1 million pics - Utah desert for my daughter's birthday
Jan 22, 2014 1:13:57 GMT -5
lparker, DirtCleaner, and 1 more like this
Post by herchenx on Jan 22, 2014 1:13:57 GMT -5
Well my daughter turned 14 this past weekend. She wanted to go on a trip with me so we did some planning and thanks to 1dave we landed on going to Utah.
She was excited about the possibility of finding red stromatolites as described by Dave:
forum.rocktumblinghobby.com/thread/63240/east-san-raphael-swell-stromatolites?page=1&scrollTo=720118
Well we found some and more!
The first night - Friday, we drove from Fort Collins, CO all the way to HWY 24 in Utah.
While we were driving I was excited to see the snow on the ground subside in Grand Junction Colorado. The moon was one night past full so the snow was easy to spot. Things took a turn for the worse as we entered Utah, however, and it seemed that there was more snow on the ground as we headed west. We pulled into Green River and got gas, and asked if the guy knew if there was much snow further west. He didn't, and I began planning a massive revision to our trip as I was thinking the whole place would be under snow.
I decided to check it out regardless, and just as we left town the snow just disappeared, like it just ended at Green River.
About 30 minutes later we were tucked in for the night in the back of the rented Toyota Sequoia. I had done the math and the expected mileage of the trip and cost of gas would have exceeded the cost for a rental that got better mileage so we rented and I was very glad we did.
In spite of 5" of foam and 0 degree (F) mummy bags we both had a hard time sleeping in the extreme cold. I don't know how cold it actually got but suffice it to say it was well below freezing.
The morning came and we reluctantly relinquished the warmth of our bags for the start of the day.
We were greeted by a beautiful landscape as the sun lit up the San Rafael Swell:
We ate some breakfast and sorted out our gear and started looking. We explored some creek beds and just found sandstone and very small pieces of red and orange jasper. After an hour of looking we wandered out of the creek bottom and onto some hills and suddenly there was red jasper everywhere.
Emma had a great time at this location, and we were picky about what we kept. Here she is finding large chunks, we kept following them until we found some pretty nice sized pieces. I found one nearly intact, about the size of a nerf football.
Here is one she threw back
and still more jasper on top of the hill
We found a lot of the geodes, mostly broken open, but many containing small calcite crystals. There were some with fibrous blue crystals that I have to assume were celestite. These weren't large terminated crystals like what I've seen at shows, but it was cool to find them regardless.
Here is one of Emma's here at home. I have more in the bucket carefully wrapped in paper, but I wanted to get this post out soon so I will update this post with more pics after I've gone through it
We wanted to see if we could find any other fossils, and since we've never managed to find any ammonites, we followed some crude directions to a town named Castle Dale up in Emery County. We headed west on I70 and I can't convey in words how breathtaking the view was as we drove. I took one pic once we left I70
We turned off the main road onto another at some point (following the GPS lady on the phone) and suddenly Emma exclaimed "There's a snake drawn on that rock back there!"
I hit the brakes and flipped a U-ie, and headed back to the parking area I had just passed, and sure enough we found petroglyphs!
The snake Emma spotted from the road
I don't know why it never crossed my mind, but it turned out there were places to see petroglyphs and pictographs all over San Rafael Country. We were fortunate to find a great tourist guidebook with maps and detailed descriptions, but I'll get to that later.
More petroglyphs and interesting graffiti
After 30 or so minutes we decided to get back on the road. Winter means short days and that played a big factor in our trip, we wanted to do a lot but we had to live with the short daylight. Another pic as we headed up HWY 10 toward Castle Dale, again the landscape was beautiful
Emma was having a blast. She loves being in places where there is a lot to be found and she loves riding and seeing new places
Well, as it turned out we didn't get any more photos of this day, but some important things happened. We hit the spot supposedly to find ammonites and found nothing. We looked around for 30 minutes or so and found no trace of anything ammonite related.
We stopped at a gas station in Castle Dale and after I got gas I asked the nice lady behind the counter if she knew of anywhere to find ammonite fossils. This is where it gets interesting. She hesitated and surprisingly said "well, yes" - I was a little surprised she knew what I meant. I asked if there was a problem with getting them. She said "yeah, they are about this big and you will have to dig them out of the dirt" and she held out her arms and touched her fingertips together to form a large circle.
I'll let that sink in.
I tried to contain myself as my bowels nearly let loose and my legs felt weak. I replied as calmly as I could "Oh, that's OK, we drove a long way so we don't mind a little digging" - she called her dad and got better directions and sent us on our way.
I'll save you the wait and go ahead and spill the beans on this, her memory (I found out later) was from her childhood, and the easy-to-find monster ammonites were all gone, long since picked over.
