Former Floridian trying to restart the hobby in the PNW

[winnph]

Hi everyone,

 

Once upon a time, I was a young college student at UF whose favorite hobby was spending hours trudging through swamps and up and down creekbeds in search of gravel beds and limestone banks. There were no other types of stone worth noting, so every stone was either limestone or imported. Fossils might not always have been easy to find, but when you did find them they generally were sturdy things that were practically falling out soft limestone or clay. My tools were a hand spade and a homemade screen in a wooden frame, that's it.

 

Fast forward a decade (or two...) and I'm trying to get my kids into the hunt from our new home in the Pacific NW. But things are so different here. The rocks are all strong! So many of the fossils seem so relatively weak!  I heard about the Lincoln Creek concretions and that sounded like fun until I saw what you guys go through to prepare those things ... I'd need a whole new workshop just dedicated to that! As I read about all these fossil-bearing formations in the Cascades and Olympic peninsula, most of them sound similar in terms of the difficulty and gear required.

 

So... I'm probably going to take the older kid at least to collect concretions in the next few weeks, but we'll have no plans for what comes next. Actually, I'm pretty sure it will end up with him smashing them "carefully" (with proper eye and dust protection, of course).