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Tammy and I left South Florida yesterday and arrived in Spokane, WA after a short stopover in Las Vegas. Didn't win any money in any of the hundreds of slot machines in the Las Vegas airport but then it is significantly more difficult to win when you don't sit down and pour your hard earned money into the gaping maws of these one armed bandits. We drove from Spokane up to an area in the northern panhandle of Idaho near Lake Pend Oreille to a small town (population 530) called Clark Fork. We settled into the Clark Fork Lodge and had a surprisingly fancy meal at a quirky little place called the Squeeze Inn. I had not suspected I could get a really tasty IPA and a dish of gnocci gorgonzola in such a small rural setting but it was a truly welcome surprise after a long day of traveling. This morning we headed a few minutes out of town to a locality I found in my Rockhounding Idaho book. Someone took the time to transcribe all of the 99 sites listed there and make a Google Maps map out of it which can be found here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1yS2FsEzCIFPU2_G1Pr5SH3oN9DY&ll=45.56234707000023%2C-114.16501500000004&z=6 We were at site 8A (48.15076, -116.15902) in this book which listed fossil stromatolites in a roadcut just out of town. With the help of Tammy's iPad we easily navigated to this site and spotted the roadcut and got out to have a look. There was lots of rusty brownish rocks on the talus slope of this cut as described in the book's description of the site. We could easily see the outcrop at the top of the hill from which these broken chunks of rock were sliding down to the road level. We scanned the rocks for the distinctive rusty squiggly pattern described in the book (which said these were quite common here). Try as we may we could not find anything matching the stromatolite description in the text. We did see evidence of extremely ancient shorelines with rippled and cracked muddy sediments frozen into place hundreds of millions of years ago. I tried to load one nice looking piece into the back of our JEEP but, given the current laws of physics, I did not succeed. I tried several times to work my way up the talus slope but the rocks were just too loose to gain much of a foothold and get very far up-slope. Any attempts to climb up resulted in sliding back down on a carpet of rocks that dropped away just as quickly as I stepped upward doing a pretty good mimicry of the stairmaster endless escalator exercise machine at my gym. As I couldn't see any definite stromatolite pieces down lower in the piles I suspected I'd not find anything different higher up and didn't feel like a major injury on the first day of a 10-day trip (for once, common sense got the better of me). I did find a smaller piece of ripply shoreline that I considered lugging back in my suitcase and an interesting layered piece that was quite different from most of the other rocks but I was there for (what was supposed to be an easily obtained) sample or two of fossil stromatolite and, striking out on this locality, gave up with only photos to remember this fun but fruitless hunt.