Summer Sojourn: day 3

After breaking camp at Bear Lake we drove farther west and crossed into Wyoming in short order.  Ironically, we got stuck behind a loaded log truck...  In the middle of the high desert.  That kind of surprised me.  I assume it was aspen it was hauling, but still, what are the odds?!

We arrived at Fossil Butte National Monument where I wanted to show the kids what the area used to look like a number of millennia ago.  Pretty neat to picture a tropical marsh where now there is only high elevation sage growing.

 It was hot, windy, dusty, dirty, super bright work.  And it shows.

 I backed up to the edge of the quarry to load up the freshly cut fossils we uncovered.

Anyway, after a short stint at Fossil Butte and a quick picnic lunch, we drove over to Fossil Safari which is a private quarry that lets YOU excavate fossils in the Green River sedimentary formation and keep whatever you find.  For a price, of course.  Anyway, the neat thing about this place is that it's in the middle of nowhere and we even had to use 4x4 to access the site.  There were only a couple other folks on site including the caretaker who outfitted us with chisels, hammers, and goggles which the twins loved.

It's really simple; you treat the rock just like a book.  A book that you have to open with a chisel.  Page by page, you peel away the layers and hope for a fossil.  In this particular area, the fossil you find most frequently are fish about 3-5 inches long from the herring family.  The caretaker was super nice and helpful showing the kids some techniques and then using a chopsaw to cut out our fossils at the end of our hour.  We loaded up and headed down the mountain.

 How's this for an impressive spring?!

From there we headed up Hams Fork.  After driving past dozens of antelope and seeing the beautiful scenery we pulled over at the Hams Fork Campground.  Nobody was there.  As I was looking for a good site, a guy pulled up in his pickup truck and we started talking.  He said that five more miles up another mountain was a really neat spot.  And we wouldn't have to pay for a campsite.  So we went for it.

The road was narrower and again we were in 4x4 for most of the drive up.  We drove through a herd of sheet under guard of a couple big sheep dogs.  We got to Big Springs which was super neat.  A really big perennial spring that feeds most of the water for the West Fork Hams Fork.  We hiked around a large beaver pond, up to the spring, and I even tried fishing for a bit as I had purchased a fishing license for this day and tomorrow.  No fish - probably because it was a beaver pond.

 Our camping site for the evening

We set up camp above the springs in a grove of pine overlooking the valley.  After our tents went up, right at sunset, a rain squall came through and I thought we might be in for another rough night, but it cleared up quickly and left us with a real nice sunset.  The kids watched a movie in their tent and we all went to bed early.