rissy stories

Utah Trip

Sunday and Monday, 5/8/16 & 5/9/16, Day 7&8: Utah 🙂

Hey guys, sorry for the influx of new posts lately – I’m trying to knock out my Utah trip entries while its still summer and its still fresh in my mind. So, here is the beginning of the second round: when we actually head into the desert and dig up dinosaur bones.

We all woke up at Mills Site around 7 and had cereal & coffee for breakfast. Mitch, Colby, Coleman, and Rocky all hopped in the truck early and went out to the desert to set up the port-a-potty. The rest of us got up a little bit later, ate breakfast, showered (again because we weren’t going to be able to shower once we entered the desert), and packed up all of our stuff.

We waited around for them to get back (I did my makeup and read my book in the van), and when they finally did – we hopped back into the vehicles and went to Family Dollar to stock up on some last minute things before heading to the desert.

I ended up buying face wash (because we wouldn’t be able to take showers), make-up remover wipes (because I had lost mine), and a few snacks. Then we piled back into the vehicles and headed out to the desert.

And this is where things changed up a bit – Rocky decided to drive the van while Coleman drove the truck (it had been the other way around for the first week) because the truck had a trailer attached to the back of it, and she apparently has a hard time maneuvering her way around the desert with the trailer on the back.

Now, Rocky is a good driver – but she can drive a bit fast at certain times when she shouldn’t and she drifts…a lot. (After what we’ve witnessed in the van traveling behind the truck for the entire trip.) So, those of us in the van weren’t exactly thrilled to give up Coleman – who drives MUCH slower and a bit safer.

And for someone who has never actually been in a desert before – I didn’t really know what to expect. I honestly expected it to be pretty flat, but that was the first instance where I realized that I was wrong about the desert – SO wrong.

Once we actually left the asphalt and began to drive to our campsite – I immediately began feeling carsick. It was a miserable time to say the least, especially since I was right smack in the middle of the van. (I should’ve asked to be moved to the front of the van, but because no one informed me that it would be bad, I didn’t realize that I had to move.)

The hills and bumps on the dirt/sand/rock/desert road that led to our campsite were nasty. And to make matters worse, it was really windy and rainy that day – so things were pretty muddy too. It probably took us about 20 minutes to actually arrive at our campsite.

And about 15 minutes into the trip, my head and stomach just weren’t having it anymore. So I had Rocky stop the van and I hopped out to walk the rest of the way to the campsite with Mitch (who had been on this trip before and knew his way around.) He gave me his water bottle and raincoat, which was very nice of him to do.

We walked pretty slowly behind the vehicles because I was trying to get my stomach to settle down. Then Mitch suddenly reached down, picked up a large jasper rock, and handed it to me.

And thankfully, that turned the beginning of my desert experience around. 

I unfortunately don’t have a picture of this specific rock (because I didn’t take one at that moment and it’s currently stored away with the hundreds of other rocks and minerals that I found on this trip), but I had never seen a rock like this out in actual nature before – it looked like something I would buy in a store.

And I probably would have acted a little more happy and excited about it if I hadn’t felt like crap.

Plus, it wasn’t very easy to walk there. We had to climb all over the hills, and then suddenly, the port-a-potty came into view. We reached the campsite about a minute after the van and truck arrived.

So, everyone immediately started unloading. Meanwhile, I hopped back into the PARKED van and lied down in my seat for another good 20 minutes or so. Rocky occasionally checked up on me and promised that I would be in the very front of the van on the way OUT of the desert.

Thank God.

Once my head stopped spinning and my stomach settled, I started unloading all of my stuff and setting up camp after everyone else already had. It was difficult to do since it was cloudy, rainy, and cold (and I didn’t take any pictures on this day for that reason), but here is what our camp looked like the next day:

And here was the inside of my tent (also taken on the next day):

Rocky and the guys set up a big kitchen tent (and another small pantry-like tent) with tables, chairs, all of our water, eating utensils, coolers, and everything like that.

However, things took another turn when Casey lost the ring she had bought at one of the gift shops a few days prior. She was in love with this ring, and it had slipped off her finger while she was unloading her stuff.

We all looked everywhere for it for at least an hour or so, but unfortunately, we never found it. It blended in with the dirt, the sun wasn’t shining, and the wind probably swept it away.

