Nevada - Utah Mega Trip 2016 Day Four: Little Antelope and Hamilton

From the grocery store in Ely, NV, we drove about 40 miles west on US Highway 50 to a turn off to a dirt road.  On the side of this were pieces of limestone containing lots of Eocene gastropods.  Lots.  Sorry I haven't a fossil photo - bright light, white stone, and light colored fossils are a challenge

Gathering to show off what they found.

It didn't take long before we had all we "needed" at this site and we moved on to another site that had a much higher variety of beautiful gastropods.  Some folks also found ostracods.


Nicely exposed outcrop of stone, very densely
 populated with fossils.

 

There are at least a dozen large
brachiopods in this picture.

We had lunch at this gastropod site, then headed on to the Hamilton site.  This is a Pennsylvanian marine site.  Initially, we were all scrabbling through scree, finding a sparse density of brachiopods.  Then Taylor came from across the ravine with specimens that made us all scamper.  It was amazing how many brachiopods were in the layers and loose to find.

The brachiopod layer - it went on for meters!

The final stop for today was in Hamilton, a ghost town.  Hamilton was once the county seat and a silver mining town, with a population of 25,000.  In the late 19th century, two major fires wiped out the structures of the town, leaving it uninhabitable.  For humans anyway.





On the way to visit Hamilton, we passed wild horses!

Exploring one of the few structures standing in Hamilton.

The good days just keep rolling along!