Search the Community

Friends of ours had their daughter come to visit for the holidays. She likes to rockhound and collect crystals and pan for gold back in the Seattle area where she lives and was eager to try the experience of fossil hunting in the Peace River. The weather (and river level) was looking good till a few days back when that huge mass of unstable air over the southeastern US unleashed torrents of rain. In fact, we were kidding Kelly that it was her presence here that brought the Seattle weather. She had a red-eye flight into Fort Lauderdale airport a few days back and on the morning of her arrival, the FLL airport received 4.5 inches of rain in an hour--shutting down the airport due to runways that were under water! Her flight was diverted to Miami but the airline she was on does not normally fly to MIA and there were no gates nor attendants to great the flight. They sat on the tarmac for 3.5 hours till they could find someone to unload the plane. Of course, they couldn't manage to unload the luggage at Miami and so the plane flew up to Fort Lauderdale later in the day so that the passengers could finally be reunited with their luggage. Hope there were no cruise passengers on that flight or their holiday vacation was well ruined. The bulk of the rain went north and south of the Peace River drainage basin but it did catch enough to push the river level into movement in the wrong direction. Canoe Outpost (where we rented our canoes) has been measuring the river level in Arcadia by calling the "normal" river level the point at which their floating dock is level with the bottom stair of their fixed dock. They declare fossil hunting season "open" when the level is 12" BELOW this "normal" level. The rain had pushed the level to around 9" ABOVE normal or just under 2 feet higher than I'd have liked it to be. We only had Saturday available as a date to try this and so we did. At worst we figured we'd have a relaxing trip down the river by canoe--in the rain! (Did I forget to mention the weather forecast was for warm temps, near 83F, but with an 80% chance of rain?) We chose a 10:00 a.m. departure over my normal choice of 8:00 a.m. which maximizes the workable time on the river with the canoes due back in before 5:00 p.m. This let us sleep in just a few hours more with a departure of 6:00 a.m. instead of 4:00 a.m. We loaded ourselves and the fossil hunting gear, snacks, and change of clothes into our friend's minivan and were off very nearly on schedule. It was an overcast (but dry) trip across state to Arcadia where we arrived in good time to sign in and catch our bus to the put in. We were pleasantly surprised to find Canoe Outpost to be celebrating their 50th year in operation (and Becky, the owner, there for 35 of those years). The peace sign in much of their signs is both a reference to the Peace River and the summer of love that was 1969. To celebrate, the canoe rentals were half-price and our two canoes for the day came for the price of one. I was quite happy to find that, though the levels were higher than I'd hoped for, the large well known gravel bed just downstream from the put-in at Brownville Park was not too deep to work. The current toward the center of the river was ripping and made it tricky to stand up and keep sand/gravel on your shovel as you raised it from the bottom to the sifter. One side of the river was protected somewhat by some trees in the water just upstream and was easily workable. The waist-deep water was comfortably cool (78F) and high enough not to have to bend over much but not too high to work effectively. There were a few other canoes launched with our group but they rolled past us when we stopped to start fossil hunting. We spotted a few additional canoes pass us from the 11:00 a.m. put-in but otherwise (mostly) had the river to ourselves. A large group (tour?) of 9 jet skis came flying up the river while we were taking a lunch break. They slowed just a bit but the wakes definitely caused a stir as the combined waves smacked our canoes pulled up along shore. We were to encounter them again on their return trip downstream a few hours later. This time we were paddling and had to move to the side of the river and point the bow of the canoes into the huge waves to keep from capsizing. Jet skis and canoes simply do not mix well. At least nobody flipped over. It remained a cloudy day with the sun only making a few brief appearances to cast some color on our sifting screens filled with black gravel. We got sprinkled and full-on poured upon several times throughout the day but Tammy even remarked that the warm air temps and a windbreaker jacket actually made the rainy canoe paddling rather pleasant. The warm temps had a number of gators (big and small) out trying to sun themselves on the banks. In total we spotted an even dozen of them in the first half of the trip back to Arcadia. There are fewer good haul-up spots and the fading light toward late afternoon usually means we see few if any gators on the last half of the paddle back downstream. It was interesting seeing the new tree falls along the banks and the other changes to the topography of the river after the summer's floods. It appears that someone's boat had come loose and found itself in a rather non-seaworthy state among the willow trees along one bank. A good example of the power of the river in flood stage! We tried to get into a deeper spot on the river that for some unknown reason is chocked full of dugong rib bones. It has larger chunky gravel and so I like to look there for the promise of larger fossils (like meg teeth). I like to take newbies to the river to this site as they can then collect multiple "paleo paperweights" as I call them and maybe come away with a meg tooth (or at least a decent fragment). We pulled to canoes to the bank at this spot and I got out to check it for depth. The bottom usually slopes down from a sticky/slipper/stinky muddy bank into a deeper channel a few meters from shore before becoming more shallow rising up onto a bit of a sand bank. I walked (slid) out into deeper water and got to neck level without it ever getting shallower and so (as I feared) this site was simply impossible at this river level. We paddled on to a final spot I like to stop at which has only fine pea gravel but often provides a copious number of smaller dime size shark teeth. I enjoy taking groups with kids there as we have a competition to see how many shark teeth per screen we can find. I believe the record still stands at 26. This site is also quite shallow (even dry sand bars when the river is good and low) and so I knew we'd have no problems there--it was my ace in the hole in case the other locations were all not accessible. In addition to many nice tiny teeth it also delivered some surprises.