So Soon?

It's over, I'm going back to California. This great "see america" trip is over and I never even got past Arizona. The one thing that I hadden't counted on has happened; the one thing that I didn't have some sort of contingency for: I got a job. I am now a paleontological monitor for SWCA Inc., an environmental consulting firm that makes sure that developement plans follow state and federal regulations for the preservation of the environment. My duty will be to dodge bulldozers and look for ancient marine mammals and other fossils in the Monterey formation. This is somehwat bittersweet because I'm not yet going to visit alot of the places or people that I had hoped that I would, but when an opportunity comes along, an ambitious individual doesn't let it go by because of mild personal inconvenience or discomfort.

Lots of Luck

I'd like to preface this post by saying that I am a man with alot of luck. Alot of it is good, and alot of it is bad, but there always seems to be alot of it.
Those of you who know me, likely know that I would much rather be too hot than too cold. There are a number of possible reasons for this, but my current favorite is that I've never been so hot that I couldn't find some way to cool off, but I have been cold and completely unable to warm myself. This last week I was prospecting in a section of the keyenta formation near Willow Spring. As far as I have been able to tell, there is only one ridge in the area that allows access up and down out of the outcrop, and on my third day at this locality I couldn't find it. What follows, as with the previous post, is a brief synopsis of my thoughts throughout one of the worst nights that I've spent in recent memory. Continue

7:00 Okay, that definately wasn't the right ridge to take, now I'm at the base of the cliffs. Okay, maybe I'll be able to get up one of these side canyons. I haven't explored this area, there might be a way up here.
7:20 Dead end, [insert explitive here]! Start climbing, I can see a way up, it's steep but it looks maneagable
7:35 Scrubala! This isn't a way up! [insert lots more explitives here]. I just climbed up this steep god damned slope, scraped myself up and pulled myself to the top of the ridge, and there's a cliff that I didn't even see! It's only 12 feet of smooth sandstone, but it might as well be 200, I can't climb it. Okay, find a way down and try to get back to the good ridge.
7:50 Badlands are a bad place to be running around. Go faster, you're momentum will keep you going forward and hold you to the substrate when running along curves in walls. Run! Fast! Go! God Damn! Everything's blending together. I can hardly see ridges anymore, it's just bands in this low light! Run! Think! Where the hell is it. It's a ridge with a single plateau with another ridge with 4 plateaus directly to the north of it. Go!
8:00 Sunset! God Damn it [Insert expletives in every language you know]. RUN, GO! GOD DAMN IT! Where the hell is it! I'm going to have to go to a landmark I know and find myway back the long way. Follow the ridges out to the main plateau and then go up the appropriate canyon. Remember, Keep going North whenever possible.
8:20 Okay, going over ridges crosways isn't safe anymore. Keep going, as fast as you can. I'm really pulling off some wicked stunts here. I'd never have tried that jump if this wasn't an emergency, and I've never actually run horizontally on a wall before. Go faster.
8:30. [Dark] Keep going North, always north. I can't see much anymore.
8:45 [Darker] What's this? The fence at the plateau. That means I'm there! That also means that there is a virticle drop of more than 50 feet imediately to my left. Keep right, Keep going north, up this canyon. The GPS unit is useless. I can see where I need to be, but not how to get there. During the day I'd just go over some ridges and get there in a nearly straight line. [Make up new explitives to insert here].
9:15 Can't see my feet at all. I can see my hand okay: it's the silouete against the stars, but my feet are gone and so is the ground. Keep going. Stumble. Go. [forget the expletives, there not doing any good]
9:30 [looking at an overhang cut into the rock by a meander in the stream bed] This will have to do for shelter. It's not much, but it's something.

I layed down in the curve of the rock. At first I tried to hide my face in my hands, my stomach pressed agains the rock. I fit better though if I faced outwards, towards the oncoming cold. Supper was three packets of honey. For the next 8 hours my thoughts were pretty simple. Occasionally, I reflected on how the day had begun, by my testing the myth that if you squeeze an egg evenly it won't break. It broke and I had to change out of my egg covered pants into my relatively clean shorts. I was going to be stuck out there on the day that I'd worn shorts. Besides my shoes, my only other insulation was a t-shirt, a light overshirt and my felt hat. I was dressed for keeping heat off, not in. By ten o'clock I was shivering. At several points throughout the night I stopped shivering and I wondered whether I was actually warmer or if I'd just run out of energy. I tried to sleep but the shivering kept me awake most of the night. I may have gotten an hour of shut-eye the whole night. I thought about the remark that a friend once made, that it would make good tv to have a camera crew follow me around on my travels. This would be great TV. The camera guy would be obligated by some journalistic code not to help me.
What occupied my mind most was the irony of it all. I got a new back-pack a couple of weeks ago and I completely forgot to take the emergency pack out of my old bag and but it into the new one. I own a thermally insulative foil blanket, dry chemical heat packs, candles, matches and protein bars that are old and disgusting but nutritive; all of it back at camp. I'd even taken a pair of wool gloves out of my bag that morning.
To better insulate myself, I dug myself into the sand. Twisting my body, sand was pushed out and I sank a little further. Shiver, dig, shiver, dig. I reburried myself with loose sand. There is now a perfect Will-shaped depression under a rock somewhere in the painted desert of Arizona.
Under normal conditions it would have only taken me half an hour to fourty five minutes to cover the remaining distance. Leaving at sunrise, it took me 2 hours to reach my camp. Once there, I ate heartily and went to sleep. That was a day of rest. I slept fitfully until mid afternoon and did soduku till going to bed for the night.
I hate the cold. Just for the record, it got down to about 40 F that night.

