Day 4 - Thursday, 7/27/2023: Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument and Penrose, CO

A cinnamon roll and a carton of milk for breakfast, then out to Barry to start the day's adventure. Before putting him into reverse, I checked the odometer: 24,934 miles, 1,369 miles added during the last three days. I'll admit it I was kind of feeling those miles myself, but today was the big meet-up with several folks from my rockhound club at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, and I didn't want to be late. I pulled out of Manitou Springs back onto US 24, topped off Barry's tank and arrived at the monument about 30 minutes before we were scheduled to meet. The gates were closed, so I turned around and pulled off at a wide spot in the road and just watched the world for a bit. Trees and grass on the hillside, an old barn settling to dust, birds drifting for a drink to the small creek--different from home, yet the same, all part and parcel of a singular beautiful ecosphere on a warm morning in late July when/where I am lucky to be behind the wheel of a pickup truck beneath a wide open sky instead of driving a cursor across a screen beneath a bank of fluorescent lighting. Yeah, the job pays for experiences like this, and I'm grateful to have a good one for sure, but sometimes it would be lovely to swap the amounts of time and energy that go into work versus time off. I'd swap two weeks for fifty any time!

Gates open, I met up with six of the crew from the club, and it was great to see familiar faces. We wandered around the wildflower-laced trails at the monument and spent some time chatting with two of the rangers about what we'd seen and the efforts underway to monitor and conserve the fossils. Next, we headed toward Florissant proper and the Florissant Fossil Quarry to try our hand at finding our own fossils. We spent a couple of hours seated at picnic tables happily splitting shale. I don't think any of us left with an utterly amazing find, but I did take home a couple of leaves and at least one bug (the long ride home over sometimes bumpy roads did not do the already fragile shale a favor; despite being wrapped in bubble wrap, one of my leaves split in half, and some other pieces were rumbled as well).

We went to the Thunderbird Inn for a late lunch and formulated our plan for the next day's visit to the Smoky Hawk claim before heading our separate ways into the afternoon. I decided to follow an online tip and head down toward the intersection of Colorado 115 and US Hwy 50 near Penrose. The 115 corridor was lined with Permian rocks, the intersection featured the Cretaceous Niobrara Chalk, and per someone online, fossils could be found in both. The distance from Florissant to I-25 looks deceptively short on the map, but lots of traffic, lots of traffic lights and some road construction made the journey a long one, and by the time I got off I-5 and onto 115, it was 3:30 and starting to sprinkle. Once on 115, the trip quickly turned to shit: road construction had us poking in single file and, worse, it cut off my access to road cuts on the west side of the road as I drove south. Grrrrrrr.

When I finally made it to the intersection, I did a few turns up and off and back onto 50 before finding a spot where I felt comfortable pulling off. I wandered around and found a few tiny shells and some unexpected minerals (a beautiful green piece that's maybe epidote, something purple that I have no clue about, and a white ball of chalk with inclusions that fluoresce), then began heading back. For the first few miles of 115 north of Penrose, there was no road construction, so I took advantage of this to stop at a few roadcuts that Rockd (an indispensable app for rockhounds of all stripes) assured me were Permian. I hit one site where the rocks had some interesting textures and had just begun to collect when, wham, the rain hit full tilt. I climbed back into the truck soaked and decided the best course was to get out of traffic and head back to the hotel. After a shower, I met up with everyone from the morning and several new arrivals from the club at The Keg Lounge, where we had dinner and planned the next day.