The Rogers Family Gets Dinosaurs for Christmas

December 21, 2007

We've come to the last installment of The Dinosaur Hunters Family Montana Adventure. Here's the final page from Kristi Rogers' diary:

"Montana Jim pulled into camp before we finished breakfast, with a canoe strapped on top of his truck – our vehicle for exploration today!  After breakfast, we loaded up into two trucks – Ray, Lucy, Minnesota Jim and I in one, and Tonnis and Montana Jim (with canoe) in the other and headed down to the river.  Getting everyone upstream proved even more challenging than we expected – the Missouri was really flowing this morning, and the canoe wasn’t big enough for all of us.  Ray rowed across the wide river with Minnesota Jim and Tonnis along for the ride, and dropped them off on the north bank of the river to walk the three miles to the sites we hoped to visit.  They carried along a GPS unit to mark any sites they came across along the way, and a couple of long sticks for clearing the brush of snakes.  Rattlesnakes are everywhere- they’re all gathering down by the river where it is cooler and there is more to eat.  Ray struggled against the current and rowed back to our side, where Lucy, Montana Jim, and I were gearing up to go.  We bundled Lucy up in her lifejacket, took off our boots and socks and sank knee-deep in the mud at the edge of the river.  Montana Jim sat up front and got ready to paddle, I lifted Lucy into the boat and climbed in after her – we sat on piled backpacks in the middle of the canoe.  Ray pushed off and hopped into the back behind us.

For the first few minutes of our float we were headed the wrong way – floating downstream rather than pushing upstream, but Jim and Ray put their backs into it and turned us around, against the full-strength current of the Mighty Missouri.  It was a long, hard slog – we had to maneuver our way around two small islands, both of which were surrounded by fast, deep water trying to aim us the other way, alternating with ankle-deep water and sharp-rock gravel bars that grounded the canoe.  Montana Jim kept hopping out to pull the canoe upstream while Ray hopped out and pushed it, and I pushed with our paddle to keep us floating in the shallow water over the gravel. Lucy asked a hundred times when we were going to get there, and the sun got stronger and hotter, and the gnats found us quickly at our slow pace.  At last we reached our destination – a grove of mature cottonwood trees along the banks, with old run-down homesteader cabins nestled in among the trees, and old machinery and coils of barbed wire hidden in the grass.  Minnesota Jim and Tonnis came tramping out of the brush and met up with us for another three mile hike to the sites we hoped to locate.  There was one other small hurdle to our progress – the grass was too tall, and the risk of snakes too high for Lucy to hike.  So….I carried her on my hip (my backpack with water and food for the day as well as hammer and collecting supplies made a piggy-back ride or “giraffe-back” shoulder ride impossible).  I carried Lucy on my hip all day – the guys tried helping me, but they just didn’t have that comfortable demeanor that Lucy and I have worked out after 4 years of field work – and she wouldn’t stay with any of them for more than a few minutes.

After three miles (or four miles!) of up and down, round and round searching, we hit the jackpot!  A site that we were able to relocate that had been discovered in the 80s by a government survey, that was so far from the river that no one had visited it since then!  Fossils were pouring from the hill – ankylosaur osteoderms (bony armor plates that make ankylosaurs look like tanks), theropod teeth, sharp and serrated, and even more exciting….just  a few yards away, across a little ravine – BIG BONES.  Dinosaur bones.  In just a few short hours we collected bag upon bag of bone – the toe bones of duckbilled dinosaurs, a few skull pieces, teeth galore, and the remains of dinosaur compatriots like crocodiles and turtles.  Even more exciting….as we traced the exposure around the edge of the hill, we started finding hundreds of little broken pieces of bones.  When we tracked them up the little ravine, we came to the source – a duckbilled dinosaur leg bone more than a meter long!  We dug in with rock hammers and paintbrushes and exposed yet another bone buried right next to the first bone – all the paddling, heat, gnats, and hiking paid off – we discovered a brand new site that appears to have the remains of more than one dinosaur and a lot of the other animals that lived alongside those dinosaurs.  We can’t wait to get back and excavate our site next summer!

Our long hike back to the canoe took hours – we’d woven our way deep into the hills, had to skirt around a pasture with a huge, grazing bull, and Lucy was a trooper on my hip the entire way.  Near the river we came across a modern dead dinosaur – a pelican that appeared to have literally fallen out of the sky and died as it was flying along.  This was the second dead pelican that we’d encountered.  It was in beautiful shape and was kind of an eerie site as we hiked along.  We found out later that West Nile virus was responsible for the deaths of those pelicans.  Once we got back to our canoe we cracked open jugs of ice cold water that we’d left cooling in the river so they’d be ready for us after the long day – we felt like celebrating!  But now, after all that hiking, we had a small problem – the canoe was too small and we were (with our bags now loaded with rocks and fossils) way too heavy to all float comfortably and safely downstream. But the sun was getting low and hiking back would take too long.  So, Tonnis decided to swim, while the rest of us hopped in the boat for a leisurely float downstream.  He hung on to our rope, and floated/swam behind and alongside the canoe all those river miles downstream.  It was quite a sight – no other people, no roads, badlands all around, and Tonnis floating his way down the river.  Every so often he’d get grounded on a sandbar and have to wade to catch up to our faster moving boat.  Lucy paddled with a willow-stick and we all felt amazingly happy with our great day.  What a day!  And what a night – our last night in the field, and the stars were out in force.  A little nighttime breeze kept the gnats away too, and we all slept great, dreaming of badlands."

From the Rogers Family and mine, sweet dreams to all of you this holiday season. Here's a virtual toast that you too shall find whatever, or whomever, your heart desires.