Her directions did get us to an interesting spot right at a major crossroads southeast of Cleveland, UT, and we did find evidence of ammonites. we were able to dig out some imprint plates from the rocks just off the major roads on BLM land there. Here are some small samples with ammonite prints, crinoid stems, and some other marine fossils:
But this was the big find of the trip for me. My largest animal fossil (piece) to date:
More angles
That ammonite, if intact, would have been one of her monsters.
We didn't find anything else anywhere nearly as exciting, although we found lots of small plate imprints and I even found a matched imprint/ammonite that is still buried and wrapped in the bucket (it's only a couple inches across)
While we were looking, this day and the next day when we returned, we started finding these interesting brown crystals on some of the fossilized mud balls
While we were at the gas station earlier, another local gentleman heard what we were looking for and he drew me a map back out to the same area we had looked at initially for ammonites and said we would find them. In spite of our lack of luck previously, we headed back to the spot we started at and looked for an hour before dark and still didn't find anything. There was an abundance of chalcedony on the ground, and if I wasn't already buried in more agate than I can possibly tumble we would have picked up several 5-gallon bucketfulls easily. This would have made good tumbling material.
We had dinner in Castle Dale and then headed toward Salina, where we hoped to get a good night's sleep and look for wonderstone the next morning. We ended up staying in a hotel which was a good decision, as it was much colder in Salina and we hadn't slept well the night before.
We awoke to a very cold morning Sunday. We had a little breakfast and then followed directions from a book to the National Forest area to look for wonderstone. We very quickly got into snow, and it got worse as we went. I was so bummed I didn't take any photos, although the area was very pretty. We'd driven 1.5 hours out of our way (3 hours total drive) to get to this and it was buried in snow. The ledge the material came from was well excavated and showed no sign of the orange, red and black stone. My suspicion is that this is all gone. There are supposed to be other veins in the vicinity and perhaps if one could explore of find a loose-gummed local there might still be some to be found, but it wouldn't have mattered for us, the snow pretty much made it impossible. We hiked around a little and on our way back to the truck found bear tracks in the snow. They weren't fresh but it did motivate us to head out.
We drove back up to the ammonite spot, with a plan to look for a while and then head to other spots for viewing petroglyphs and pictographs. The tourism brochure taught us that pictographs are painted onto the rock and petroglyphs are scratched/carved.
We tried an area a little north of where we had looked the prior evening, covered in large boulders, most of which were weathered and broken, but all appeared to have started as large spheres
There were all sizes of spheres, some as small as a softball, the ones just coming out of the dirt were intact, most were broken and they got progressively larger, the largest of which (that we found) was pictured previously.
We found some of the brown crystals I showed previously here, but no real fossils to speak of. We broke some of the more weathered pieces down a bit but unlike the plates we found the previous day we did't find any embedded shells.
We decided to call it quits around 2 PM and head toward the Buckhorn Canyon Pictograph Panel. This was the highlight of our trip. We found numerous pictographs and petroglyphs following the guide. Again the drive there was beautiful
And the canyon did not disappoint
We didn't drive all the way down, and instead headed back the way we came to investigate another landmark, "The Wedge" - described to us as Utah's miniature Grand Canyon.
A beautiful drive
We got into a bunch of junipers on top of the plateau, which created a nice change in scenery, even though I didn't get many photos. I was racing the sunlight so I kept a pretty fast pace.
We arrived in time to see the canyons and they were beautiful. Very easy to access although the drive in seemed to go on forever once you entered the area.
After thoroughly enjoying the view of The Wedge, we headed back to the intersection where we hoped to find any more ammonites. We did manage to get several small plates and started finding more imprints, but by that time the sun had set and the cold air was descending so we decided to call an end to our rock hounding and head back east.
We drove all the way to Moab Sunday night. I had been trying to get a photo of the night sky, but as it turned out my camera/lens combo has some problem that causes a red band to form on the right side of the image.
I did manage to get one passable photo, not what I was hoping for and including some light from Green River, but I'm happy nonetheless
We spent Sunday night in a motel again, and were grateful for the warmth.
We awoke Monday to Emma's birthday, so I took her next door for a birthday breakfast at Denny's.
We headed up to Arches National Park. It turned out that MLK day is also free National Park Day. I told Emma it was "Happy Birthday from America" and we drove on into the park.
Here's a bunch of photos of our morning in Arches (really wished I hadn't forgotten my polarized filter, sorry for all the wash-outs)
We left Arches National Park about 11:30 and blazed home. I had my laptop in the car so Emma was able to finish the rest of her homework on the drive. We got gas in Loma, Colorado and drove 316 miles straight from that point to our house. In spite of Denver traffic at rush hour we made it to the house by 6PM.
Emma discovered that the car had XM radio on the way home and found the Elvis station, which we listened to for over 5 solid hours. Thank you very much.
