Gettin' a little Withlacoochee

The Peace River is a fossil mecca 

but during the rainy months of summer, 

if I want to keep hunting for ancient treasures, I have to branch out into other fossiling realms. 

This summer, Tom and I have made a couple of fossil coral trips to the Withlacoochee.

I like to seek out fossils that are relatively easy to collect because I, like most people, have limits on my time and finances. Florida and Georgia fossil coral, associated with upper Oligocene to lower Miocene shallow marine limestones, fits the bill and the Withlacoochee River provides great access to this interesting material. Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be any other fossil material in this area but that allows us to focus on the coral hunt.

Yeah, I know...gators.

There's been some disturbing news lately regarding alligators.

I really really really hope I never have a tragic encounter with one.

Really, the mask and snorkel isn't necessary but it was a nice way to stay cool while I picked up chunks of coral.  

Of course, there are other ways to stay cool...

I did enjoy seeing the fossil coral under water...

...and I was startled to have a bowfin swim past me.  I didn't know what it was until I described it to Tom and he told me.

Looked a little prehistoric!

It's a dirty hobby.

One of my friends said it looked like I had a leech on my face in this photo, and that was entirely possible, but luckily, this was only mud.  

Heavy gloves are a must...

unless you like the feel of abrading your fingers with a cheese grater.

We've found that our biometrically enhanced devices can't recognize our fingerprints 

for several days after a visit to the river.

This area has been hunted heavily for years and while the huge botryoidal coral heads are long gone, the river is still full of smaller botryoidal and druzy geodes that were broken off of the larger specimens and left behind.

It takes some work and a little bit of muscle because the promising coral chunks need to be broken open to see what’s inside. A sturdy rock hammer does the trick. Once in awhile, you’ll be lucky enough to lift a piece of coral out of the river and see water drain out of the hollow geode interior. We always manage to head home with a few new pieces for our collection.

Even on less productive visits, as my friend and fellow fossil freak, Pam, says,

"It's nice to be out on the river."

Out with the dirt, in with the wood: Eden Valley and the Blue Forest

After visiting Yellow Cat and the Poison Strip

in Utah, we continued on to the more favorably named

Eden Valley, Wyoming,

in search of Blue Forest petrified wood.

Don't Tom and I look happy in this photo?

We're putting on a brave front because this was after several nights sleeping on an air mattress that simultaneously steamed and abraded us.  Even with a cotton fitted sheet, a sweaty layer of moisture would form between the air mattress and the unlucky half of our body in contact with it, resulting in a chill when we would flip over; and maybe it was something to do with the desert environment but it felt like we were sleeping on 1000 grit sandpaper: not rough enough to cause scarring but it left Tom feeling like he might have to get his tattoo touched up.

Still, it was beautiful,

and since Jim and Vickie bring everything but the kitchen sink (and they would bring that, too, if they could figure out a way to make it work), we camped in relative style.

No, this is not a scene from "Breaking Bad."

It's Jim and Vickie's interesting little trailer that was packed with all manner of foods, drinks, utensils (an entire knife block) and dishes but, strangely, no bowls.  Only an issue when we wanted cereal, and the coffee mugs stood in for that.

So what were we there for?

The wood, baby!

Blue Forest wood is gorgeous: the fossil retains every tiny detail and at times, I had to look twice to convince myself it was a fossil and not a modern branch.  The wood is surrounded with layers of blue-hued chalcedony and golden calcite crystals.

But there's a catch.

You have to dig to find it and...

nearly every piece is encased in layers of hard, fossilized algae.

Finding an algae cast is no guarantee of success.  The cast in the above picture was empty.

Empty!

It ain't right.

The ground is pocked with holes from decades of fossil hunters

 and covered with discarded algae casts.

I pondered the environmental impact of all the digging but the area was dug up long ago and "planted" with oil and gas wells which are visible in every direction.  Fossil hunters are allowed to dig as long as they don't use mechanized equipment. 

Pick a hole, any hole.

I decided to give myself a head start on the digging and jump into a hole that had been started by some other hunter.  Here was my new burrow for the next day and a half.

I hit pay dirt my first try so I just kept digging, uncovering a load of fossil twigs and branches

and even a root ball which I am lovingly cradling in this photo.

I also found a long, unbroken algae cast but I still have no idea what's inside because 

this crap is HARD!  

We're still experimenting with ways to remove it without breaking the fragile fossil inside but the best bet seems to be...

ACID!!!

Muriatic acid to be exact, and in small measured doses.  I'll post results as they come.

Meanwhile, I found some float material that was algae-free

 and Tom polished them in his masterful way:

And here's one he hasn't polished yet to show how gorgeous this stuff is:

But wait!  One more!

This picture isn't the best but Tom found a limestone nodule and when he broke it open, it contained a  piece of fossilized wood so realistic looking you'd be afraid of getting a splinter.

