  Very cool!

     The smallest thing I found also has great texture.

     This is a little fragment of sturgeon mouthplate.  

     I don't usually post pics of all the fragments of mammoth and mastodon enamel I find but I will today to give you an idea of the quantity.  

     I've quit keeping the tiny pieces because they really add up fast and I don't know what I will do with the larger fragments but still, it's mammoth and mastodon enamel!  Gotta keep it!

     Here's a pic lifted from the FCOLC newsletter.  I am showing off the end piece of a baleen whale jawbone that I found at the Mosaic mine.

     If I've had a good day fossiling, I like to enjoy an aprés fossil bottle of wine.  Whoops!  I meant to say "glass" of wine.  The day following fossiling, I like to indulge in an aprés aprés fossil 2 hour power nap.  Bliss!

     Under the category of "Friends, Fossils, Food, Fire" I want to point out that this product should be avoided:

     I know it shows a picture of hamburgers being grilled but there is absolutely no way that would work.  Pam and I tried it.  We're not even certain you could warm a hot dog on it.  A thin fish fillet would probably be ok.

     One of my approved gas stations along my route is the BP at Exit 48, off I-4.  It's fairly clean, well-run, and the clerks are polite.  Every time I head back to the restroom, I say, "Hello!" to this lady:

     While she seems like an excellent beer pimper, she also seems a poor choice to direct women to the women's restroom.  On the men's side, all they get is a forlorn NASCAR driver sitting on the floor:

     Actually, he looks like he's sitting on a...well, nevermind.

     

Off to the phosphate mine

     I got to go on the fossil club field trip to the Mosaic phosphate mine!!!

     Only 30 spots were available for club members to visit the mine this year and I tried to accept that I probably wouldn't get to go but I got to go!

     I'd been rambling on and on about it in the days leading up to the trip but my friends and clients seemed to have a little trouble understanding my excitement:  I get the opportunity to scour a desolate wasteland for 4 hours in the hopes of finding something fossilized.

     My first trip to the phosphate mine was last year and I was overwhelmed and confused as to how to go about it.  This year I knew what to do:  eyes fixed on the ground, scanning non-stop until the whistle blew.

     My method was to cling, mountain goat style, to the steep hillsides, in the hopes that the danger and difficulty of negotiating the gravel-strewn incline had prevented previous fossilers from working those areas.  It seemed to be a good idea.  I immediately found this 3.5" fatty meg and even though it has root damage, I am in love with its perfect serrations and ultra-cool green color.

     I tried to stick to a pattern of working my way up the slippery incline (remind me to wear crampons next time!) until I encountered footprints of other searchers, then I would scooch to the right and carefully move back down the slope until I reached the mucky ooze at the bottom.

     Last year I only found 1 megalodon tooth.  I did a LOT better this year and I had a blast!  Every so often someone would peer over the top of the hill, catch sight of me and say something like, "Oh!  Is that safe?" to which I always replied, "Nope."  And it's not "safe" but I fully believe that if I had lost my footing, though it would hurt like a mo-fo, I would definitely survive with only minor injuries. 

     The last 2 pictures make it seem like the megs are all laying right on the surface but sometimes all you can see is a suspicious ridge in the gravel that you check out in the hopes it's a tooth.

     Around the 3.5 hour mark, I was starting to lose my mountain goat prowess and feeling more like an out-of-shape middle-aged woman (which is what I am).  Time to retrace my steps!

     I worried that since I had already worked the slopes I was about to retrace, I wouldn't stand a chance of finding anything else.  Wrong!  Found the best meg of the day (my life?) on the way back to my truck.

Absolutely perfect!

     Jack sent me a quick comparison from the internet:

     No plans to sell my meg and I realize that the "asking" price is different from what someone might actually get for an item, but it's fun to think about.

Here's my meg take for the day (including a perfect hemi in the lower left and a mako in the lower right):

Lots of beautiful small shark teeth:

Tooth from a 3-toed horse:

And fragments of stingray barbs:

Fingers crossed I get to go next year!!!

Why is it still raining?!

     I know I should be grateful for a less-than-arid winter in Central Florida but...

      Enough already!

     We've been having quite a bit of rain in the Orlando area and every time it rains here, I can see it reflected in the rising river level on the waterdata.usgs.gov gage.

     Even though this measurement is taken at a location almost 3 hours away, you can see the correlation.  It makes it hard to revisit some of the places I went to last season as they are still in deep water.

     High water levels don't stop me from going, of course.  I spent my Christmas money (thanks, Daddy!) on new tires for the old Ranger.

     They're not the best on the market but they are new and have TREAD and I get excited every time I see them.  I might even try to avoid hitting curbs for awhile so they can stay new-looking a little longer.

     I had my bicycle loaded, as well, for a few days and it got so much good-natured attention, I considered making it a permanent fixture in the bed of my truck.  Apparently, having a kayak AND a bicycle on my truck gives me an air of being "ready for anything."

     Friday we went to a location that was new to me.  It was very close to where we parked, which was nice, but it was hard digging.  I tweaked my back right off the bat and am still nursing it back to health but it didn't stop me from digging on Friday (even though it probably should have).  I kept poking around until I found a shallow trough of gravel and rock laying on top of thick white clay.  I scraped up  a small selection of fossils but the coolest things I found were 4 crystalized shells.

     These are the first whole ones I found and they are so pretty!

     I've included my first river marble in the above photo for scale.  Being a lifetime gardener, I've found many marbles buried in the dirt over the years but this is the first one that's turned up in my fossil screen.

I thought this tiger shark tooth had a nice color; a little different from most of the teeth I find in the Peace River.

     Mastodon and mammoth enamel, turtle scute, bird bone, deer tooth, ray mouth plate tortoise foot pad, etc., but excited to find 2 snake vertebra (middle of photo) in fairly decent condition.

     This weekend is shaping up to be cold and rainy so I'll have to play it by ear.  I can layer more wool and fleece under the waders but at some point, my hands and arms are going to get wet.  Can't dig with numb hands!