Rock Hounding

Before Carter and I moved here to Utah,

Frank was here by himself for about a month.

He missed us terribly, of course, but he did use his singleness to go out and do a lot of exploring.

He hiked a lot.

But with the arrival of the furniture and family, real life set in.

Frank has spent most weekends doing house projects

or working in his garden.

So he decided he needed a fun weekend activity last weekend.

He chose it and set it all up.

We went out in to the middle of nowhere 

and went rock hounding!

The middle of nowhere

In other words, we hiked around the Utah dessert and looked at rocks.

Frank's goal was to find some cool petrified rocks,

preferably an animal fossil.

We found lots of petrified wood.

No animal fossils, much to Frank's dismay.

It was a perfect day.

Not too hot (thank heaven)

There was TONS of petrified wood and big tree trunks

 Carter and I were tasked with being on the lookout for an animal fossil

We found this for Frank...but he didn't want it.

Not quite a fossil...

It did make me wonder if I was going to happen across a mountain lion or something scary.

I still don't have my "real" camera.

So lame.

I loved all the flowers and other desert plants that grew between the rocks.

We climbed pretty high.

I was lucky enough to find several animal dens dug into the dirt...

by "found" I mean "fell into"

No one else had this problem.

I'd be walking along a perfectly normal looking area and the dirt would just give way to a hole underneath. 

Carter is higher than he appears here...and was actually standing on a rocky overhang.

 This whole side of the mountain was made of some kind of rock that was super weird.

It would just flake off in your hands.

I'm sure someone with a little knowledge would know right off what it was.

But it was cool.

My attempt to capture the layers of this rock

 We ate lunch 

fed some of the leftovers to the ants nearby

and then headed over to the geode digging site.

Carter got to do his first off road driving.

At the geode site, we were clueless.

How does one know where to dig?

But Frank gave it a valiant effort.

I found a tiny tiny geode

but not by digging.

Someone else had dug it up and left it on the ground...

where I found it!

 We finally gave up.

And headed home.

(when Frank got out of the car later, he discovered he had a pocket FULL of sand! hilarious)

We took a "shortcut" home which consisted of about 70 miles of dirt road.

Not a short shortcut.

A fun, memorable day in Utah.