My Summer Vacation

We’ve been travelling a lot this summer. After 2 years of Covid, putting off several trips and visits to friends and family, we decided it was time. I wrote about our trip through Arkansas where we stopped at the Crater of Diamonds State Park, and then went to the Jim Coleman Quartz Crystal Mine.

This last trip was to Seattle via Wyoming. Not a direct route, you may have noticed. One of the states we regularly go through on the way to Seattle is Utah and when I Googled rock/fossil collecting in Utah, it came up with this place in Wyoming. To be fair, it’s just over the border, less than an hour from Park City, Utah.

It turns out the ‘Fish Fossil Capital of the World’ is in Kemmerer, Wyoming. There is a park there devoted to it, and also, there are several privately owned quarries that allow the public to look for fish fossils. I spent the day, literally 8 hours, bent over, splitting open slabs of rocks that they provided. They also provided the tools. I went to American Fossil, check them out HERE.  
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I found some great fish fossils, had a blast, was thoroughly exhausted at the end. They were very friendly and helpful, and I plan on going back again

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I went to a fish fossil gallery/quarry called ‘Ulrichs’, which also has their own quarry I want to visit next time I’m there. The setup is a little different, but I want to try them out as well. I learned a lot by going to Ulrich’s. They do fossil prep work and sell kits of fish fossils and tools that you can recover the fossil from. I bought a kit. (You can too, from their website HERE ). It looked like a small slab of rock that someone literally drew a fish outline on in pencil. 

Before

After

​I started picking away at it after reading the directions. It was great fun for me. I spent about an hour at a time scraping away. After 8 hours, I have this:

​I know that’s not for everyone as it’s quite tedious and a bit painful on the hand/fingers. It was something I enjoyed. I used the pick to uncover 5 other partially exposed fish I found at the American Fossil quarry. I can say, their rock is softer and easier to process. The fossils are also a bit softer and delicate perhaps and need some extra care. At American Fossil, they provide table saws to trim your finds. 

​Something I learned later was that I should have trimmed less. Also, there are probably fish just underneath the rock’s surface that I didn’t notice because I didn’t know to look out for the subtle sign of a fish spine that can form a ridge in the rock. Next time I’ll do better.