'Tis Madness

I was suffering from schizophrenia¹, then I went insane.

There is a pathogen out there that can take you from normal health to delerious sickness and back in under nine hours. I don't know if it's viral or bacteriological, but I suspect that it's contageous.

Last night I dreamt that I was geology, the strata itself. I was being deposited in streams and rivers. Deep red mud. I was burried, uplifted, faulted, melted, lithified. All felt at once. I saw my history before me; moving events superimposed over each other.
I opened my eyes and then I was two simultaneously, the rock and the man. The hermit and the hermit shale formation. No man is an island. I was a flood plain. I couldn't move except in shutters, spasms; faulting, earthquakes. I yearned for original orizontality, but I was tilted. It's been a long time since I wished so hard for a cold lenolium floor and a toilet to curl around the base of. I needed to throw up, a crevass splay. I needed to eat in order to throw up. Sediment in, sediment out; deposition and erosion.

My shoulders hurt, my knees hurt. I scratched myself, bloody, hematite leatching out. My flesh rotted and I palpated my bones. Fossils encased in the strata. I was full of footprints. The hermit shale, pennsylvanian in age, broken by a nearby volcanic dome, a massive anticline. I was carved by the Grand Canyon: my throat burned, etched by my own acids, a volcanic intrusion. I feared sleep, the way that I fear sleep when I've drunken too much; fiercely, terrified. If I slept, I'd be the stone and not the man. Ancient tides washed over me, I was burried in sand; the coconino sandstone was burying me. I slept.

Some people pay good money for trips like that. I'm okay now. I'm a bit sore from all the shaking I did, but the madness is gone.

1. Schizophrenia as in being of two minds about something, not as in the actual clinical condition.

What, no stega?

It may take a particular kind of person to apreciate this, but I think that a new Devonian sarcopterigian fish is actually kind of cute, if not adorable by fossil fish standards¹. Perhaps most important is that it isn't a dark grey smear on a dull grey rock (or affectionately known as a Smudgeichthys).
It's a great specimen, but I do have a problem with the name that it was givin. The name is perfectly valid, it just won't make things any easier for students of paleontology. The creatures that students typically memorize as transitional between fish and amphibians are Eusthenopteron, Ventostega, Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. The new fish has been dubbed Tiktaalik roseae. Tiktaalik is from the Inuit word for a large freshwater fish and roseae refers to someone who fronted the money for the expedition to Ellesmere Island.

1. Fleshed out, the creature was probably much more fearsome and ugly than cute and it likely tasted like shark meat.

Continued Adventures in AZ

How strong is your education? Even a small part of mine can hold up a car. I'll explain: The first of the events of the last couple of weeks was a flat tire in the middle of the desert. Changing the tire was one big, long lesson in the benefits of redundancy. First of all, it was a good thing that I had a spare tire; second, it was fortunate that I had a spare jack since the first one couldn't withstand the weight of the van and snapped like a steel trap. No fingers were lost but itcertainly didn't do anything to improve my calm. Also, in order to actually hold up the car while I put some boards under the new jack, I found out that a stack of books is really effective. I just now have two deep grooves in the gover of the top book.


the broken Jack.








Thankfully, this was the most major setback I had during the entire two week period. The only other setback was the fact that I spent the first week in an area completely devoid of body fossils. I base where I go searching on data from UC Berkeley's paleo collection database. According to that database, a bonebed containing thousands of specimens was excavated at this particular locality. If there was a bonebed there, then it contained the only fossils around, since I didn't find a single shard of bone for the 7 days I was there. Not only that, but there were only two or three small pieces of petrified wood in an area covering several square miles.
The consolation however came on day 4 when I started to find dinosaur footprints. In all, I found 9 sites with dinosaur prints or trackways; most of them at the edge of the cliff. Furthermore, I also got to do some spelunking, as I found several caves that had entrances large enough for me to crawl through. When I say crawl, I seriously mean it. Those of you who went to Tumbler ridge last summer might remember that I was squeemish about crawling through the smaller exit of the cave that we visited there. Therefore, in light of my claustrophobia, it should surpise you that I was able to do any caving at all. Below, you will find some of the photos of that experience, plus an obligatory ass shot.
While at this site I also saw a bit more wild life than I'd previously encountered, including a golden eagle, a porquepine, chipmunks, rabbits, various passerine birds, and heard (though I never saw) distant coyotes.






After finding nothing but caves and ichnofossils for a week, I moved camp and started exploring a valley that was a bit further to the Northeast. There I had a bit more luck. I found a number of micro sites containing weathered bone and teeth. 11 sites contained whole or partial teeth and I collected a large number of broken bone material that I intend to piece together like a puzzle some time in the future. I was also able to collect two nearly complete cow skeletons that had been bleached in the desert sun. I didn't find any bullet, but I'm sure that these animals didn't die naturally. They were only a few feet apart and showed no broken bones or signs of having died in any kind of a flooding event.
The plan is to get my tire fixed, re-supply and check out one last sight near here. I've been saving it for last since it is likely the hardest to get to and there is no way I'm going to venture over over (and off) roads that the USGS recommends 4 wheel drive for (incidentally, the van only has rear wheel drive, but that won't stop me) without a spare tire.