Drunken Fossiling

I call it "rehydration solution."

Don't you judge!

I really want to be a part of the trend of doing an activity in a drunken state and then posting the results on YouTube but I don't have the stamina to actually kayak and dig for fossils all day in a drunken state.  

Maybe I'll try "Drunken Fossil Sorting" 

for my YouTube debut but doesn't that conjure images of broken fossils?!

Better stick with the occasional nip for medicinal purposes only.

My geologist sister-in-law

says she is a "catch and release" fossil hunter.

I've decided I'm a "share the love" fossil hunter.  My house is small so I keep my favorite finds and share the rest with my fossil club and any friends who are interested.

I just took a load down to Ft. Myers in preparation for the club's annual Fossil Fest in February.

Tragedy struck

at the fossil meeting; or so I thought.

I dropped my 20 lb palm frond that I found in Washington, creating the crack you can see on the left in the photo above.

Can't cry over spilled (or dropped) fossils so I waited until I got home to pull the pieces apart.

I was thrilled to find and even better palm frond inside!

It's the only one I have that shows the connection point of the stem.

I'm not going to make a habit of dropping my fossils (unless I take up Drunken Fossiling) but I'm glad it worked out this time.

I just participated in a kayak trip on the Suwannee

with my non-fossil kayak group.

I took a screen and shovel, as I always do, in hopes of finding gravel, but I have yet to find a place to dig when I'm with this group.

The 21 mile stretch that we paddled was lined with lots of swiss-cheese limestone and I managed to collect some echinoids.

I'm most proud of my creative foot warmers.

My feet get chilled, even when it's not that cold out, and I hate to wear wet dive boots all day while I paddle.  I bought a pair of inexpensive, water-proof boot covers for motorcyclists and inside those, I wear a light sock with a self-warming insole.  

Bliss!

Barefoot and preoccupied in Arkansas

Fossil hunting locations often lack curb appeal.

Another ditch, another day.

I've been consulting the web page findingrocks.com and while most of the info is outdated or extremely vague, I've managed to glean some productive fossil sites from it.
A combination of a road trip and some findingrocks.com research recently took me on a tour of 

"Arkansas' Least Appealing Ditches"

 (I'm claiming that as a title for a future reality series).
These ditches give access to the Fayetteville shale of northern Arkansas which dates to the Mississippian period (approx. 354-323 million years old).  I was on the hunt for small pyritized ammonoids (a group of cephalopods which also contained ammonites).

Ditch #1

This is an extremely public ditch, flanked by an interstate on one side and a busy access road on the other and, as always when working an area like this, I have to wonder,

"Why the frack are you honking at me?!"

Seriously, drivers, shouldn't you be texting or something?

I grabbed a bucketful of the rounded, disk-shaped concretions that findingrocks.com said might have ammonoids inside.  

My favorite is this rock that looks like a mashed Moon Pie:

Ditch #2

 I know: breathtaking.

When I started searching the ground behind the dumpster I initially thought someone had been shooting skeet...

but the red fragments turned out to be the target concretions. 

I started to hammer at them with my rock pick which attracted the attention of a wandering businessman on lunch break.  He approached, asking what I was looking for and peering into my bucket where he saw a bottle of my rheumatism medicine (IPA) and several unassuming round red rocks.  Five seconds into my explanation of "Fayetteville shale" his eyes glazed over and he went back to work.

I found one ammonoid fossil:

but after cracking several rocks and only finding interesting, fossil-free formations:

I headed over to...

Ditch #3

This is the kind of ditch I could stay in all day:

loads of interesting rocks and a bit of privacy.

I could've even strung a hammock from the sewage pipe for whenever I needed a break from wading barefoot in the leech-infested sludge.

Ok, I exaggerate.

The water looked like normal creek water and the leech-y looking critters never actually adhered to my skin.

Paradise!

Once again, I started looking for rounded concretions but my eye was constantly drawn to the "turtle" concretions which have the appearance of fossilized turtle shell but, well, aren't.