In the end, I put 1470 miles on the rental, we only kept a single bucket of rocks between us, and we had a time that I can't imagine either of us will ever forget.
Thanks for sticking with this marathon post!
She was excited about the possibility of finding red stromatolites as described by Dave:
forum.rocktumblinghobby.com/thread/63240/east-san-raphael-swell-stromatolites?page=1&scrollTo=720118
Well we found some and more!
The first night - Friday, we drove from Fort Collins, CO all the way to HWY 24 in Utah.
While we were driving I was excited to see the snow on the ground subside in Grand Junction Colorado. The moon was one night past full so the snow was easy to spot. Things took a turn for the worse as we entered Utah, however, and it seemed that there was more snow on the ground as we headed west. We pulled into Green River and got gas, and asked if the guy knew if there was much snow further west. He didn't, and I began planning a massive revision to our trip as I was thinking the whole place would be under snow.
I decided to check it out regardless, and just as we left town the snow just disappeared, like it just ended at Green River.
About 30 minutes later we were tucked in for the night in the back of the rented Toyota Sequoia. I had done the math and the expected mileage of the trip and cost of gas would have exceeded the cost for a rental that got better mileage so we rented and I was very glad we did.
In spite of 5" of foam and 0 degree (F) mummy bags we both had a hard time sleeping in the extreme cold. I don't know how cold it actually got but suffice it to say it was well below freezing.
The morning came and we reluctantly relinquished the warmth of our bags for the start of the day.
We were greeted by a beautiful landscape as the sun lit up the San Rafael Swell:
We ate some breakfast and sorted out our gear and started looking. We explored some creek beds and just found sandstone and very small pieces of red and orange jasper. After an hour of looking we wandered out of the creek bottom and onto some hills and suddenly there was red jasper everywhere.
Emma had a great time at this location, and we were picky about what we kept. Here she is finding large chunks, we kept following them until we found some pretty nice sized pieces. I found one nearly intact, about the size of a nerf football.
Here is one she threw back
and still more jasper on top of the hill
We found a lot of the geodes, mostly broken open, but many containing small calcite crystals. There were some with fibrous blue crystals that I have to assume were celestite. These weren't large terminated crystals like what I've seen at shows, but it was cool to find them regardless.
Here is one of Emma's here at home. I have more in the bucket carefully wrapped in paper, but I wanted to get this post out soon so I will update this post with more pics after I've gone through it
We wanted to see if we could find any other fossils, and since we've never managed to find any ammonites, we followed some crude directions to a town named Castle Dale up in Emery County. We headed west on I70 and I can't convey in words how breathtaking the view was as we drove. I took one pic once we left I70
We turned off the main road onto another at some point (following the GPS lady on the phone) and suddenly Emma exclaimed "There's a snake drawn on that rock back there!"
I hit the brakes and flipped a U-ie, and headed back to the parking area I had just passed, and sure enough we found petroglyphs!
The snake Emma spotted from the road
I don't know why it never crossed my mind, but it turned out there were places to see petroglyphs and pictographs all over San Rafael Country. We were fortunate to find a great tourist guidebook with maps and detailed descriptions, but I'll get to that later.
More petroglyphs and interesting graffiti
After 30 or so minutes we decided to get back on the road. Winter means short days and that played a big factor in our trip, we wanted to do a lot but we had to live with the short daylight. Another pic as we headed up HWY 10 toward Castle Dale, again the landscape was beautiful
Emma was having a blast. She loves being in places where there is a lot to be found and she loves riding and seeing new places
Well, as it turned out we didn't get any more photos of this day, but some important things happened. We hit the spot supposedly to find ammonites and found nothing. We looked around for 30 minutes or so and found no trace of anything ammonite related.
We stopped at a gas station in Castle Dale and after I got gas I asked the nice lady behind the counter if she knew of anywhere to find ammonite fossils. This is where it gets interesting. She hesitated and surprisingly said "well, yes" - I was a little surprised she knew what I meant. I asked if there was a problem with getting them. She said "yeah, they are about this big and you will have to dig them out of the dirt" and she held out her arms and touched her fingertips together to form a large circle.
I'll let that sink in.
I tried to contain myself as my bowels nearly let loose and my legs felt weak. I replied as calmly as I could "Oh, that's OK, we drove a long way so we don't mind a little digging" - she called her dad and got better directions and sent us on our way.
I'll save you the wait and go ahead and spill the beans on this, her memory (I found out later) was from her childhood, and the easy-to-find monster ammonites were all gone, long since picked over.
Her directions did get us to an interesting spot right at a major crossroads southeast of Cleveland, UT, and we did find evidence of ammonites. we were able to dig out some imprint plates from the rocks just off the major roads on BLM land there. Here are some small samples with ammonite prints, crinoid stems, and some other marine fossils:
But this was the big find of the trip for me. My largest animal fossil (piece) to date:
More angles
That ammonite, if intact, would have been one of her monsters.
