Torrey's Peak and Gray's Peak
On Monday we took the scenic drive through the Rockies and left Colorado. Along the way, we got lucky again and saw over a dozen Big Horn Sheep rams near I-70. So a quick detour occurred and more awesome pictures were taken. If you never have had the opportunity to drive through the Rockies you should do so….it is beautiful.
Bighorn Rams
We stopped and took more beauty shots about 10 miles from Vale and continued on. After a few hours we dropped down and into Fruita, Colorado. Fruita is the home of the Dinosaur Journey Museum, which is run by Dr. John Foster and his wife Rebecca Hunt-Foster. Both are noted paleontologists and friends to the Burpee Museum. We spent a couple hours visiting with them and getting a tour of the museum.
For those interested in late Jurassic Dinosaurs, this is a place to visit. Some of the old dinomation robots are here as well. We said our good byes and headed the last leg for Hanksville, UT. After two more hours we arrived in Hanksville at 10:00 PM mountain time and settled into our new headquarters….the Henry Mountain Hideout. Next step….breakfast and checking in with the Hanksville BLM (Bureau of Land Management). Stay tuned….
Josh with a Stegosaurus
Allosaurus
Pike's Peak from below
AWESOME, AWESOME, and AWESOME!! As soon as we checked out of our hotel we entered Pike National Forest and began the nearly three hour drive up Pike’s Peak. Pike’s peak is one of the tallest peaks in the lower 48 states, standing at 14,110 ft above sea level. It was named after Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, an army officer who was sent by President Thomas Jefferson to map the mountains after the famous
a little windy
Louisiana Purchase.
Ok…history aside….although the temperature at the base (about 7000 feet above sea level) was around 60 degrees, things would change the higher we went. The drive should be more like 2 hours to the top…..but when every turn you make you have to stop to take a picture…things slow down. The forests are beautiful a mixture of tall pine and Aspen. Around 9000 ft up you start seeing some snow on the ground, by 10,000 ft a lot of snow. The mountain has granite exposures all over the place. From a geology point of view, it’s great.
Granite
The granite has big “chunks” of feldspars and quartz in it, the crystals very visible. This means that when this part of the mountain was an intrusive magma…it cooled very slowly allowing crystals to grow large. In retrospect….it’s probably a good thing that Betsy Carlson (one of Burpee’s intrepid Educators) was not with, otherwise we would be leaving with about half the mountain in our vehicle.
We saw wildlife signs all over the place. Notices for bears, coyotes, Elk, deer, bobcat, Mountain Lions and yes….even the elusive
Roadside Fox
Bigfoot. We see some wildlife here and there……but we made a friend early. A red fox came up to our vehicle to say hello. The little guy was adorable. He obviously knew how to play to the crowd, because he was constantly mugging for pictures. I probably took about 40 pictures of him alone. He was fairly tame and allowed me to get close enough for a smile and a wink. After this bit of good luck, we continued up…and up…and up. We passed 11,000 FT then 12,000 FT. The air grew cooler and cooler. Soon it was dropping below 40 degrees. We saw people skiing thousands of feet down on 70 degree slopes (they must be
See that crazy skier?
crazy!)……this picture I took shows a tiny little dot in the middle of the steep slope. We drove until we reached the furthest we could…..about 13,500 ft. The last 600 feet was blocked because of snow. The air temperature was 30 degrees (wind chill was more like 15)….30-40 mile an hour winds…snowing, top of the world….AWESOME. Josh and I walked around and got some great pictures (in between getting dizzy). It really is something to walk a bit and get vertigo due to lack of oxygen. It was a great day….we spent about 40 minutes nearly at the top before we made the painstakingly slow descent. Low gears and stops to rest the vehicle were the orders for the rest of the day…..loosing brakes at 13000+ is a bad day. All in all it was great…..I am already trying to figure out how to get back.
