A stop in Provo

After leaving Delta, we headed for Provo and the Earth Science Museum at Brigham Young University. This museum showcases many fossils from the Jurassic Period, which spans a period from approximately 210-140 million years ago. The museum houses one of the top five collections from the Jurassic Period in the world and has been featured in magazines, newspapers, and on television throughout the world. Unfortunately for us, it's not open on Saturday, which is when we were there. Additionally, there was a sign on the door saying that they were closed for field work so we probably would have been out of luck no matter when we'd gotten there.

We didn't let it deter us and just headed to our RV park, looking forward to a little time to relax. This campground, Lakeside RV Campground, was gorgeous and located right next to the river. There were tons of cottonwood trees and the whole place almost looked blanketed with snow as the fluff was so thick everywhere. After a walk along the river, we changed and headed to the pool for some recreation time. This was where Matt really started to take off with his swimming and started to get a lot more confident in the water. A little more practice and he'll be swimming like a fish!

I think Provo has been one of Rob's favorite stops so far. He ran along a bike/hiking path called the Provo River Parkway (among other names) and loved it. This path was 34 miles of uninterrupted path - no roads, traffic, cars, etc. that ran along the river and up to Provo Canyon. He ran a total of about 13 miles, taking in the local wildlife. He kept talking about "birds with doodads on their head", which we later identified as quail.

You can see how thick the cottonwood fluff was on the path along the river.

The trees actually looked like they were covered with snow, they were so white.


A close-up of fluff on a pine tree.

Leaving the campground, heading for Vernal, we drove along the Provo River in Provo Canyon. We pulled over to admire Bridal Veil Falls (evidently a common name for falls as Yosemite also has one and I saw another one on a map in another state) in the canyon.

A closeup of the falls, showing it's likeness to a bridal veil, hence it's name.

(As you can tell, I'm taking advantage of having a decent connection and posting while I can!)

Digging for Trilobites

After leaving the Great Basin National Park area, we headed for Delta, UT, arriving on July 10. Our reason for this visit was to dig for trilobites at U-Dig Fossils, something we'd been looking forward to since we saw a program on them on the Discovery Channel 4 - 5 years ago. They provide you with a rock hammer and a bucket and guarantee that you'll find trilobites. Turns out, this is a fairly easy guarantee for them to make as it would be hard to not find them in this huge treasure chest of fossils.

We paid for two hours, figuring that would be plenty under the hot Utah sun. Turns out, it was more than enough for Matt, who packed it in just short of an hour and a half after the sun got to him. As you can see below, he refused to listen to us about wearing his hat.

The basic mode of operation was to find or split off a chunk of rock and then split it with your rock hammer. Matt's hard at work here, looking for fossils.

Look at that smile! As you can tell, he was successful. He had a knack for finding little trilobites, although I hold the record for finding the tiniest, as you'll see below. It popped out for me, tiny as can be.
Rob was actually breaking pieces of rock off of the side here and had fabulous luck finding some nice trilobites.

Here are some of the specimans that popped right out of the rock for us. Believe it or not, this picture is zoomed in and my tiny one, on the far right, is actually smaller than it looks in this picture.

A few more of the nice specimans that we found. We also have many that are still in the rock. Evidently, if they're face up in the rock it's better to leave them in "the matrix" rather than to try and pop them out.

It was a hot two hours of work but very worthwhile. I feel compelled to note, however, that there really is nothing else in Delta to do besides hunt for fossils, topaz, and geodes. It's known as a rockhounders paradise and that's about it.