Montana and Fossils

All right. I'm back from Montana. I'm very tired. I returned with some seventy pounds of agates, petrified wood, and fossilized sea creatures, and I've also developed a temporary pathological fear of our car or driving in general which I'm hoping will wear off soon.

For those who aren't on facebook, here's what I've been up to the past few days, and why I wasn't able to post this past Saturday:

My dad, my brother and I have been planning a trip to Montana for awhile now. Our goal was to find fossils, which, in retrospect, seems to be what all my family vacations are centered around. The badlands of eastern Montana are perfect sites for digging; the bluffs are filled with untold treasures from millions of years ago, and long exposure to wind has eroded the scruffy prairie grass and the thin topsoil to reveal the sediment where one might find these fossils. However, neither my dad nor I knew exactly where to look, so we enlisted the help of our friend Ward Olson to help.

Ward Olson

Ward is a character. He is an old friend that my dad met when he was studying paleontology in school. The man's only a little taller than me, gray-haired, built like a compact little gorilla, and wears clothing that looks like it should have rotted off him years ago. His formerly black hair and beard (now gray) were what originally earned him his nickname 'the troll'. After driving twelve hours through Minnesota, North Dakota, and half of Montana to get to a little, two by four-block town called Rosebud, we were supposed to meet him at a post office on the edge of town at 4:00. He wasn't there. He was expecting us at 6:00, thinking we'd be unable to get moving in time.

Darrell and Carol--Pacing out tipi rings

We eventually gave up on Ward and instead set about looking for Darrell, the man whose yard we were going to be camping in. We managed to get a hold of him, and found his house on the edge of town next to a little marsh.
Darrell, and his girlfriend Carol, turned out to be two of the nicest people we could have hoped for. Darrell is an artifacts collector; He's part Cheyenne Native American, and has dedicated his life to finding and protecting ancient Native American sites and artifacts. During the entire course of the trip, he gave us a running history lesson on all the places we visited--mostly related to the battle of Little Big Horn--and showed us his collections of artifacts that he'd acquired over the years. He had everything from arrowheads, effigies, photographs of medicine sites, to bridle bits from Custer's cavalry, and he told us stories about how he found these things and what they meant. We stayed up for hours after Ward finally arrived, and it was late when we finally flopped down on our sleeping bags out in the tent and dropped off to sleep.
The next day, Darelll took us out to a private ranch that he routinely combed for artifacts and directed us towards a dried-out river bed that looked like it only ran when there was a lot of rain. Ward, Darrell and Carol were gone over the ridge in a heartbeat, while my dad, my brother and I set out more slowly along the bottom of the bed, our eyes glued to the ground. At first, we didn't find much--a few oyster shells and some squiggly rocks that could have been sections from an ammonite--but once we figured out what we were looking for, we began encountering thick patches of exposed sediment and rubble, which, when dug through, yielded what looked like squished sections of tube divided by squiggly leaf patterns:

After we met up again with Ward, we found out that they were something called Bacculites, a genus of cephalopods from the late Cretaceous. What we were finding were the shells, some of which still had the original mother-of-pearl outer shell covering the fossilized rock underneath. In life, the tentacles and eyes of the animal would have jutted out one end, like a nautilus, resembling a squid or an octopus with a shell. I found enough of these things to fill my little blue fossil bag, and Ward, when he came back, was waddling on account of all the rocks stuffed in his pockets. He'd found a lot of bacculites as well, along with another species of ammonite called Placenticeras--also from the Late Cretaceous--which developed in a spiraling whorl with segmented chambers on the inside. We found one too, but ours was broken.

Buffalo

Once we were all back together, Darrell asked us if we wanted to see some ancient Native American petroglyphs that he'd discovered on a bluff just south of where we'd been searching. As if he needed to ask. He drove us up, and we climbed  the side of the sandstone bluff to where the pictures were etched into the rock--a buffalo, a bear, a man with a shield, and elk hooves--along with the carved graffiti from dozens of kids who'd decided to add their names to history...right over the petroglyphs. There once were other glyphs up there, but Darryl said they'd been either worn away by time or cracked off the surface of the rock by sliding chunks of sandstone. It's odd to think that one day, even the ones that are still there will be gone.

After the glyphs, we ended the day by picking agates along a river not far from Darryl's place. There wasn't a lot at first, because we were searching in places that other people had already combed, but once we moved to the harder to reach spots, we began finding Montana moss agates and petrified wood by the handfuls. Between me, my brother, and my dad, we probably collected a good fifty pounds.

Agate picking--Eli in front

It rained that night, and so on Monday, we decided that it would be our last day; we didn't want to set up a wet tent that night. After packing up and saying goodbye to Carol, we left with Darrell and Ward for a little town called Glendive. From there, we turned off to the south and bumped our way along a crushed-shale road that wound through exposed hills and the oil-drilling sites that had been set up out there. It stank of petrol whenever we rolled down the windows. Neither Ward nor Darrell knew exactly where we were going (not exactly the most encouraging thing when your guide drives down a dead-end, stops, and then turns around and goes back), but eventually we ended up at the top of a hill looking down on a burnt-out cedar forest and patches of exposed black shale. Arming ourselves with rock hammers and bags, we set off down the hill.

Ammonite

We hit our stride there. What we found were dozens of large, lumpy balls of fossilized mud which, when smashed open with a rock hammer, proved to be full of clumps of fossilized clam shells. That was interesting at first, and we stuffed our bags with these things, but about a hundred feet beyond our first big find, we stumbled across a vein of rubble that was filled with ammonites--genus Scaphites. We quickly dumped the less impressive clams and began working on the ammonites. By the time we were done, my bag felt like it weighed three hundred pounds, and my jaw actually hurt from the strain on my neck and shoulders. We tramped back up to the top of the ridge tired but very much satisfied, and said our goodbyes to Ward and Darryl at the top. We then had a Ward adventure.

 Anyone who knows him has been through something like this before.We'd been doing pretty good for the majority of the trip, mostly by staying on our toes and listening to Darrell rather than Ward, but we let our guard drop just a little bit towards the end.
"It's only 18 miles from here to Baker," was what he told us. Instead of following our tracks back and heading for Glendive, Ward decided that it would be quicker for us to continue on towards a town called Baker, from whence we could hop onto the interstate and be on our way home. "18 miles from here to Baker" was not the case when we set out. It was an hour and a half later, when we'd gone about forty miles south of where we needed to be, and we'd ended up asking for directions from an oil rig worker (the only other living soul out there). When we got to Baker, we discovered that we were another hour south of the interstate, and had to navigate our way back to Glendive in order to get back on the interstate. We cheered heartily when we hit paved road again. From Glendive, it was another eight hours back home, most of which was done in the dark. I've never been so glad to see home in my life.

Here's to the troll, and to adventures in the future--may they ever be unexpected.

Happy reading!

S.R. Koch



Keep watch for the next post--we found something very unexpected in the final spot we searched, and my plan is to do a full Things From the Shelf post once I've done all the research.