Afterwards, since I was on duty that day, I helped with dinner. We all ate (unfortunately I don’t remember what we had) and then Rocky gave us the rules:

1. Obviously we couldn’t roam anywhere outside of our campsite without Rocky, Coleman, or Mitch – because everything in the desert begins to look the same if you are unfamiliar with the entire area. So it was very easy to get lost.
2. We absolutely weren’t allowed to go anywhere after the sun went down – except for the port-a-potty.
3. We were allowed to have campfires away from all of our tents – but we weren’t allowed to keep our chairs down there (because some have swept away in the past).
4. We were supposed to always listen to Rocky (obviously).
5. No “hanky-panky” in the tents (a rule that had already been established).
6. We had to make sure the flag next to the port-a-potty was facing upwards if we were using it – and then flip it upside down when we weren’t using it, so everyone else knew if it was occupied or not.
7. Either wear A LOT of sunscreen or cover up your arms and legs completely so you don’t get severely burned out in the sun.

There were several other minor rules that were fairly obvious (don’t eat anything wild, don’t touch anything that is brightly colored, be careful of cacti, etc.), and then she told us that the first exam would be the next day and that we would have a review after dinner on that day.

Then after that, we went back to our tents for the night. It was freezing to say the least – I wore my winter coat to bed as well as a hat and gloves.

So, obviously this day wasn’t very eventful – which is why I’m attaching Day 8 to this blog entry as well.

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Day 8:

We got up around 7:40 that next morning – and it was HOT. The sun was out on this day, so it was beaming down on my tent. The inside was boiling, especially since I had fallen asleep with a winter coat, gloves, and a hat on.

But once I got undressed (and then dressed), and outside, I realized that it was actually a nice, warm, sunny/windy day (obviously because I couldn’t feel the breeze inside my tent). We ate some breakfast and I PLASTERED on sunscreen.

Rocky and Coleman went to Pat’s to get some more supplies, and I used this downtime to study for our exam a little – since it was that night. We had to memorize the San Rafael Stratigraphy (formations, groups, and members) from the Triassic to the Cretaceous, so that’s mostly what I was working on:

(from oldest to youngest – and this information pertains to things that are in the pictures that I’m going to show you – so please don’t skip it!)

Triassic: Chinle Formation

Moenkopi Formation

Jurassic:

            Morrison Formation – Brushy Basin, Salt Wash Member, & Tidwell Member.

            San Rafael Group: Summerville Formation, Curtis Formation, Entrada Sandstone, Carmel Formation, & Page Sandstone.

            Glenn Canyon Group: Navajo Sandstone, Kayenta Formation, & Wingate Sandstone.

Cretaceous: Mesaverde Group, Mancos Shale, Dakota Sandstone, & Cedar Mountain Formation (Buckhorn Conglomerate).

So I just kept writing this information down over and over so that I would be able to remember it for the exam.

Then it was announced that we were all going to go hiking while Rocky and Coleman were gone – so we went on that hike and came back around 11. Mitch showed us various things, we collected a lot of rocks, and we took a lot of pictures.

In regards to the history of the area, we were witnessing the Morrison Formation of the Jurassic – obviously it held thousands of dinosaur bones and fragments. The guys found some red dinosaur bones (and there’s actually a blue one embedded into one of the rocks that’s still out there somewhere), but the majority of the fragments were black.

But more specifically, we were milling around The Brushy Basin (of the Morrison Formation) on this hike:

And this is Buckhorn Conglomerate:

And here’s some more pictures of the hike:

(Cacti like this were EVERYWHERE in the desert. Most of us wouldn’t notice them while we were walking around – and we’d step on them. The needles would poke through our shoes and prick the bottom of our feet. I accidentally knelt down in one and it pricked my left knee – but I’ll get to that in a later entry.)

And Mitch told us that this is called “Desert Varnish:”

It can also be seen as black streaks on some of the sandstone formations at Arches National Park (pictures from the previous two travel blog entries.) They are basically dark oxides that form on rock surfaces in arid regions.

And here are some pictures of rocks I found (and coal):

Overall, I found some chert, jasper, rocks with quartz in them (the rocks with tiny crystals all over them that sparkles in the sun), and some other various rocks that I never fully identified.

And we never did get a solid confirmation on what these tiny red rocks were:

We eventually traveled back to camp, where Rocky and Coleman had just returned from Pat’s. Now, everyone got ready to head out to where we were going to be working for the next week: The Aaron Scott Quarry (pictures of the actual quarry will be given in later entries because I was always busy and didn’t exactly have time to take pictures of what we were working on until the very end of the trip.)

But here is the detailed report of what I specifically did on this day in the quarry:

Casey and I were pretty much all over the place on this day – we did many things. We started by digging out all of the sediment on the large blue tarp (that was covering dinosaur bones) around 1:45-ish on the South, Southwest side of the quarry.  

