All of recorded history fits under a fingernail
We were going to dig. We had picked a tour, and what nobody told us and we did not think to ask is that it starts eight miles down an unpaved road. We found that out at the turn. The van is a long low box with a lot of glass in it, and one look at the surface was enough. I backed us out and we sat in the pullout and rebuilt the day.
We rebuilt it around Fossil Butte National Monument and the two towns next to it, Kemmerer and Diamondville.
Big spotted the first sign on the way in. They run along the right side of the entrance road and the first one says the Earth was created about four and a half billion years ago, and after that they keep coming. By the time you reach the parking lot the last five hundred million years are laid out along the perimeter fence: first fossil life, first plants, Pangaea assembling, Pangaea coming apart, the dinosaurs, each of the extinctions.
Then you get to the scale.
Every nine inches is a million years.
So the whole of our own species, all of it, is a couple of inches of fence. Recorded history is at the very end, and the gap it occupies is one you can barely get a fingernail into. Big worked that out standing there and did not say anything for a second. The fence does the explaining.
Inside there are fossils and casts on every wall, and rangers who were glad to be asked things. Fish mostly, because this was a lake. Fifty million years ago Fossil Lake sat here, and the Green River Formation is what it left. The good ones show fin rays. Fin rays are thin bones inside a soft flap, and they have no business surviving anything. Some of them show skin.
The bathrooms have an exhibit. It is the part Big and Little will tell other children about.
Coprolites are fossilized droppings. The park collected close to ten thousand of them, prepared more than four thousand looking for halves that fit back together, and ended up with 733 matching sets split across the two restroom exhibits. Nobody takes in the whole collection without visiting both rooms. Somebody built that joke over years, with a catalog.
We stamped our passport books, then sat outside and ate a snack looking out over the lake front. There is no lake. There has not been a lake for fifty million years. It is still obviously lake front, once somebody has said so out loud.
After that we drove the scenic road up as far as the pavement goes, two and a half miles, and stopped where it turns to gravel. Past that point it climbs at seventeen percent. Twice in one day the road surface picked our itinerary for us, and the second time I was fine with it.
Then Ulrich’s, on the way into town, to look at fossils. Slabs split and cleaned and priced, and a business that runs guided digs with its own crew. That is the dig we did not get to, sitting there in a shop window, being polite about it.
Diamondville has a park and we stopped there for recess. Slides, swings, a splash pad, pickleball and basketball. After a morning that was entirely made of ideas, everybody needed twenty minutes of not having any.
The town is here because of coal. Coal is plants that did not rot, pressed for long enough. The seams under Kemmerer and Diamondville come out of the Frontier Formation, which USGS dates to the Late Cretaceous, so the coal in this valley is older than every fish on the visitor center wall. The swamp came first. The lake came later, on top of it. There is now a nuclear plant going up near the coal-fired one, permitted by the NRC in March. That is three ways of getting power out of the same valley.
On the way out of Diamondville we came through downtown Kemmerer and stopped at the J.C. Penney.
The sign says MOTHER STORE and FOUNDED 1902, and both are true of the company rather than of the room you are standing in. Penney opened his first store in this town on April 14, 1902 and called it the Golden Rule. The store trading here today has been at this location since 1929. The former Golden Rule building and the house Penney lived in are a few blocks off, and they are part of a National Historic Landmark district.
The thing we stood and looked at was a wire. It runs from the checkout counter up to a second story you cannot get to, with a carrier on it like a clothesline pulley. You put the customer’s cash and their ticket in it and send it up, and somebody up there makes change and sends it back down the other side. We were told the point was that the money spent the day somewhere nobody could reach. The line is still strung.
We camped on BLM land and cooked there.
At dinner we go around and everybody says their high point. Big said the fence, the whole visual of time laid out on the way in. Little said the passing game, because a football came out while dinner was cooking and she spent the last of the light catching it.
We watched the sun go down over the high desert. We cleaned up. The stars came out over a valley that was a swamp, then a coal seam, then a lake, then a coal town, in that order, and we stood in the cold and looked at them for a while before bed.
Tomorrow we are going to try to record another podcast episode, fingers crossed, and then get back on the road north.