EISPIRATEN

After I was done walking around in the Providence Mountains I drove to Cadiz on the Southern edge of the Marble Mountains. Some of the shale here is supposed to contain Trilobite fossils, and I wanted to poke around.

This place feels like the end of the earth. It's the end of pavement, which itself is a spur off the old 66, which few drive on. The railroad is here, and trains run back/forth constantly. The view from a little ways up into the mountains:



This view is actually from two years ago. The farm behind the rail is bigger now. No idea what they're growing. It's a chill place to camp and to hang out for a day. This area of the Marble mountains has lots of exposed rock layers, some of which are the right age to have Trilobites in them. Two years ago, I only had a vague idea of where to look. This time I had a slightly better idea. Slightly. I met David in the morning, we found an area that we thought would be promising, and spent a few hours poking around. Found lots of trilobite heads, of various sizes. No complete specimens, although I found a small set of what could be the legs only. Had so many fossils by the end, that we left some there. My haul:



These guys were there for 500 million years until I showed up to pull them out of the wall.

My wife and I enjoyed searching for trilobites with Dima last week and it's an interesting area.

Let me mention some tricks we learned about finding them. We tried a few little spots, not far from each other, with no success. Then Dima started looking at a sort of concave area on the hillside, where the shale was a little thicker and the soil was more moist. I don't know if those things were factors, but he found one or two right away and then I looked there and found a few more. Within an hour or so we had about 20 of them.

I noticed that in one or two Youtube videos, people were using a small pick to split the rock. It turns out that tool is called a brick hammer. I brought a couple of cheap ones up there and they worked pretty well. It seemed like the best bets were shale pieces the size of a small steak, or your hand. We'd pull one out, split it lengthwise with the brick hammer, and sometimes get lucky.

Of the batch that Cholada and I found, these were our favorites: