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. |
