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This week we found ourselves headed for Carbon County, PA and looked up some places to go hunting. St. Clair was out, but there were some references to Carbondale here and there. As the name suggests, Carbondale was a coal mining town. There are active and inactive areas all over town, much of it fossiliferous. The most popular spot seems to be the one we went to, a tailings pile next to an apartment complex off of Westside Rd. The land status is unknown, but there were was nothing posted, so we ventured in as many have done before us. Our directions said to follow the gravel path between the third and fourth buildings on the right, then bear left and continue to the en of the ravel road, where you'd see a "mountain of tailings." When we parked, I looked from side to side for a pile I expected to be maybe the size of a van. From behind me, I hear my husband say, "Oh, that mountain of tailings." I looked from side to side. No, her told me, look straight ahead and up. Oh! It was indeed a mountain! The pile loomed above the rich grove. How did I miss that? (On a return trip a couple days later, I noticed it also loomed over the apartments!) A narrow trail leads through the woods to a meadow and a bare section of wall just asking to be explored. April was the perfect time to go as all the weeds were down from the winter snows and not yet regrowing much. The trees growing from the wall itself provided just enough footing for me to climb without sliding back down - until I wanted to. Whee! Once I reached the wall, it took me only seconds to spot my first bit of Calamities bark, and then another, and then a complete, 3D stalk section! After about an hour of searching I spotted a limb sticking put of the fine slate crumbs and pulled it out. It was a chunk of Calamites stalk as big as my outstretched hand. I spent a total of about 5 hours over two days scrabbling across a sheer wall of loose shale. Ferns! Leaves! Roots! Seeds! Bark of all different textures! Some of the ferns were incredibly detailed. One had all the miniscule veins outlined in red (pyrite?), while others were just extremely fine impressions in the grey rock. As it turns out, the gravel road itself runs across an overgrown tailings pile. Here and there you can find exposed rock, including bark plates bigger than dinner dishes! After spending what felt like an hour on day 2 (It turned out to be three hours!!!) I decided it was time for lunch and slid down the hill like a little kid. There at the base of the hill, was mu find for the week: a whole section of tree(?) trunk with bark all the way around the specimen. It was lying alone in the woods on some leaves, just waiting for someone to wander off the beaten path. I debated about bringing it home. It was so big! Hubby was snoozing on a nearby rock. Rocks are not his thing and bringing home piles of them doubly so, but he is so sweet that he picked that heavy thing up before I could blink and carried it to the car himself. He's a keeper! It will take quite some time to photograph all my treasures, but I will post in the comments here when I have an album together.

Family vacations include just my wife and I now that the "kids" are grown and married, and these days the two of us are happy to plan our trips around fossil sites. A couple of weeks ago we drove down to New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania, stopping at Big Brook, coastal New Jersey, Calvert Cliffs, St. Clair, Beltzville Park region and Carbondale. It was a great trip. We didn't make any startling discoveries, and the scientific community won't have to rethink any evolutionary theories after our expedition, but we enjoyed ourselves immensely. On our drive south we stopped for only an hour at Big Brook. We'd been there several times before and we always look forward to it. We didn't have time to stray too far from the parking area but we did a little sifting with quarter-inch screens and made a few small finds. The mammal tooth is modern, not fossilized. I think it's deer. We found a few small shark teeth, the usual belemnite pieces and concretions of all shapes and sizes. We tend to pick up anything that looks like something, but we weren't there long enough collect very much. Our malibu barely noticed the weight. ................ We drove to the shore and enjoyed a few days just walking the beaches and marshes of Brigantine, New Jersey, not searching for fossils, just enjoying the sea and the migrating birds. I did come across what I think is a bit of fossil coral. I could be wrong. It seemed out of place there but just about anything can wash up on an ocean beach. ..... After a few days of R&R in NJ we drove down to Solomons, Maryland, where we stayed a couple of nights and toured the friendly and informative Calvert Marine Museum. It's small but bigger on the inside, with some excellent displays of fossils. Very kid - friendly and also very professional. We had planned on visiting Flag Ponds the next day but ended up at Matoaka instead. It was a cold and damp and I was glad we didn't book space in one of the old wooden cabins. They reminded me of places I stayed with the Scouts as a kid. It was a blast back then but I'm afraid my aching bones are too old for them now. We met the 95-year-old owner who was helpful and friendly. The young woman in the office was equally friendly, let us use the "facilities" in one of the cabins, and showed us the way to the beach. The strand lines along the narrow beach were full of broken shells, most of them eroded from the cliffs. We collected some miocene scallop shells, along with smaller molluscs and some good-looking barnacles (if you can say that about barnacles), but we didn't see any shark teeth on the surface. We screened along the water line for awhile, and found a few small teeth and quite a few nice pieces of coral. I filled my backpack with chunks of clay that had fallen out of the cliffs, to check for any small shells or micros, someday. The car bounced along the dirt road without any real problems. ... On our way to Pennsylvania the next day, we first stopped at Brownies Beach, a little further north along the Calvert Cliffs. We arrived at a very low tide and the beach was beautiful. We mostly scanned along the shoreline as we walked the beach, and occasionally stopped to sift a little. My wife found one nice shark tooth, maybe Carcharias sp?, but I didn't have much luck just scanning the surface. We were happy just walking along the beach and admiring the cliffs and the scenery, and occasionally stopped to pick up a few fossil shells. I brought back some more clay to look through later. (To be continued ... )