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The reunion date is set for Saturday, November 13, 1-3pm at Burpee.
Bring your family and introduce them to your Burpee Crew and the friends you made this summer. Some of you have been visiting the Burpee quarries for years and this is another chance to catch up with the gang.
Bring a dish for the pot luck or just bring yourself. Send your 2010 pics to Mirm and get a master CD at the reunion. Hope to see you there!
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Utah's Goblin Valley State Park
Session #1 Starts in Hanksville UT on May 24th. Burpee’s educators will travel to Utah in time to give tours of the dig site Memorial Day weekend.
Visit www.burpee.org/education/expeditions to read more about how to join the crew in Utah or Montana this summer.
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Highway to Hell Creek
Free and open to the public.
Burpee kicks off a new field season with the first of two orientation sessions. If you’re on the fence about joining the excavation site in Utah, this is your chance to find out more. If you’re interested in Montana, you’ll have a second chance on July 10. To read more and print registration forms visit www.burpee.org/education/expeditions
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Mirm Near the Quarry
Heidi Strand, Burpee’s Director of Resource Development & Marketing and I are fresh off the plane and have some fun photos to share. For a very quick trip, we met so many people and accomplished a lot. We made it to the Hanksville-Burpee Quarry three times in three days, not bad considering we weren’t there to get dirty.
After meeting with the BLM and some local bussiness owners, we hit the Hanksville attractions and did some shopping. Because the site was rained out in the afternoon, the whole crew headed for Goblin Valley, a near by state park. More incredible geology and scenic views. Scott
Goblin Valley
reminded us all that some scenes from Galaxy Quest were filmed here. If you’ve seen the movie, seeing these blobby rock formations might ring a bell.
Other than eating at every restarant in Hanksville, I made a point to visit the local grocery store, the Information
Mirm at Goblin Valley
Center, that doubles as a weekly clinic, the BLM office, the new fire house and all three motels.
The highlights for me were the shakes at Stan’s Burger Shack, Jed’s Jerky and everything at Blondie’s including; their great service and fun staff, the blueberry pancakes
Blondie's
Jed's Jerky
and don’t forget the turquoise jewelry.
Scott Sporting His Beef-a-Roo Tee and Estwing Cap
On our final day, we made it out to the site on the way to fly out of Grand Junction CO. I got this great shot of Scott in his Beef a Roo tee. He is convinced that Beef a Roo could rename their Olive Burger after him. Personally I would go for the Blue Cheese Burger, “Mirm’s Surprise Burger”. I know, not as descriptive, but catchy.
Ultimately, we all agreed that all of the photos just don’t do justice to the real thing. The suraoundings are so vast and colorful you start to feel “scenery drunk” from taking it all in. It reminded me of my first trip to Alaska, the scope and magesty of it all. I hope you get a chance to experience Utah for yourselves one day.
Comments Off Monday, June 15 Connecting Our Future held the groundbreaking cerimony for the expansions of the Burpee and the Discovery Center
Connecting Our Future is all about the KIDS
Children’s Museum. Construction bids are being awarded to contractors and work is already beging to prepare the two orginizations for a year of change.
Dirt is Fun!
Thanks to all of you for your support of this partnership.
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Lisa Johnson Getting a Tour Started
Text by Betsy Carlson, Burpee Educator
Photos by Sheila Rawlings, Director of Education, Burpee Museum
Having given 100s of tours in the past, this dig site tour is unique. First, the visitors are making history. Those viewing this quarry will be able to tell their children and grand children, “Why I was at the Hanksville-Burpee Quarry the first summer it was open to the public. The summer they were digging out four sauropods.” These tours are unique also in that they are continually changing. Each day the quarries have more bones being exposed, other bones are further exposed, and still others are jacketed and removed. So this is not static but a living tour, where visitors are experiencing science.
The tour begins with a short introduction to the Morrison Basin and the Morrison Formation. From there we examine the side of a preserved river channel where an Allosaurus was removed last summer. Then we climb the ridge to look at the quarries on top. Here a Camarasaurus and a possible Apatosaurus are being excavated. Vertebra, ribs, and scapula are quickly recognizable to the visitors. Next we leave the ridge and walk along the top of an earthen dam to look at Cow Dung Reservoir. Then we climb down into a ravine and examine the layers of sandstone and conglomerate with different sediment sizes. From here we walk further down into another wash where we see preserved roots, animal burrows, and Union Clams. Now it is time to climb out up onto the opposite ridge where the Barosaurus is being dug. This tour affords a rich opportunity to see the dig as well as to enjoy the variety of weathering formations in the Brushy Basin Member of the Morrison Formation.
