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Hey y'all! I'll be staying in Salt Lake City for two and a half weeks from Mid May to the end of May. I was hoping to see if any of y'all knew of any private tours/quarries that would be open during that time. I'm looking for fossil fish and trilobites mostly, so if anyone knows of any trilobites aside from U-Dig that would be appreciated too. I recall going on a private digs when I was younger that was not affiliated with any of the big names (with permission from the landowner of course) - hoping to find something similar. Calling all people that "know a guy" - thanks!

As the title notes, I went hunting ammonite fossils in the hills above the Salt Lake Valley. This location was shared with me from a retired paleontologist I contacted last week. Mike Foley had posted one of his science papers, Bulletin 78, about ammonites in northeastern Nevada where I visited not long ago. So after receiving the GPS coordinates via email I planned the trip early this week on Tuesday, April 2nd. Once I found a parking spot off campus in a residential hiking trailhead area, I grabbed my backpack with hiking stix, two hammers and a chisel and off up the hill. 1.25 km later I was a mile above sea level and on track to locating the outcrops containing the Anasibirites beds. My first find was pretty old but not fossil old. Turned out to be something I recognized instantly. A large caliber, black powder cartridge rifle, spent bullet. When I got home I took a few minutes on my laptop to refine my guess. A 45-70, 500 grain bullet produced first in 1884 for the Springfield model 1884 known as the "Trapdoor Springfield" rifle. Probably fired from a soldier at Fort Douglas, Utah at of the base of the foothills where I found it in Battle Gulch. Up the hill a little farther was a sure sign I was getting closer to the real target of my hunt. A slightly out of focus ( sorry ) hash plate of small shells. And once I got to the correct GPS coordinates...I found a shark! keychain. Go figure. It was not the last keychain of the trip either. The next was a student's locker key, car key, plastic library card and a carabiner. Both keychains were right smack in the middle of the outcrop beds. And shortly I was noticing many hammered rocks, broken fossils and previous hunters' activities. Here's the cross section pics of the ammonites in the Anasibirites beds. There are approximately 25 ammos in the pic. The view behind me. Downtown Salt Lake, the Capitol, the incinerator smoke stack for the copper mine and in the far background the Great Salt Lake...soon to be the Great Dry Lake poisoning the entire valley's occupants with tons, yes, tons of arsenic blown down the valley with our daily winds. Lots of other toxins will join the arsenic...heavy metals galore not to mention the silicosis crisis pending. Btu enough of that. I collected a few that I could extract from the bed and headed down the hill. This was about halfway down... fossil water ripples. I stopped to get my hiking stix out for the steep descent. Right when I stopped looking south down the valley and set the backpack down, I noticed a mule deer antler shed right at my feet. Nice parting gift. Looking back up the hill at the outcrops of limestone. A panorama of the valley. It was a beautiful day as seen in the pics, a few ammos to prep and a great conditioning hike to get me ready for a busy summer. Steve

Hi everyone! I'm gonna be spending a few days in Salt Lake City this August and am looking for advice. I'm debating between heading to the U-dig/New-dig sites in Delta UT for trilobites vs. heading to Kemmerer WY Green River for fish and other fossils. I wish I had time for both and to explore on my own, but time is limited. Any thoughts/suggestions? Also, any advice on finding petrified wood around the Salt Lake City area? Thanks so much!!

Here is a small trip only minutes away from downtown Salt Lake City. If you would like the exact location, PM me. I hadn’t been to this site in a couple years so it took @Earth Chemistry and I a couple hours to re-discover it so here’s a little history about the area. Ok first, the structural geology in this area is quite famous as it is a large pair of synclines. From https://geology.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/synclines.gif They were made in the Sevier Orogeny about 120 Ma to 50 Ma ago.

Hey guys. I’ve got this bivalve that needs a labeling. I collected it from the Jurassic age Twin Creeks Formation on the east side of Salt Lake City. It has some shell material left but most of it is an internal mold.

So I’m still snowed in so here’s a trip from warm Early June. My friends and I wanted to hit all the closest rock locations around Salt Lake City and search for fossils and cool sedimentary geology (a couple of them being sedimentary geologists). We visited the Southern Oquirrh Mountains and a few canyons over on the east side of the valley at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. Here are the stratigraphy columns for both provided by Geolgic History of Utah by Lehi F. Hintze and Bart J. Kowallis. I did not lead this trip so I am not certain which rock layers the fossils were each from (I’ll point out the ones I do know) but I’ll say we went through the Cambrian and Mississippian in the Oquirrh Mountains and basically everywhere on the Salt Lake City column.