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Today I went on the E.S.C.O.N.I. (Earth Science Club Of Northern Illinois) fossil collecting trip for Mazon Creek concretions to the Braceville Shaft Mine in Braceville, Illinois. It was a great day for the trip since it had rained recently and exposed a lot of concretions that made surface collecting great, that coupled with great overcast skies and temps in the upper 60's. It was a great day had by all and there must have been hundreds of concretions collected. Here is are a couple Aerial shots of the Shaft Mine. We met at 8 am and most people stayed until 2 pm. Most of the participants, about 40, have been to this site before and new what they were looking for. It great to see people drive as far away as Wisconsin and leave with some nice concretions. A couple hours into collecting, buckets of open concretions were dumped out so the participants could search through the pile and pull out what ever caught their fancy. I brought 3 bucket full of stuff to dump and Rich @stats brought a bucket full and I believe one other person brought some. Here are people from the group searching for some open concretions- there were concretions from Braceville, Pit 11(Essex Biota) and Pit 4 (Braidwood Biota) in the pile. It was great to meet Rich and a couple other Fossil Forum members-Ben @deutscheben and @Lisa102 or as she calls herself "Mud Girl"- . I know that their were other members in attendance, but I am notoriously bad at names and I apologize in advance. I usually never get in pictures, but I thought why not today- it was good day. Here I am with Rich @stats I am the one with the Snoopy bandana- I usually wear that on most fossil trips, but always backpacking, it is like a good luck charm. Here I am with Ben @deutscheben . Here is Lisa @Lisa102 , you can see why she calls herself "Mud Girl"- I give her huge "Props", she was always high up on the spoil pile and collecting some really nice concretions. I know this is Andy, but do not know his FF Tag. I am now going to group the rest of my pictures into 3 topics and I will start with pictures of the area. If you look at the first 2 pics, you can see pieces of boards sticking out, these are remnants of the mine (late 1890's ?) and maybe some trackways the were used by mules to pull out carts. One member found a horseshoe today that would have belonged to a mule. In years past, I also found similar horseshoes and old bottles. You get to the top by going up these gullies. It is important to look for concretions as you go up, because the rain causes them to roll down from the top- it is as just important to look for them on the way down, since a different perspective reveals more.