USPS Feud Update

It's just possible that with a mix of Gorilla and packing tape, I have tamed the United States Postal Service delivery beast.  

Stay tuned...

Adventures in Yellow Cat and the Poison Strip

Generally, I avoid radioactive places.

I had read that some areas of Yellow Cat, Utah might harbor mild radiation.

Mild?!

Hopefully nothing more intense than the years I spent standing in front of my parents circa 1980 microwave oven, waiting for my LeMenu's to heat through.

And the "Poison Strip" moniker comes from a preponderance of arsenic in the ground water.

No worries!  I stuck with the bottled kind and...

I quickly learned that even a short walk away from camp required copious amounts of bottled water.

This is the high desert, after all.

But boy, oh boy! If you want cool rocks, this is the place to be!

Down a short slope from our campsite I ran across these super cool rocks, laced through with red ribbons and pockets of crystals.  Still don't know what it is.

It got to be overwhelming.

Rocks are HEAVY, and even with the campsite in view, the return climb up that short slope was a lot harder with 100 lbs of rocks strapped to my back.

Still, I kept going back, until...

Tom identified one of my shut-off switches:

Gin.

Simple as that.

The other switch is darkness; I stop digging when I can't see any more.

And a couple more photos...

Here I am on a slippery slope that doesn't look nearly as intimidating from below as it felt while I was on it.

And here is some local wildlife that was released unharmed.

On to Wyoming!

Sti

Traveling Circuses and Fossil Hunters

I tried to warn him.

I tried to mentally prepare my boyfriend, Tom, for the rigors of travel with Jim and Vickie.

Awwww!  Look at him!  So naive.

I had explained that Jim and Vickie would pick us up at the Salt Lake City Airport in their pickup truck and that they tended to travel with too much gear.  Tom wanted to know where we were going to go and what we were going to look for.  I had only the vaguest answers for him, mumbling about Utah and Wyoming and how it was "up to them."

Still, he went with me.

He is a good man.

What he didn't expect to see was a pickup truck with a camper top, packed to the gills with crates, bags, and suitcases, AND a trailer packed full with more of the same.  

Too late to back out!  Away we went!

Our goal the first evening

was to set up camp in the Yellow Cat area of eastern Utah, about 240 miles from SLC,

but first!

along the way Vickie wanted to try and locate a septarian nodule site.

The directions in rock hounding books and on the internet can be sketchy and difficult to translate to real time.  We found our way to a gravel road in search of "a ditch on the left-hand side."

Believe it or not, we found said ditch!

Initial digging attempts were frustratingly disappointing.  The ground was covered with broken nodules so I knew they had to be there.  Tom found some beautiful fragments of septarians and chert nodules which inflamed my out-of-control competitive side (I swear, I'm working on that!).  

I finally hit pay dirt!

The only bad part of it was that I didn't find the pocket of nodules until it was time to leave.

Talk about working at a fever pitch!

It's probably for the best because we needed to eat some canned goods and burn some firewood before we would have enough room in the truck for rocks.

These septarian nodules are much more fragile than the ones I collected last year in Mt. Carmel, Utah, so I'll have to be exploring means of stabilization.  

I soaked some of my AZ rainbow wood from April in a heady concoction of acetone and epoxy as a means of stabilizing its crumbly texture.

Any day now I hope to have time to actually slab it and see it if worked.

Looking for a camp site...

this was our view.

I may tease Jim and Vickie sometimes, but they make these vistas possible.

Yup,

this camp site looks about right.

I will admit, there are times that all the extra food and water adds 

a sense of mental security.

To be continued...

Summer...again...

One of my fossil buddies sent me a post 

from The Fossil Forum

which detailed a fossil hunter's trip in mid-June to a central Florida river where he proceeded to find 4 juvenile mammoth teeth, among other things.
I guess I'm going to have to get more adventurous. 

I had a few, lightweight, late-season finds in the usual places that are in keeping with my middle name:
Aimee "the finder of small things" Hankel.

A very small tooth.

It was suggested that it might be a pre-equus horse tooth which would be very exciting but when I looked at comparisons on the internet,  

my very small tooth seemed to be whispering,  "Deer."

The official word is in from Dr. Hulbert at UF and my tooth is a lower premolar from a bison, probably in the 10-30,000 year age range.

Not the glamor tooth I was hoping for but vaguely more interesting than a deer.

These teeth, however,

are screaming, "Modern horse!"

How about these whale ear bones?

I don't think you could find them much more worn out.

I call them "shabby cetacean chic." 

A respectable chunk of mammoth tooth,

that I jacked up with my shovel before I knew of its existence.

The end results of one entire day's dig:

Now THAT'S determination!

You know times are lean when you bring home dugong ribs,

and sad Peace River coral,

and the hollow shell of a disappointing "geode",

and...glass...

Always so much glass...

As always, dreaming of dry weather.