Early July 2014

I wanted to play in a stream this last sunday.  There are none in Phoenix that aren't yucky.  We decided to go to Christopher Creek in Payson.  While there Math-Mommy and Math-Girl wanted to dig fossils.

Here is the route:

We were only able to start out around 1:30pm.  This put us in Payson around 2:30-3:00.  We stopped by Walmart for some toy shovels and pails.  These are great for the beach and great for the mountains too.

We then headed down 260 to the Paleo site.

Here is what it looks like when you first drive in.

It is a little turn-off on a gorgeous mountain road.  Everything is dry because it is the middle of summer in Arizona.

So you park up near the gap in the guard-rail and you can walk in through it and up to the lamellar deposits.  I think they are shale, but they are soft and you can break them with fingers or a plastic hammer.  Sometimes you get clumps that look like a tiny pile of stone leaves ... it is trippy.  But I digress.

After you pass through the gap, you (like math-girl) must walk up to the gate, and go through it.

Then you walk up the path to the hill.  

Now, most people don't know much about fossils.  They think "Night at the Museum" or "Jurassic Park" but in reality 99.5% of all fossils are marine invertebrates.  That means shellfish or plants.

At the Payson Paleo site you find tiny little stone shells, sometimes leaves, worms, or worm tunnels, etcetera.

Now I think it would be neat to see if one could look at the non-planar layers of mud that make this up and estimate timing of seasons from the seas where these tiny stone shells in layer after layer after layer on the top of high mountains.... must not digress.

So here are my girlies on the west(right when looking from the parking area) hill getting fossils or at least playing in the dirt.

And these are the worlds cutest math-kiddos playing with beach-toys on a mountain top digging fossils.  The little screener thing is really nice for helping let dirt through, but keep the shells.

I wonder if there are microfossils to be found in this, plankton, or krill (whatever they are) or such.....

Here is the cutest micro-mathbaby.  She is pretty sure she loves that binky, but when I asked her to take it out for the picture - she did.

Isn't she beautiful?  Happy little kiddo on a very old seabed, on a mountain top.

We did get to splash in the creek, but I didn't get any pictures.