For the past week I was in Wyoming near the Big Horn Mountains, digging up dinosaurs with my paleontology class as the final event in my U of C career. The group of us all met up outside the fossil lab at 3:45 in the morning and took cabs to the airport. A series of little jumps later, and we were in Billings, Montana picking up some rental vans and driving off into the great unknown (literally, as we didn't know our exact dig site until we got our field guides that morning; fossil hounds are apparently a concern and will come and steal bones if your site gets around too much).
First of all, whatever else I or anyone might have said about Montana/Wyoming, they're beautiful states. I mean, really. All the hills have eroded just enough that rock strata peek out from beneath sage bushes and scrub trees, making the landscape weirdly patterned and colorful. A lot of rock walls along the roads there are labelled with the formation (Chugwater, Sundance, etc) and the approximate age of that formation, which was awesome. On our way in we actually got to stop and touch some granite rocks that were formed 3.2 billion years ago; almost certainly the oldest thing I will ever poke.
We also passed the formation above, called The Fallen City. I think you can see why; it's really incredible to behold. Like a lot of the things we saw, I would have loved to be able to hike over and really get up close, but it was miles and miles away, with no roads or trails to it, and we had dinosaurs to go dig up. We did get to stop a lot along the way for mini lectures on the geology of various areas, and I learned that my camera apparently has GPS-related powers and knew where we were.
Eventually we made it to our stated goal of Shell, Wyoming, which is a tiny, tiny town sort of in the northernmost middle of the state. Our home base was a restaurant-convenience/souvenir store called Dirty Annie's, after the sheep-herding woman who built the place. She is memorialized by a truly creepy mannequin in a covered wagon out front.
The day after that, we headed out into the wilderness proper to set up our camp. When it rains, the camp becomes completely inaccessible due to infinity mud. As it was, we just had to get out occasionally so as not to sink the car. There were two drivers, the inimitable Paul Sereno of legend, and our car's driver Erin. Erin is an artist/paleontologist who builds models of dinosaurs for Sereno and for the Field Museum and who played Scandinavian death metal for most of the rides. She also does longsword fighting. In short, badasses. We weren't lacking them.
Our first task, upon reaching our campsite, was to remove the enormous amounts of cow shit that had been deposited there by our neighbors, a herd of cows. Now cows, they don't moo anything like cows are theoretically supposed to. There is no neat 'mooing' sound. There's sort of an eldritch, tortured groan that I guess you could convince yourself sounded like 'moo' if you really wanted to. But anyway. After that, we finally got to open up the site.
