North Sulphur River 9-23-12

[wfrr]

I picked up my old running buddy TRENTON-MON early yesterday about 8:30 am. We had a big day planned which would entail about a 5 mile round trip hiking in the North Sulphur River channel.

I found a nice assortment of broken points and scrapers, worm tubes, ammonite parts, petrified poop, a large piece of enamel I suspect from a mastadon tooth, some oysters for my 5 year old grandaughter, some shells and baculites.

I also picked up a good assortment of bone frags. I need to research that big chunk on the lower left, there might be enough there to identify it. I expect it and the larger verts to be from mosasaurs. The lower right bone I posted in the questions section. Check out that post under North Sulphur River Upper Geology.

I also picked up 5 verts and several likely vert fragments. One of the verts is a cast in phosfate, looks like a fish vert. Theres also a nice shark centrum.

Trenton-mon picked up some goodies, I expect he will post those too.

We are a couple of worn out old guys and we know it. We guessed we were going to push ourselves. Wow!!

It wasnt too hard on us hoofing it in, at least we werent whining out loud yet. About 1.30 we made it to the turn around point and started to head back. It got rather hot down in that channel. I had about 8 lbs of stuff in my collection bag. About then I managed to pinch a nerve in my neck. My buddys feet were bothering him. So we were kind of hobbling along.

A little over half way back we sat down and finished the water which was of course hot by then. Luckily some clouds came in and a breeze started blowing. We cooled off a bit and plodded back to where we came down, a little beat up but okay. For me it's always a struggle climbing out of there. This time we really were huffing for air.

Well after having a pain pill, a cup full of ice water on my head and another to drink, I put on a dry clean shirt and sat down for a long cold blast of max a/c.

All in all a decent hunt, a rather warm fall day, a new found appreciation for ice cold water and still another adventure in the bank for a couple of old, worn out.. old friends.

over and out.

Edited September 24, 2012 by wfrr

[Auspex]

Heh. You didn't mention seeing any young guys down there, which tells you something...

[S233]

Nice finds! When i am older i will still do anything for fossils, well if my legs are not broken from hiking and all the fossil hunting i do .

[CreekCrawler]

Great piece of mastodon molar there....

[wfrr]

best chunk ive found so far, id love to find one intact

[wfrr]

heres a better pic too

[CreekCrawler]

Awesome! This is my best masto find out there.A whole molar is high on my list as well.They are very fragile as you can imagine.This one was under the water slightly and when I touched it the bottom pretty much exploded. I kept all the parts and pieces for reconstruction at a later time.

[wfrr]

That is pretty cool CreekCrawler. thanks for sharing pic that with us.