Leslie and David's Wanderings: 8 June 2019 Fish Fossils?

The weather in the Jackson area was going to cold, wet, and possibility of snow. So we decided to backtrack to southwestern Wyoming to visit Fossil Butte National Monument. It was a 3 hour drive down from Jackson. The first part of the drive was through beautiful forested canyon and the last half of the drive was across open high prairie that had its own beauty along with not a tree in sight! Once we arrived at Fossil Butte NM, we went to the visitor center to start. Our research had indicated there were only 2 short hiking trails and a short road through the park. We collected our 38^thPassport Stamp, explored the fossil exhibits, and watched the park movie. While talking to the ranger, we over heard one person talking to another ranger about the Nature Trail saying the only nature they saw was a caterpillar. Then another came up who had just hiked the Old Quarry trail and had not seen any signs of fossils. That, combined with a cold blowing wind, convinced us we did not need to hike in this NM. We actually enjoyed the fossil exhibits more than we expected. This area had been a lake 50 million years ago, and plants and aquatic animals (turtles, fish, alligators) lived and died in the lake. Their remains preserved in the lake bottom as silt covered the remains and over time the layers were compressed into limestone. The lake silt layer is over 300 feet thick, but the majority of the fossils are found in an 18 inch layer that covered roughly 1000 years. Most of the fossils in the NM were recovered by commercial fossil hunters prior to the formation of the NM (which made us wonder what was being “protected” by the NM). Many of the rare fossils were sold to museums. There are still commercial fossil quarries in the area that sell to private and public collectors. One interesting exhibit at the visitor center was watching a ranger cleaning a fossil. He used a miniature power driver to chip the limestone away until close to the bone, then he used a miniature sand blaster using iron fillings to take the remaining rock off. Very delicate work. One small fish fossil can take up to 60 hours to clean. With weather moving in, we decided to head back. On the way down we came down the eastern side of the mountain range, and on the way back we went up the western side. We even dipped into Idaho for 3-4 miles (our 16^thstate since we left Fort Worth). We ran into some snow, sleet, rain and high winds on the way back but nothing that really slowed us down.