Fossil Butte National Monument

A few years ago my son and I wanted to have a great male bonding experience. We decided to go to Fossil Butte. It’s about a 2-3 hour drive from our house. The nice thing about it is that we get to go through a lot of interesting :-/ towns like Evanston and Kemmerer, Wyoming on the way.

Fossil Butte is the remains of an ancient lake bed. There are literally millions of fish fossils trapped between the sedimentary layers of the rocks.

There is a visitors center at the monument with displays about the nature of the lake bed and how the fossils formed over time.

Just outside the monument’s boundaries are several commercially operated fossil digging operations, where for a fee you can dig for fossils and keep what you find. The nice thing was that they allowed children, aged 10 and under to poke around in their scrap rock pile for free. They could keep anything that they found. My son (call him R9 for the heck of it) had a great time and found a few fossil fish fragments which he brought home.

But I think that the thing he liked best was posing for this picture. He made it a point to stand deliberately at a strategic point in front of this sign. Boys will be boys.