Badlands Residency Day 9

March 30, 2012

Started the morning same as yesterday. Espresso, Interpol, painting. Love it. I feel so alive here.

After lunch I drove Ed and Steven out to the canyon where the Calhoun group took their last hike. Led them back up in there, and scaled the canyon wall again up to the ledge above. We spent a good couple hours fossil hunting. I showed Ed the things that we had found earlier this week. Took some video of his explanations of those fossils, which I hope to figure out how to post here. Tried last night and couldn't get it to go. Steven spent most of the time doing photography while Ed and I climbed up the buttes and formations that rise up above the rim of the canyon. Made some excellent finds, including an intact maxilla (upper jaw) of an oreodont sticking out of the rock halfway up one of the steep slopes. So cool. Also some snails, rabbit jaw, rhino teeth and jaw, and so much more. Ed wants to come back again to hunt, so we'll maybe do that next week. It's some crazy climbing, but way up high there are more intact fossils and he would really like to find something worth excavating. Once we got way up there, we could see across to the next canyon and got a better idea of where we were. Might be quicker to access coming from the castle trail. Anyway, we hiked back, I painted more, and Ed dropped off one of his books on mammalian osteology for me to look at this weekend. Today I was consistently correctly identifying mammal vs. reptile fossils, and can pick out tortoise, oreodont teeth, and rhino teeth. 

 Later I went outside to converse with the neighbors: John (AiR last fall, also does astronomy at the park), Tricia (works for the park and does astronomy), Ryan (law enforcement), and Steven. We all headed down to the wagon wheel for some late food, and on the way I experienced one of those it's-a-small-world moments. There's a long back story to it, but I'll try to be brief. Stan, a painter from Spokane I know, had a crazy experience a couple summers ago while on his way to an art fair in California. He stopped in Yosemite for some camping, and had his license plate stolen. Big deal since he needed to have it to legally be driving his car the rest of the way to CA. Long story short, the rangers there staged a sting operation and planted a car with plates for the thieves to steal. They did, got caught, and Stan got his plate back. Or at least that's roughly the version I recall. Well, it turns out that Ryan was working as law enforcement at Yosemite that same summer and was involved in the whole thing. The ranger (just one, who Ryan says is really pretty out there) who tried to do the sting operation did it by putting her own car in the campground with the plan to camp out nearby and watch for the thieves with night vision goggles. The thieves came, stole her plate, and she missed it. Next day Ryan was talking to her, and she said she couldn't see anything out of the night vision goggles. He asked her a couple questions and figured out that she simply hadn't taken the cover off the goggles. So now there's another license plate missing and they still have no idea. The head guy at the park then took over, and he personally stopped every car leaving the campground to question people, trying to judge their character. When a car of foreigners came through, he asked them point blank whether they'd stolen the plates, they confessed, and gave them all back. Since they were from France and it would have caused a huge hassle, they only got fined, not arrested. So how amazing is that, to run into a guy involved in a story I heard about from a friend so far away. And to answer your comment yesterday, Stan, as much as I love doing figure drawing with you, there is no way I'm leaving here until they pry me away and tell me to go home. :)

Self portrait after scaling canyon wall.

Up above Calhoun Canyon, as we've dubbed it.

Entelodont premolar I found.

Ed found an intact oreodont maxilla mandible.  Most exciting.

Snail fossil, shell mostly intact.

The rock jumble we climbed to find fossils.

Starting to hike out, but wait, what's under that big rock...?

...another oreodont mandible fragment.
Note the chevron tooth shape.  Classic oreodont, says Ed.

If you look really hard, you can see a dot that is my car
parked along the road far below.

Spot from which the previous photo was taken.

After the hike.