Participating in the dig is wonderful and so are the desert vistas. But for me the best part has been meeting and visiting with the visitors on the tour. First, I have been amazed by the geologic knowledge the Utah public has. Basically the residents of Utah know their local geology. I especially have enjoyed meeting families with a long history in this valley. These visits have been truly inspirational to me.
To relate how special these visits have been, let me relate a story. I had given the tour to a group of twenty one. I knew that some of the participants were from the same family. After the tour as we were finishing the final questions, one participant said, “I think it was our grandfather who built the dam for Cow Dung Reservoir, since he was the only one in those days with a Cat” (Caterpillar crawler). From there I learned that they had four generations on the tour celebrating the one year anniversary of one member’s heart transplant. Another had had a hip transplant in January. The Hanksville-Burpee Quarry tour was their family outing. Fourteen family members from 2 to 72 all descended from the builder of the dam saw his dam and the dinosaurs that lay at its foot. Such is the history that we are learning through these tours. I am excited by the potential which these dinosaurs hold for the future of the area of the Hanksville –Burpee Quarry.
Comments Off Thank you for visiting Burpee’s Blog. If you want to read more please visit www.burpee.org Education/Expeditions you will find the links to the BLM press release and the Salt Lake Tribune article or click here for the MSNBC Story.
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Helmuth Redschlag Just Getting Started
The advance team spent the day opening the Hanksville-Burpee Quarry. This required a lot of shoveling and sweeping to remove the bones we had plastered last year. In a relatively short time large plaster “pods” began to emerge. Most of these jackets have partial sauropod (the big four legged,long necked/long tailed dinosaurs) skeletons like Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, and possibly Apatosaurus (AKA Brontosaurus).
Doug, Working a New Find
was well worth it because by mid-day new bones were already being discovered. Doug Krueger found two large bones, most likely a sauropod fibula (shinbone) and a large hip bone. Bill Harrison (you might remember as one of Jane’s co-finders) came across a nice tail vertebra to the same dinosaur. By about 4:00 PM it got to be too much, most of us looked like six foot lobsters so we called it a day. All in all a really good start.
Bill Harrison with Vertebra
Text and Photos By Scott Williams
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Don't Fence Me In
We began our Friday with an early morning meeting with the BLM at the Hanksville-Burpee Quarry. Our task was to put up fencing around the quarry to mark it off as well as restrict movement to certain sensitive areas. It turns out that there are Fish Hook Cacti not far from the quarry and they need to be conserved. So we assisted BLM Agent Buzz Rakow in putting up the fencing, which during a 90+ degree day, driving steel rods into thick sandstone is no picnic. My hands are still numb. By about 1:00 PM we had the site fenced
Oysters by the Billions
and were off to check out some jeep trails we had spied from the road. One of the trails took us several miles off the beaten path. On the top of one of the Morrison Formation exposures we found billions and billions of fossil Oysters. When I say billions…I mean hundreds of billions. There were so many they covered acres and acres like pavement. Interestingly these fossil oysters are early Cretaceous in age, making them younger than the Morrison Formation. They come from the Mancos Shale (a Cretaceous Marine Formation). In this spot the Mancos had weathered down leaving the oysters behind. From this spot we eyed hundreds of more unexplored square miles to the north. The exposure looked like we were on Mars. The Geology in this area is awesome…I would think some student could make a good project mapping it all.
Falcarius and Josh
Saturday was a little less exerting. Josh and I traveled to Salt Lake City to pick up Carrie Levitt. Carrie is a University of Wisconsin at Madison Geology grad and volunteers as a fossil preparator at Burpee Museum. After picking her up we swung by the University of Utah Museum of Natural
Carrie with Columbian Mammoth
History and got a chance to meet their fossil preparators. Its a cool place for fossils. In fact they are working on some new to science horned dinosaurs which will be published on soon. After meeting with the preparators we checked out the exhibits. Aside from some very cool dinosaurs the fossil mammal displays are equally impressive. We left SLC behind and returned to Hanksville. Tomorrow we get to open the site and begin work…..some more volunteers showed up as well so things are about to pick up….stay tuned.
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