We didn't find anything else anywhere nearly as exciting, although we found lots of small plate imprints and I even found a matched imprint/ammonite that is still buried and wrapped in the bucket (it's only a couple inches across)
While we were looking, this day and the next day when we returned, we started finding these interesting brown crystals on some of the fossilized mud balls
While we were at the gas station earlier, another local gentleman heard what we were looking for and he drew me a map back out to the same area we had looked at initially for ammonites and said we would find them. In spite of our lack of luck previously, we headed back to the spot we started at and looked for an hour before dark and still didn't find anything. There was an abundance of chalcedony on the ground, and if I wasn't already buried in more agate than I can possibly tumble we would have picked up several 5-gallon bucketfulls easily. This would have made good tumbling material.
We had dinner in Castle Dale and then headed toward Salina, where we hoped to get a good night's sleep and look for wonderstone the next morning. We ended up staying in a hotel which was a good decision, as it was much colder in Salina and we hadn't slept well the night before.
We awoke to a very cold morning Sunday. We had a little breakfast and then followed directions from a book to the National Forest area to look for wonderstone. We very quickly got into snow, and it got worse as we went. I was so bummed I didn't take any photos, although the area was very pretty. We'd driven 1.5 hours out of our way (3 hours total drive) to get to this and it was buried in snow. The ledge the material came from was well excavated and showed no sign of the orange, red and black stone. My suspicion is that this is all gone. There are supposed to be other veins in the vicinity and perhaps if one could explore of find a loose-gummed local there might still be some to be found, but it wouldn't have mattered for us, the snow pretty much made it impossible. We hiked around a little and on our way back to the truck found bear tracks in the snow. They weren't fresh but it did motivate us to head out.
We drove back up to the ammonite spot, with a plan to look for a while and then head to other spots for viewing petroglyphs and pictographs. The tourism brochure taught us that pictographs are painted onto the rock and petroglyphs are scratched/carved.
We tried an area a little north of where we had looked the prior evening, covered in large boulders, most of which were weathered and broken, but all appeared to have started as large spheres
There were all sizes of spheres, some as small as a softball, the ones just coming out of the dirt were intact, most were broken and they got progressively larger, the largest of which (that we found) was pictured previously.
We found some of the brown crystals I showed previously here, but no real fossils to speak of. We broke some of the more weathered pieces down a bit but unlike the plates we found the previous day we did't find any embedded shells.
We decided to call it quits around 2 PM and head toward the Buckhorn Canyon Pictograph Panel. This was the highlight of our trip. We found numerous pictographs and petroglyphs following the guide. Again the drive there was beautiful
And the canyon did not disappoint
We didn't drive all the way down, and instead headed back the way we came to investigate another landmark, "The Wedge" - described to us as Utah's miniature Grand Canyon.
A beautiful drive
We got into a bunch of junipers on top of the plateau, which created a nice change in scenery, even though I didn't get many photos. I was racing the sunlight so I kept a pretty fast pace.
We arrived in time to see the canyons and they were beautiful. Very easy to access although the drive in seemed to go on forever once you entered the area.
After thoroughly enjoying the view of The Wedge, we headed back to the intersection where we hoped to find any more ammonites. We did manage to get several small plates and started finding more imprints, but by that time the sun had set and the cold air was descending so we decided to call an end to our rock hounding and head back east.
We drove all the way to Moab Sunday night. I had been trying to get a photo of the night sky, but as it turned out my camera/lens combo has some problem that causes a red band to form on the right side of the image.
I did manage to get one passable photo, not what I was hoping for and including some light from Green River, but I'm happy nonetheless
We spent Sunday night in a motel again, and were grateful for the warmth.
We awoke Monday to Emma's birthday, so I took her next door for a birthday breakfast at Denny's.
We headed up to Arches National Park. It turned out that MLK day is also free National Park Day. I told Emma it was "Happy Birthday from America" and we drove on into the park.
Here's a bunch of photos of our morning in Arches (really wished I hadn't forgotten my polarized filter, sorry for all the wash-outs)
We left Arches National Park about 11:30 and blazed home. I had my laptop in the car so Emma was able to finish the rest of her homework on the drive. We got gas in Loma, Colorado and drove 316 miles straight from that point to our house. In spite of Denver traffic at rush hour we made it to the house by 6PM.
Emma discovered that the car had XM radio on the way home and found the Elvis station, which we listened to for over 5 solid hours. Thank you very much.
In the end, I put 1470 miles on the rental, we only kept a single bucket of rocks between us, and we had a time that I can't imagine either of us will ever forget.
Thanks for sticking with this marathon post!