Digging for fossils, another must-do on our cross-country bucket list. We found a place just ten minutes from our campground, Baisch's Dinosaur Digs. It's run on a 9,000 acre family ranch that contains part of the Hell's Creek Formation, which means big things to fossil aficionados. Shana and Marge met us at their office/shop/mini-museum. It was crammed full of fossils of all kinds, not the least of which was the gigantic skull of a triceratops in the corner. Marge was the matriarch of the ranch, in her own words "too old to go out digging," but full of a lifetime of stories and anecdotes, not to mention fossil knowledge. Shana led the show, though, and after giving us and the other hunters a quick rundown, we hopped in the ranch trucks and headed out.
Actually, everyone else hopped in the ranch trucks. Shana figured our Rav4 would probably be OK getting out to the site. In another unexpected highlight of our journey, I got to put the Rav4 into 'Trail Mode' and navigate a gnarly 15 minute drive through mud, up sidehills, through high grass and a few deep puddles. It was a blast, and we only bottomed out once, just barely.
As exciting as that was, the next seven hours were more like fun but dogged work. The fossils we were likely to find were tiny, and discovering them usually meant kneeling on the ground, picking through mudstone and sandstone and gravel to try and find something that looked out of place: something shiny or smooth was usually a good sign.
No triceratops skulls for us. Our haul mostly consisted of tiny bones and teeth, although I did manage to find one larger raptor tooth, estimated to be about 60 million years old.
There wasn't a lick of shade out there and by the afternoon, we were mostly fossiled-out. I think we spent much of the final hour just exploring, reveling in the freedom of discovering a new outcrop or cave behind each butte and hoodoo. But it was incredibly hot, so eventually we packed up to go. Just then, a very-late Dutch film crew arrived to shoot a travel show, or possibly a documentary. We're not really sure. We stuck around to watch, thinking maybe we'll get in the background of a few shots as the host talked fossils with Shana. To our surprise, they interviewed us, about how our dig went, what we found, what it was like etc. It was a fun but surreal way to end the day.
So if you're ever out in Montana, I strongly encourage you to spend a day with Shana at Baisch's Dinosaur Digs. She's patient, knowledgeable, great with kids and just an all-around nice person to spend the day with. And who knows, maybe you'll end up on TV half a world away. I'm totally looking forward to telling people that we're huge in the Netherlands.
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