This weekend, I’ve tried to forget about all the shit that’s been going on lately, so I’ve spent a lot of time out of the house. This isn’t exactly the best time of year for hiking, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the past two days.
Yesterday, I found a geocache just outside of Wellington, north of Farnham Road. The road was really muddy in spots, snowpacked and slushy in others. I had to park 0.3 miles from the cache, and the walk was easy up until the last 100 yards or so, which was up a steep hill. After finding the cache, I decided to keep going up the hill, climbed the small cliff at the top, and ended up on a flat plateau. I walked towards the east along the edge of the cliff, and eventually found an easy place to climb back down and hike back to the car. All along the way, I found tons of interesting fossils, mostly just shells and the like. I left one behind that I didn’t mean to–it was too big to carry for too long a distance, so I left it on top of a boulder and planned on picking it up on my way back to the car. Since I ended up taking a different route back to the car, I forgot about it. I’ll go back and get it next weekend, since it was quite different from the rest of the fossils that are common in that area.
Today, I went after another cache in Spring Canyon. Things were pretty uneventful there, but if there had been less snow I would have hiked around quite a bit more. There were elk tracks and droppings literally everywhere. It would have been nice to catch some pictures of that many elk, but it was the wrong time of day–they must’ve all been bedded down higher up in the mountains.
After finding so many fossils yesterday, I did some searching to see if anybody else had found anything of significance in that area. It turns out that there are a lot of cephalopod fossils in the Mounds Reef just a few miles away. I’ve only been to Mounds once, last year sometime, and it was a pretty interesting area. There are huge, strangely smooth and round boulders all along the Mounds Reef that look as though they were harder than the surrounding rock, and they’re all that’s left after the rest eroded away. I’m planning on going there next weekend (that is, if I’m not moving) and spending a lot of time hiking around and digging for fossils. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but I never knew exactly where to look, until now.