Search the Community

This week we found ourselves headed for Carbon County, PA and looked up some places to go hunting. St. Clair was out, but there were some references to Carbondale here and there. As the name suggests, Carbondale was a coal mining town. There are active and inactive areas all over town, much of it fossiliferous. The most popular spot seems to be the one we went to, a tailings pile next to an apartment complex off of Westside Rd. The land status is unknown, but there were was nothing posted, so we ventured in as many have done before us. Our directions said to follow the gravel path between the third and fourth buildings on the right, then bear left and continue to the en of the ravel road, where you'd see a "mountain of tailings." When we parked, I looked from side to side for a pile I expected to be maybe the size of a van. From behind me, I hear my husband say, "Oh, that mountain of tailings." I looked from side to side. No, her told me, look straight ahead and up. Oh! It was indeed a mountain! The pile loomed above the rich grove. How did I miss that? (On a return trip a couple days later, I noticed it also loomed over the apartments!) A narrow trail leads through the woods to a meadow and a bare section of wall just asking to be explored. April was the perfect time to go as all the weeds were down from the winter snows and not yet regrowing much. The trees growing from the wall itself provided just enough footing for me to climb without sliding back down - until I wanted to. Whee! Once I reached the wall, it took me only seconds to spot my first bit of Calamities bark, and then another, and then a complete, 3D stalk section! After about an hour of searching I spotted a limb sticking put of the fine slate crumbs and pulled it out. It was a chunk of Calamites stalk as big as my outstretched hand. I spent a total of about 5 hours over two days scrabbling across a sheer wall of loose shale. Ferns! Leaves! Roots! Seeds! Bark of all different textures! Some of the ferns were incredibly detailed. One had all the miniscule veins outlined in red (pyrite?), while others were just extremely fine impressions in the grey rock. As it turns out, the gravel road itself runs across an overgrown tailings pile. Here and there you can find exposed rock, including bark plates bigger than dinner dishes! After spending what felt like an hour on day 2 (It turned out to be three hours!!!) I decided it was time for lunch and slid down the hill like a little kid. There at the base of the hill, was mu find for the week: a whole section of tree(?) trunk with bark all the way around the specimen. It was lying alone in the woods on some leaves, just waiting for someone to wander off the beaten path. I debated about bringing it home. It was so big! Hubby was snoozing on a nearby rock. Rocks are not his thing and bringing home piles of them doubly so, but he is so sweet that he picked that heavy thing up before I could blink and carried it to the car himself. He's a keeper! It will take quite some time to photograph all my treasures, but I will post in the comments here when I have an album together.