One of many
trip reports under the
SilGro home page for Alan Silverstein and Cathie
Grow.
Email me at
ajs@frii.com.
Last update: March 18, 2024
(Previous trip report: 1997_0323_LunarEclipse.htm)
(From email sent to a friend on June 23 after returning:)
It was a great trip to Big Sandy and Blue Forest (near Farson, Wyoming), Warfield Quarry (near Kemmerer), and Delaney Rim, with Susan McEachern. I was saturated with rocks. No more rock hunting for me until I put away all my toys! (grin -- but I said this a lot over the years)
Thursday, June 19: We got a late start out of town that evening, so we camped north of Rock Springs at 1:30 am.
Friday, June 20: We didn't reach Big Sandy until 10 am. We spent three hours at the cane beds east of the reservoir, and later five hours at Blue Forest, until near sunset and we lost our light.
From that day I had one bucket of pretty decent Blue Forest fragments, mostly surface float, but good stuff, more selectively picked than before, plus one very nice chunk that might yet end up being book ends; it must be 20 lb. I dug it up at the cane beds. [I talked about having it made into bookends, but later soaking it in muriatic acid revealed delicate chalcedony filigree on the surface, so I left it as a display piece in the basement.]
I also got past the north end of the main butte at Blue Forest, past some oil/gas wells, to the north buttes... More diggings there and lots of virgin float; bumpy roads.
We had the cane beds all to ourselves, and BF was nearly deserted too. Unfortunately four holes I dug at BF came up pretty dry, very little float, little base rock, and nothing in it as far as we went.
I can't believe we wimped out and spent the next two nights at the Antlers Motel in Kemmerer (instead of camping), but the beds and showers were great, and it was < $20/each to do it.
Saturday, June 21: We arrived at the Warfield Quarry (private fossil dig) at 0750; sky clear, roads dry, but ground moist. Rick and Joe had been out partying the night before and were still asleep. Eventually we got up the courage to get near Joe's trailer and say, "Are you up?" He peeked out a window and said, "It's my day off, go bug Rick..." Oops! Well we went down to the car and waited and got our stuff together.
Joe motorcycled down a while later and said, "It's OK, I'll get you going." Nice guy really. At 8:40 we were finally digging, except John (a resident "share digger") woke up soon after that, and insisted on babysitting and showing us a lot of stuff and talking a lot at us -- all through the day. He was also a nice guy, but apparently there was some friction between him and Joe. We got an earful about that, and about the county sheriff (more later).
There were very few other people at the quarry. You [friend at the time] were right, most of their diggers are "regulars" who work weeks and take off on weekends. I felt even more fortunate Rick allowed us to be in there for just one day. Of course we thanked him profusely when we met him.
We heard a lot from John about people being "fired" from the quarry for various malfeasances, and how Rick and Joe were disorganized hippies and Rick made too much money and the employees and share diggers didn't make enough... :-)
Well it was solstice day and we dug for over 11 hours with short breaks! It got windy/dusty at times, and hot at times, but it was fair weather cumulus mostly and some occasional welcome shade... A great day for it. And we mostly avoided sunburns, and we only had a little repetitive stress injury the next day, but man did I wake up sore. :-)
I knew we had to split big rocks, but where they put us, it took a while to clear back and dig out smaller stuff to expose the huge mudstone sheets. By the end of the day though, we'd split a lot of 2-3' across sheets and found a lot of material. No awesome finds though!
They (John) didn't keep any of my stuff "off the top," and just a few of Susan's. We both brought home a lot of fossil fish, though, nearly as many as [friend back then] did on your last trip. I sure hoped to find them a stingray or something wonderful, but no such luck. I heard they only find about 15 a year of those, and very very few gar -- maybe only four in the life of the quarry?
I dunno if the wetness of the rock made it harder to split or not, or if it would really dry out later in the summer, being so massive. Many of the fish were "rotten", meaning recently attacked and decayed in situ.
I sort of knew what I was doing, but I still learned lots more. It was really hard for me to resist breaking down bigger sheets to trim the fish to manageable sizes, and I ruined some that way, but mostly I left the big sheets for the divvy, and only trimmed mine later while packing them. Also I learned too late in the day to not clean any fish (with a chisel) on the spot to expose them.
Well there were no hard feelings and I don't think I left any bad impressions. I think we were pretty normal one-day quarry visitors really. We did find them some run-of-the-mill whole fish for them to sell, on relatively large sheets, and lots of "barrel fish" -- that pay for the gas and oil, John said.
