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Like the title says... it's a bit on the crammed agenda for only two days. But not if you don't sleep. lol! Old people don't need all that much sleep anyway, so I've found out. Tuesday the 2nd of April I was up in the foothills above Salt Lake City checking out the Anasibirites Bed in the Triassic Thaynes Formation. Wednesday, I'm packing up my camera gear for a session of astrophotography in The Last Chance Desert between Green River and Salina, Utah. Not only is Utah full fossils, it's also renowned for it's beautiful dark skies at night...but only way out in the desert. We have light pollution like anywhere else in the urban environment and just an hour or two we have Bortle Class 1 dark skies. The scale goes from 1 to 9, 9 being like Tokyo and1 being in a desert, ocean or unpopulated, unlit location. Fishing, Astrophotography and Fossils are my big three personal interests among many others. Wife and family are always first but balance in ones life is also a good thing. Enough rambling. Packed the gear for fossils and stars, food, drink, personal safety gear, eye drops ( gotta have it in a dusty desert ) gassed up the Element and I'm off. Never gets boring scenery. Heading over the summit pass @ 7500 feet. First stop was a previous site, Garley Canyon, which was barely thawing the ice and snow with plenty of mud. This time it was dry and I turned in to look for the orange outcrops containing ammonites. Had to visit one of my favorite cacti - Scelerocactus vivipara - the small flowered fishhook cactus. This is an exemplary specimen. Usually BLM land have so many open range cattle that they get squished before growing up. I drove around looking for those orange mounds of possibilities. All the way to the cliff. Not sure what this was besides guessing and worth a photo. Nice, HUGE, slab of inchnofossils, which I left in place. I drove around and did not quite hit the spots where the orange outcropping were to be found. The website I researched had been posted back in 2009 and with time the jeep trails were much rougher and washed away. I also had a timeline to catch a museum before its closure at 4 pm. This canyon and the orange outcroppings weren't going anywhere and miles to go before I don't sleep this night. Second stop is a rockhound mecca. Septarianville also known as the Dragon Egg Nest. Supposedly the only location with red interior septarian nodules. The more common variants are yellowish calcite interiors. We have a nice yellow one and my wife gave the green light for a nice red one to go with it. Here's the turnoff sign. I go down the gravel road a few miles and spot the sign...hmmm.. the sign is a little worse for wear than the online pic and the site is deserted. No tents, no big excavator, no tourists/visitors. I called the number - no answer. The web says open until 8 pm. I'll be following up on this later. They probably have a summer season only. IDK. The site courtesy the big eye in the sky. What the red ones look like. There is online a blogger's site where he drove one mile past this site to find large ammonites in concretions weathered out of the hills nearby. So I find said hills and start checking out the likely spots. It's a dead end road with hills...I couldn't miss it. And I didn't. However there are a lot of hills, ravines, climbing and hiking around and the concretions are few a far between. In fact, I'm not seeing any at all. So on to the next hill. Ahhh! I see a few which have been hammered open. The usual suspects inside. Bivalves, gastropods and some evidence of small ammos. I checked every broken concretion carefully, as I had found at other sites that more than a few keeper fossils were overlooked. Not this time. Just lots of crumbled concretions with many being calcite veined only and Inoceramus bivalves along with gastropods were all I found. Where were the reputed "large ammonites" ?!? Here's a sample of the few concretions found. In the center of this piece I noticed a olive shaped smooth fossil shell. With a little, lite taps I and put this & another into my empty bucket. I believe I found samples of Birgella subglobosa or B. burchi. Not sure. Daylight was waning and I had 50 miles to get deeper into the desert for the evening under the stars. Along the hike back to my car. I noticed a few surface finds of trace fossils. I collected the first one. The sun set in the west as it does and in the east a celestial phenomena occurred; The Belt of Venus appeared. It only lasts a short while so my image captures were spontaneous cell shots out of the window as I drove. On to the desert astrophotography destination. An early evening image before the Milky Way rose in the wee hours between 2 and 5 AM. Jupiter, Orion the Hunter and the Pleiades are heading south for the summer. And the Milky Way season is ON! A rare mud puddle added some interest in the reflection of the stars. A short nap between 12 and 2 and then between 230 and 5 I captured many images of the Milky Way galaxy. Afterwards, another short nap and back to the fossil hunting. First stop, the Castle Dale museum, second stop the Jurassic National Monument, third stop meeting new friends and sharing the excitement of finding amazing ammonites. I also have an interest in ancient American pottery and craft replicas of this type of pottery using locally found clay, slips, organic and mineral paints, primitive tools and outdoor firing techniques used by those original potters. This specimen is from the same location where I collected mine late last year on one of my earliest fossil hunts. And I'm going to post this now to not overload the thread with MB's of images. Next up is the Jurassic National Monument and a few pics of the ammonites found after visiting the Cleveland-Lloyd dinosaur quarry. Steve