Oak Springs Trilobite Site
Caliente Field Office BLM
(map link)
I spotted the trilobites on the list of BLM recreation sites on my Ely District Recreation Opportunities Guide and drew some little bright lines around it so I wouldn't forget to stop at #18. There's actually two signs to help the public find the spot and a short piece of maintained road to parking with a toilet, trash, picnic tables, information signs, register, even tools. Well, the public has been a bit too hard on the tools, so there was not actually a rock hammer when I looked. They suggest you have one for best experience. And eye protection. And you are allowed to keep common stuff like plants and trilobites so long as it is for your own personal having. I haven't got a hammer so I am dependent on what might already be visible. (I decided against bringing along the hatchet that doesn't get any use.)
Beside the sign and register, there's a trail heading west to the actual location of the fossils. It's quite a short hike being not more than a quarter of a mile.
I was actually hiking with other people! I followed a family with young children who did not seem challenged by the route.
The sign says the most common thing to find is heads, but that's just of trilobites. The actual most common thing are these little blue-green splotches that I'm not even sure are actually fossils. Maybe it's just a weathering? There were rock layers that didn't have them. Maybe it's ancient algae blobs.
I walked around looking, but mostly trying to be somewhere that wasn't clearly dug through already.
I got higher and higher and started pondering if I shouldn't just go right up the peak. It's about 600 feet from the lot. I may as well have. I would have gotten a new peak on Peakbagger and I was doing the fossil hunting wrong.
I ended up leaving without finding a prize. Le sigh.
Thursday, 23 November 2023
As I passed the trilobites again, I decided to stop and try a little more. It's a very short way off the highway. I had asked in the Caliente office how big they were since I thought they were maybe nickel or quarter sized. If they were much smaller, I could be looking right past them. They said there are often some by the register that others leave to help folks out. Also, it hadn't been long since the last rock hammer had been left and the unappreciative public at large should not expect another to be sacrificed to them soon.I looked about quite a bit before condescending to look about the areas with clear holes in them already. There I started finding plants. Hum. Perhaps that means things were fossilizing more. And things could mean trilobites too.
Once I did that, it really didn't take very long to find one. It was just a head, but it was a complete head and I found it and I was excessively happy to do so. I showed it off to the vacationing geologist who happened to be about and was also trying not to dig through what was already dug.
There are six trilobites known to occur here. I compared mine to the line drawings on the sign and decided Olenellus terminatus was most likely the one I had. There were others around. The rocks by the sign and register had reduced in number since I was first there, leaving nothing of interest, but there was a pile on the picnic table nearest the toilets. I only kept the one I found, but moved the best of these to a more visible spot.
The sign had some clues to how I was doing it wrong at first. The trilobites that lived here died out after about 10 million years. The sea remained and the shale continued to build, but there were no trilobites to fossilize. By going high, I was looking in the younger and deader sea. The class Trilobita may have lasted 270 million years, but these six species did not.
*photo album*
©2023,2024 Valerie Norton
Written 17 Jan 2024
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