I wasn't planning on taking any of them home until I noticed that one of them was covered with ammonoid fossils:

and another huge one was going to look fabulous on my deck:

...and the stack of rocks that had to get from the bottom of a deep ditch to the back of my truck continued to grow...

The ditch was cut out of soft shale that didn't seem to have any fossils in it until I waded upstream and noticed the character of the shale was a little different: firmer with some visible, tiny ammonoids.  The daylight was waning so I grabbed the biggest chunk of shale I could manage and began to enact my exit strategy.  

I have learned that loading my least favorite rocks first ensures against the culling of my finds due to exhaustion.  That big, beautiful turtle concretion was my impetus to haul every rock in my pile up the steep sides of the ditch and through a field of stick-tights and wild blackberry shrubs.

There was a lot of cursing involved.

It was all worth it!

Lots and lots of rocks to examine and think about.  Slowly splitting the fragile layers of my hunk of shale has revealed perfect tiny pyritized snails, ammonoids, and other shells.  My old camera with the amazing macro setting finally died and these macro shots are lacking so if you can't actually see the fabulous detail on these tiny shells, know that it's there.

I'm thinking of having these jewels set in a three-finger ring.

;-)

Working in the mines

My fossil club, the Fossil Club of Lee County,

 was granted a rare visit to the Mosaic phosphate mine to hunt for fossils 

and since the "snowbird" members of the club had not yet migrated back to the Sunshine State, there were plenty of spots available to go on the field trip.

  What a relief to not have to FREAK OUT 

(as I normally do)

 about whether or not I'd get to go.  Instead, since my participation was guaranteed,  

I could relax and FREAK OUT 

about whether or not I'd find anything.

(fossil antler, Mosaic mine)

Whenever I tell non-fossil friends that I'm going to a phosphate mine,

 they grow concerned, imagining Chileans trapped thousands of feet under ground.

Not that I want to travel to the bowels of the earth in a cage elevator,  but I lose all "street cred" when I explain that I'll just be wandering around in the fresh air and sunshine, 

scanning the ground for shark teeth.

(dolphin vertebra, Mosaic mine)

The difference between an early October trip to the mine and a December/January trip (when I've gone in the past) is...

 #1. the fresh air I previously mentioned is being super heated by that previously mentioned sunshine,  and...

 #2. we're still in the rainy season.

Heavy rains the night before meant that more fossils might have washed out of the spoil piles,  but the dirt road to the hunting area was very muddy; muddy in a way that had me wishing I had 4 wheel drive.  One of the other club members snapped this photo of my little truck in action...

Much better than the picture I posted a couple years ago of my old Ranger stuck on a muddy path in Arcadia.

We usually have to wear hard hats at Mosaic

but this visit was to an area that was no longer being worked so we were allowed to wear our own headgear.  I don't know why, but the night before the field trip, I dug an old, beloved sun hat out of the back of my closet and decided I would wear it while hunting fossils the next day.  

Wine may have been involved in that decision.  

I bought this hat at Eddie Bauer on The Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1994.

The hat looked a lot better (as did I) when I wore it to North Carolina in 1995.

Fast forward to last Saturday, 2015:

Not so good.

The hat has obviously lost its will to live so I think I will toss it on the funeral pyre,

 if it ever cools down enough to light my chimenea.

The fossil hunting was fairly good.

Lots of broken megs but a couple are good enough to be keepers, and I found a nice mako, too.

A great variety of fossilized material always make the hunting more interesting.  Pam found a big chunk of fossilized wood and I found some nice pink chert.

A handful of pre-equus teeth rounded out the day (and a stingray dermal denticle on the far left).

We got rained out 90 minutes before our time was up

but I'm so out of condition for Florida fossil hunting that I was shocked to hear we still had 90 minutes to go!  

Maybe they'll let us all pop back in to reclaim our lost 90 minutes?

One can dream...

Hey, I resemble that comment!

I'm read a book about the founder of the science of geology, William Smith, entitled

The Map That Changed The World by Simon Winchester,
and in it I found this quote:

"What had hitherto been a signifier of drawing-room decorum seemed overnight to become the pastime of the dull, and then steadily to evolve into that which amateur paleontology is now: no more than the mark of the nerd."
Why I oughta...!
So what if I like to sit in a ditch on Sundays.  I still made it to the sports bar in time to watch my New England Patriots beat the Buffalo Bills and no one was the wiser.
But what about that ditch?

I like hanging out in this ditch because it exposes a layer of fossil coral.  I used to be nervous down here alone but I believe there are far less miserable places for serial killers to hang out.

You can clearly see the strata here:

There is an upper layer of solid grainy, dark soil and then a layer of tightly compressed coral sitting on top of a base layer of hard gray clay.  Initially, I tried to just pull out pieces of coral.  Nope!

Then I came back with a small shovel, but the layers were tight enough that the end of the shovel folded back on itself.  Now I bring a small hammer and narrow chisel and sit on the mud in meditative silence while I work out a few pieces to take home and slab for jewelry.

Knee-high boots and lots of insect repellant are indispensable but

what a beautiful reward for the trouble!

Here's another piece of fossil art

put together by one of the members of the Fossil Club of Lee County:

Very creative and she's definitely not a nerd!  :-)

Glad to Have Junk in the Trunk

I had 2 consecutive days of fossil hunting planned

during my group trip to Washington

but circumstances were trying to throw a monkey wrench into the mix.

My non-fossil friend from the previous day's adventure was supposed to head up to Canada with the rest of the group but a lost passport meant she would either have to spend the day alone or AGAIN go fossil hunting with me.  I offered to rent my own car for one day (that's how determined I was to go rock hounding) but she reassured me that if she wore her grungy clothes and had some of her own tools, she would be perfectly happy to hammer rocks with me.  

I stopped at a convenience store and found a cheap hammer and flat blade screwdriver: 

good enough to split shale.  

That day's fossil destination had been picked out of a rock hounding guide for the state of Washington.  It's always a gamble, since many of the books were written years ago, and you never know if there will be an apartment complex built over your fossil site when you get there but I still wanted Washington state fossilized palm fronds and this seemed like a reasonably 

easy-to-get-to destination with a high possibility of success.

My rental car on this trip was a Nissan Versa and I drove it for about an hour on good roads 

until the map said to take a left.

The "road" to the left was only wide enough for one vehicle and began twisting up the side of a mountain.  It was well maintained and there were regular turnouts in case you met with an oncoming vehicle (which we did) but my passenger was not enjoying that part of the journey.  

Anxiety can catch like the common cold and soon I was white-knuckling the steering wheel and sneaking peeks at the odometer to see if we had gone the distance.

Only one...more...turn...

onto a rutted gravel road that put the previous incline to shame.

I shifted into the only choice for a lower gear, and crept upwards. 

Right about the time that the tires started spinning and my friend was ready to abandon ship,

we came upon a hillside littered with fragments of shale palm fronds.

JOY!!!

The guide book described this area as an old quarry which exposed an outcrop of Eocene age fossils (approx. 54-34 Ma) deposited in sedimentary formations when it was a low-lying coastal range with a subtropical climate. The rocks seemed to either be extremely fragile shale or very hard sandstone.  The shale had lots and lots of palm fronds but also a wide mix of broadleaf fossils, ferns, twigs, etc. and the sandstone had fossilized wood.  

It was not easy to retrieve a couple samples of the fossil wood but eventually I succeeded.

The difficulty in retrieving leaf and palm fossils lay in the fragility of the material but we eventually had a satisfactory selection.

Here's my "happy place" selfie:

Might not look like much but it measures approximately 12" x 15" x 2" and weighs 20 lbs and I got it  home WHOLE!  One side is a palm frond and the other side is a variety of leaves and twigs.