Mounted Dodo
right-whale
Well after months of planning the adventure to the Hanksville-Burpee Quarry has officially begun. Josh Mathews (one of Burpee’s top notch fossil preparators and a recent NIU Masters Graduate) left around 9:00 for our digsite located near the town of Hanksville, Utah. The whole trip is about 20 hours of driving so we were going to do it in stages. The first step….and arguable the most boring is the 13 hour drive to Colorado (which takes us through the long dark of western Iowa and Nebraska- No offense to any Cornhuskers or Hawkeyes out there). Our plans were to drive to Woodland Park, CO so we could visit the Dinosaur Resource Center Museum on Saturday morning. We made the decision to take a break early in the trip and stop at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, in Iowa City. The Natural History Museum is an awesome place with a lot of history. It was founded in 1858 and has one of the best Biology Collections I have seen. It has several different large and exotic mounted mammal exhibits including a Giant Panda, Moose, Musk Oxen, Pronghorns, Apes and even Walrus. The museum also boasts an amazingly diverse osteology (skeleton) collection, the most
Moose
impressive specimen being a 45 foot long Right Whale Skeleton. Finally its bird collection reminds me of the old Burpee Museum exhibits. Thousands of birds from all over the world are displayed. Aside from birds of prey, songbirds, shorebirds the museum has one of the best Dodo restorations I have seen. All in all, this museum was the best diversion to take our mind off of the remaining hours of driving we had. For the record we made it into Colorado at 1:30 AM…..yeeeesh.
Josh Mathews, Prehistoric Paradise
Despite the fact we arrived at 1:30 AM, Josh and I were up surprisingly early. We still had about an hour drive to get to the Dinosaur Resource Center Museum in Woodland Park but we knew we would have smooth sailing and beautiful landscapes to keep us company. The museum is part of Triebold Paleontology which is known for its work in the paleo-community including molding/casting, cast and specimen sales, and mounting dinosaur specimens. Some might recognize the director, Mike Triebold as he recently was at PaleoFest as one of our speakers. Upon arriving at the museum we were greeted by Tracie Bennitt and her husband John. Tracie is the Sales and Marketing Director for the Institute and helps keep things rolling. Her husband John is a great guy and is typically the one they send to mount a specimen. We received a great tour of their facility and their museum.
The museum was full of fossils of all sorts. The dinosaur hall had Edmontosaurus (duckbill
Platecarpus
dinosaurs), several Pachycephalosaurus casts (the bone-headed dinosaurs), a T.rex cast, a Daspletosaurus (T.rex’s cousin), and several other dinos. It was awesome to see so much in one area. In addition to dinosaurs, one of the things the museum is known for is their work with mosasaurs. Mosasaurs are the big sea-going reptiles that lived in the late Cretaceous period (but they are NOT dinosaurs), in fact they are probably more closely related to lizards like the Komodo Dragon. In fact one of the reason we did not get a chance to say hello to Mike Triebold was that he was on another mosasaur dig in Kansas.
The reason this might be of interest to Burpee is that in the late 1960′s our founding director Milt Mahlburg and one of his students collected a couple partial specimens of some mosasaurs in Wyoming. The specimens are currently in Burpee’s collection, but needs some restoration and mounting. If the right funding and time becomes available we could have the specimen restored and mounted for an exhibit, so we wanted to see the facilities at the DRC as they would be the logical ones to do the work.
The mosasaur that Burpee has appears to be a composite Platecarpus and would be an impressive
Bone Heads
animal at nearly 20 feet in length. Just imagine one of those fellas “swimming” around our new exhibit halls…(sigh)… I can dream can’t I? Anyhow after an exciting day, Josh and I bid Tracie and John goodbye and left the museum. As we were leaving we could not help but notice our adventure for DAY 3…..PIKE’S PEAK!! Bring your oxygen masks for tomorrow’s entry!
We’ve been without a blog for too long. Thanks to those of you following Burpee’s field work, events and happenings through our other digital media; website (burpee.org), Facebook, Craigslist, etc.
With our 2009 Field Season kicking off next week with Scott Williams departure for Utah, please add this blog to your “favorites” list or igoogle page. We’ll try to keep up with posting fresh photos and latest news.
Morrison Formation Utah
Hi everybody! This is Katie. I just wanted to update you on what’s going on in the lab. First of all, Scott and Josh have already left for Utah and are readying our permits and such. Back in the lab at Burpee, however, Mindy and I have been continuing our preparation of specimens. We are working on some pieces of Homer that we collected last year and are trying to get caught up on a backlog of fossils. We both will be leaving on the 18th though; we are catching a ride with a crew from Western Illinois University. So our lab may look a little deserted, but its for a good cause! We will have a few volunteers coming in from time to time to keep things running smoothly down there, so do stop by and see what they’re up to. I will upload some pictures of our work later this week. This summer may be the busiest and most prolific the lab has ever had!
Katie
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