The weather was very sunny and windy – 70 degrees without the sun (it was also partly cloudy).  

We took a short break after we uncovered and removed the tarp.

Then Rocky made a phone call to Janet: our second instructor who hadn’t arrived with her class yet. She was a professor at a college in Kentucky – they were all going to work with us at the quarry. 

Around 2:30 – Casey and I worked on the Northwest side as Coleman and Randy shoveled sediment off of the second tarp that covered a huge pit.

We took the buckets that they filled with sediment and dumped them off to the side.

Then we used a rock hammer and chisel to dig away rock and dirt from the dinosaur dorsal bone (the back vertebrae) towards the end of the workday.

REVIEW: 

The tarps were covering the cervical/dorsal vertebrae (it was either to the Allosaurus or the Barosaurus – I honestly don’t remember which dinosaur it belonged to because I didn’t work on this section very much after it was uncovered from the tarp) that they’ve been trying to uncover for four years.

When they last worked on it, they covered it with a tarp to avoid damage from the rain. Sediment had piled up on those tarps over the past several months. So basically, we had to dig everything out this day.

This bone is apparently pretty rare and we wanted to FINALLY uncover all of it in one piece if possible (after 4 years of working on it. So, we ended up working on this section of the quarry A LOT during this trip 

We started walking back to camp around 4:00 and we made dinner at 5 (chili) – we had our exam around 8.

I ended up writing out everything I knew about each site that we had gone to in order to review for this exam: So here is a quick review of the first week if you’re new to this blog (otherwise, you can skip this last section):

Elephant Rocks – Missouri.

-Spheroidal weathering – it weathers on all sides – creates rounded corners.

-Pink granite = granite has large crystals, which means that the magma cooled very slowly.

-It also contains so rhyolite – exploded from a volcano, cooled quickly = smaller crystals (Aphanite).

-Magma either explodes or intrudes

-Weathering = cracks/joints expand and contract with the cold weather = frost wedging.

-Youngest granite here is 1.3 million years old.

-Water seeps into those cracks/joints.

-Erosion then moves material – freezes and thaws

-Missouri Granite Formation = red and pink granite.

-Used to be a volcanically active area.

-This is also “The Lead Belt”

-TOR = rocky hilltop.

Kansas – Central Kansas – Mesozoic Era

-Stones are a lot like Missouri

-Big unconformity between the Pennsylvanian and Cretaceous (missing the Triassic and Jurassic).

-Cretaceous Interior Seaway.

Central Lowlands

-Indian, Illinois, Missouri

-Passed through this on the first day

-Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri = Paleozoic Era

Ancestral Rockies

-uplift along the northwest – southeast faulting trend during the Pennsylvania era

-Also known as the Colorado Orogeny

-Deposited the Garden of the Gods, the Arches, and Elephant Rocks.

Laramide Orogeny

-little igneous activity

-faulting = steeper

-large fault-bounded uplifts

-mixture of Pre-Cambrian with young sedimentary.

Colorado Plateau

-uplifted into an irregular dome

-downcutting by rivers and streams formed canyons

-sediments were moved by erosion, exposing Tertiary sediments and mountains.

Great Sand Dunes

-1.5 billion years old

-trapped in between two mountains – San Juan (89%) and Sangre Christo (11%)

-mostly contains 28% quartz and 52% volcanic rock

-sand = hypersthene and basaltic horneblende.

-non-magnetic and mineral heavy – San Juan.

-San Juan – Tertiary

-Sangre – Proterozoic

-eroded – wind and glacier melting = moved sand dunes.

Black Canyon

-Tertiary – volcanism

-Laramide Orogeny

-uplift after volcanism

-Gunnison River cut through it – formed canyon

-pegmatite dyke = really big crystals

-everything around it weathered quickly, but the magma cooled slowly = big pink granite canyon intrusions.

Arches

-salt dissolution structures, balanced rocks, petrified dune fields, and canyons

-folds = salt tectonics

-Panthalassic Sea covered the whole thing

-gradually evaporated during the Pennsylvanian, which deposited evaporates and salt beds

-Entrada Sandstone – Middle Jurassic

-Ancestral Rockies.

We took the exam around 8 that night, and then we all went to bed. I had still gotten pretty burnt that day because I didn’t think to put sunscreen on my ears – so my ears were pretty much burning for the rest of this week from this point on because I didn’t put any on them on this day (biggest mistake of my life).

But anyways, that’s all I have for you today, I will probably post something again shortly. I’ll catch you later!