Warfield Fossils

I drove out a long dirt & gravel road to the Warfield Fish Fossils quary (the only way to get there). It took about 20 minutes to reach the quary site. After paying $75 for a full day's dig they gave me an orientation and instructions on how to find the fish fossils. The young attendant and I split off a thick slab of shale that I would start working on.

I used a hammer and chisels to split the rock in layers to locate the fish fossils and get them into a small piece of rock without breaking them, which is easier said than done. Here you can see two partially exposed fish on different layers in the slab that I started to split. I had to split that again many times to get my fish.

Here are a few examples of what I found:

It started raining very hard about 2:00 and there was no sign of it letting up, so I decided to quit early instead of staying to the 4:00 quiting time. I was concerned about my ability to get back out to the highway if the roads got too muddy. It was a challenge to navigate the muddy roads because the mud is sticky and coats your tires. I had to stop and get out to scrape mud from the tires and tire wells so that I could continue. The weather cleared soon after I left the quary, but I was satisfied with all of my finds, and I wanted time to drive out to the Fossil Butte National Monument, about 10 miles west of Kemmerer.