A spontaneous trip to Mounds Reef...my wife said I should go.

March 23

Kinda late to start up a long post about my trip today...so I'll just say it started like this . A bit more snow that expected. Crossing the summit @ 7500 feet above sea level. Back in January there was much LESS snow than this. I was hoping the downhill side was nice and dry.

It was...turned out to a beautiful day with 63 F degrees before a front blew in.

And the trip ended like this...the juvenile raptor sculpture is about a meter tall and the adult is about 2 meters. Looks to be made of CNC cut 3/16ths or 1/4 inch mild steel. Probably waterjet cut.

Pretty cool. The toe claw suggests it's a Utahraptor, but with a T-Rex head?

Stay tuned...I'll fill in the trip tomorrow.

March 23

A little over two weeks ago I retired from the workforce and the very next day underwent carpal tunnel syndrome surgery. So for those two weeks I did a whole lot of nothing while my hand healed and realized that every day was Saturday. I only had to wait for the surgeon's okay to get back into activities involving the full use of my right hand.

Swinging a rock hammer, a 3 pound hammer and the big 6 pounder right after surgery was just a wee bit intimidating for fear of damaging my healing hand. So the trip on Wednesday was more on the surface finding style of collecting and yesterday's trip was going where the surface finds were rare. Cracking open concretions is the name of the game in Mounds Reef and I was ready to play although I still felt the need to go easy at it and err on the side of caution.

This is my fourth visit to the Mounds Reef so I knew where I had previously found fossil bearing concretions ( pretty much anywhere one looked ) and decided to just mix up my activities with a little hiking, scouting and exploring along with collecting along the way. The area is 20 miles long running parallel to the highway with numerous gravel road entrances onto the BLM land tract. I had already picked several very productive sites and picked a new spot for the earliest part of the day while I was still fresh.

The Morrison formation had been on my radar from the research before the first trip, but I wasn't super interested several reasons. One big reason was the lack of accessible roads for regular passenger vehicles. One would have a decent up and down hills, canyons and washes hike to get there. Another was listed in a previous trip - plenty to see and explore but lacking legal collectible fossils. Curiosity won out so I drove as close as I could and walked in to the nearest edge of the transition from the Juana Lopez member into the Morrison formation.

Pretty easy to discern. It goes from tan colored sandstone and dirt to a dark red/brown layer as seen in the distance. Now to find a path down a 40 foot precipice.

A weathered out calcite veined nodule.

A wall of exposed nodules.

I walked around the washes and took a few pics. If there were dinosaur bones where I walked I did not recognize them. This was something different from the other stuff I was seeing.

Is it a bone fragment? I don't know.

There was another piece three feet from it.

I looked at them a few minutes and realized they were one piece broken in half.

I took this pic and then put them back where I found them. They were the only two items I saw that didn't look like all the other rocks, nodules or concretions. I didn't carry a backpack or even a drink as I limited my time to less than an hour of exploring.

Anybody have a guess at what I found? I think it was just a broken rock. Here's a cross section of the smaller piece.

Another nice weathered open nodule.

Back to the car and a short drive to the next stop. A pretty nice ammonite imprint.

A previously broken open concretion. Instead of swinging my hammer at every concretion I saw, instead there were enough like this one to inspect . I probably walked up on half a dozen busted open concretions that were still loaded with fossils. This one in particular had three or four recoverable ammonites, gobs of bivalves and gastropods. It left me scratching my head as to what the initial persons cracking open concretions were looking for. If you zoom in, you'll see an ammonite laying exposed right beside the concretion.

And several nice larger bivalve fossils.

This one was new to me.

This is from the same concretion.

Shortly after I collected these specimens, I noticed a bit more cloud cover and a quick change in the wind and temperature. I had my back to this front which blew in quickly.

A car drove up and parked right behind me...first humans of the day. A young couple got out as I was putting my tools and bucket in the car and asked if I found anything. We chatted a bit, I showed them some of my finds and they were excited to give it a try. From where we were parked I pointed out the location I have just left and gave them simple instructions - look for "chocolate coconuts". They had a brand new rock hammer and were very excited about finding some fossils. I quickly grabbed the imprint and small ammonite that had popped out of the matrix. I let the guy hold them and said keep them, he replied that he could not accept them, they were my finds. So I turned to his girlfriend and said " he says he can't take them, but you can" and she did, gratefully thanking me. I said now you know what you're looking for and won't go home empty handed. Paying it forward.

I got back into cell service, called my wife and asked her out for a dinner date her choice...as long as sushi was on the menu. She responded and said I'm at the grocery store and picked up a sushi tray from the seafood deli section. I said you're reading my mind; how about Indian food instead for dinner. Coconut korma chicken over basmati rice with garlic naan for her and chicken tikka masala with naan for me. Yummy way to end the day.

The metal dino sculptures were at a highway intersection on the drive home. Lot's of fossils in Utah and many towns have a museum.

The Cleveland- Lloyd fossil site has a nice museum. I need to visit it at some point...it's just around the corner from where I was all day. It reopens in a week.

https://www.blm.gov/national-conservation-lands/utah/jurassic-national-monument