Rick didn't even come say howdy till mid-day, just briefly, then he drove away and never came back that evening. Joe motored 70 miles away for the day and we didn't see him again until after we loaded the car under John's supervision, just before we left.
John was a character... He told me I should just pick out the best 4-5 fish and throw the rest in the muck pile. (Maybe he hoped I'd leave him some material; I dunno.) Joe told me he wanted the barrel fish and I should leave them (split them up along with the rest), but John repeatedly said I should take them -- no, I did split them along with the rest. I still had a huge load of material, three boxes... Happy happy.
Serious mosquitos near sunset!
[I wrote back then:] If I go back I'll remember to bring a couple of six packs of beer to give the guys. [But I never made it back.] Glenn Antonopoulus and Jim Kasal (FC rockhounds club) were there all week, left Saturday morning, and they did just that... Good idea.
In the evening I did offer Joe a small piece of polished Blue Forest wood and a small polished dino bone, and he accepted both, so that was cool.
It was the solstice! Sundown near 9 pm, awesome full moon rising as we drove out. We didn't get back to Kemmerer until after 10 pm, and we were lucky to get a room again, the same room in fact. Pizza Hut was open till midnight, and we were there at closing!
I don't know if I'll ever want/need to go back to the quarry, but I think Rick wouldn't blackball me (or even remember me), and I'd have no qualms about calling (apologetically, diplomatically) if I did want to return. I learned how important it is to remember the orientation of each rock you pull -- mark them with a pencil! So if you find half a good fish you can find the other half.
Sunday, June 22: We slept in and then visited the Car Wash Rock Shop. The proprietor was quite an interesting character. He showed us around, including his enormous wood stockpiles in the basement. He said there was abundant BF type wood all around the area, much of it on private land -- and he had the material to prove it. He probably knew the wood formations in that area better than any other living person. [I wrote back then:] Have you met him?
Three years earlier the same sheriff who was glorified by National Geographic for busting fossil fish poachers, raided his place and confiscated 1500 lb of material, claiming it came from public land. The guy said it was all legal stuff and they just tried to railroad him out of business, but actually it helped his business... Quite a story.
I had mixed feelings... Seeing his glorious specimens made me less excited about my stuff -- like walking into a big library and being overwhelmed by the books. Seeing his stockpiles of material made me a little sick -- and it also reminded me to stop collecting faster than I can process and give away stuff. The hunting was so fun, but the rocks were getting out of hand at my house, and it was becoming an obsession!
[I wrote:] I will not simply build up huge stockpiles of raw material. If nothing else I'm going to be generous with rock club door prizes. [2024: And that's what happened! No big stockpiles of raw material, but have had enough to keep tumble polishing continuously. Unfortunately despite giving away most of the processed rocks, I have ended up with over 220 indexed flats/boxes of keepers in the basement!]
Anyway we didn't get out of Kemmerer till about 11 am. We drove the Delaney Rim road from the I-80 Tipton exit (158) to Wamsutter (173), 15 miles by I-80 but 54 miles by the gravel roads (including some sidetrips).
There were deep ruts in some spots, had to straddle a little, and some old drying mud holes, but quite passable for my Subaru when dry. We left the highway at 1:10 pm and returned at Wamsutter at 6 pm.
We visited the known stromatolite algae agate site first -- lots of great material there, and this time I also found some bone! Further east, oolite agate at Delaney Point (I took some to play with); great views.
The directions I had from Don Eastman, coming the other direction, were fuzzy, and the mileages way wrong in the recent Rock&Gem article -- so [I wrote:] when you are ready to go there, please let me give you a good map -- so we drove right past the turitella agate site and around a while on the wrong roads trying to make sense of the directions.
Eventually we saw the famous tin shed (and another tin shed :-) from up high, got oriented, and found the turitella beds. No digging required! Unless you wanted thicker material for spheres, like Bob from Utah who we met there. Many acres were littered with chunks and loose agatized shells.
It was remarkably virgin considering how it was all along the main road. We collected as much as we could possibly want, of really cool material. [I wrote:] I'll show you sometime. Maybe one more excuse for you to come visit my house soon -- there's more poundage than I want to drag into work!
It was about 40 minutes from the turitella site to Wamsutter, and it would be 3.5 hours home from there non-stop. So overall, figure 4:10 driving to the site. We did a dinner break in Laramie and got to my house just before 10 pm...
(Next trip report: 1997_0708_AcrossDivide.htm)