I actually brought home TWO pieces that weighed in at 20 lbs each and since it was Labor Day weekend, I wasn't able to ship them flat rate on Monday.  I had to load 2 checked bags and a carry-on duffel bag with carefully packaged shale fossils and 

jettison most of my other belongings in order to make weight.

I mean, I couldn't leave any of this behind!

(oh, and there were more on the floorboards and the seats)

Once again, we celebrated with a fabulous meal and a Washington micro-brew.

Back at home, safe and sound with my "new" fossils, I find it easy to get lost in their beauty; layers and layers of forest growth compressed into these perfect remnants.  Each stone is like a book with wonderful illustrations inside that will be forever unseen and only imagined.

Living proof!

I'm living proof that you can

pick an unreasonable goal and succeed!

The Washington state women's kayak trip that's been in the planning stages for over a year finally happened (no, that's not the unreasonable goal), and since I've decided to multi-task on my trips, I wasn't going to let 6 days in the Pacific Northwest pass me by without at least one fossil expedition.

Here I am, in the San Juan Islands, in the driver's seat of a 22' tandem kayak.

I skipped the selfie after I finished paddling 25 miles coz I wasn't smiling anymore.

The problem with combining activities

when you are also navigating the vacation schedules of 7 other people is that

something has to give.

I regret that I missed out on some of the group activities to Vancouver (bicycles and wineries: need I say more?) but I'm also thrilled with the fossils I found and wouldn't trade them for anything,

which brings me back to my opening statement.

I now know, after a few tries, that if I write to fossil and mineral clubs in the areas I will be visiting and ask for info to an easy site where I can find even one little fossil to take home,

I will receive a letter of acknowledgement and then never hear back again.

These trips are time sensitive material!

(The notable exception is the wonderful person in MN that gave me detailed directions to the staurolite crystal area.)

I'm not asking for state secrets or a free pass to anyone's private honey hole; I just want a fossil...

any fossil.

To put it in perspective for us Florida fossil hunters, how many times have you directed people to Venice Beach for some basic shark teeth? A lot, right?  And I've even sent satellite pics to people to explain how to get to Apollo Beach.  All I'm saying is...

Share the love!

So I got one useful reply from all my queries and it was from a member of the fossil forum who directed me to an area where he used to look for palm frond fossils, albeit 30 years ago.

Good enough for me.

I loaded up my tools.

(when in Washington, right?)

But I also loaded up one of my friends who is not a fossil hunter.  She thought it would be interesting and I didn't put anymore thought into it.  We drove about 30 minutes to the town of Bellingham and then watched the odometer to take us 11 miles to the target area.

Hmmm...a narrow, winding road with a steep foliage-clogged incline on one side and a steep scary drop-off on the other.  I found a turnout, parked, and started bushwacking and climbing.

And that was the problem.

I didn't think to advise my friend to dress in old clothes OR to bring something else to do, and I didn't even have any tools for her to use.  I was happily splitting rocks, hoping to find a fossil while she was sitting and staring at this view:

It's an amazing view

 but there are no walking paths and after 2 hours of just sitting there, she was done, and of course, I was just getting started!  Hopefully I can go back some time.

Here's what I found once I figured out what kind of rocks to look for...

Positive and negative of a large leaf inside a small rock.

Fir needles!  So cool!

I believe this is a type of evergreen.  Small and delicate.

And then there was the perfect leaf

that I found inside a piece of very hard rock and against all better judgement and experience, 

I tried to take some of the surrounding rock off with my hammer, to make the piece easier to transport.  I broke it.

I promise, I have learned my lesson!!!

(Fool me once, yada yada yada...)

I packed my fabulous finds in a collection bag, skidded back down the slope to where my friend waited, and celebrated in town with clam chowder and a fabulous Washington micro-brew.

Stay tuned for part 2 of Living Proof!