Friday, August 3, 2007
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Kemmerer to Lander WY
I also found pieces of rock with turitella fossils in it:
I headed back to town for lunch in the only restaurant in town. I decided to have a steak sandwich, expecting something like I would get in LA, about the size of my open hand, about 1/4" thick served open face. What I got was a 10 ounce steak the size of two open hands, 1/2" thick served with 2 small pieces of garlic bread to make it qualify as a sandwich. It also came with a huge basket of onion rings. It was outstanding! I ate it all!
Next I drove next door to a world famous ice cream place that my geology buddies have raved about, that claims to have the largest ice cream cones in the world.
Luckily for my waist line, they had a sign on the door that they were closed for remodeling and would be open again on July 27, 2007. It was July 27th, but clearly construction delays are common in Wyoming too.
I then proceeded up Highway 191 to a gravel road leading south a short distance to a site where I found petrified palm rootThen I continued on towards Lander Wyoming, passing over the Continental Divide. Going down the mountain I passed a fabulous enormous red sandstone canyon, called Red Canyon, but the road was to steep and busy for me to stop for a picture.
That afternoon we had some rain in Lander and there was a bid double rainbow off to the east
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Fossil Butte
Warfield Fossils
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.