Artist’s reconstruction of the ancient Florissant forest by Rob Wood. NPS.

The July August issue of The Interpreter, a magazine for professional and volunteer interpretive educators, features as its cover story an article by Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument Volunteer Interpretive Specialist Heidi Bailey called “Are Your Stories Lost in Space? Interpret the Geography of a Place.”

In the article, Bailey uses Florissant as a vivid example of how telling the geographic as well as historical story of a place can enrich interpretation and engage visitors.

Bailey writes

Geography is about visualizing large spaces, getting acquainted with special places, and connecting to the Earth as a whole. The places and spaces around us are integral to our lives and should play a significant role in the stories we tell.

Bailey provides concrete activities that interpreters can use in their work. She can be contacted at hbailey@fossilbeds.org.

The last of the new Visitor Center exhibits at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument have been installed. They include a diagram of a stratigraphic column showing the different types of rocks in the park, touchable samples of rock and fossil wood, and an changing board showcasing currently research at the park and partnership projects like the conservation of the Sexi Petrified Forest in Peru.

These exhibits greatly enhance the park’s ability to educate visitors, and display some of the park’s most spectacular fossil specimens along with hands-on activities for kids. The free Junior Ranger Program is a great complement to the new exhibits.

-Melissa Barton

Related Stories

• Exhibit assembly progress
• Gazette highlights park need for new Visitor Center
• New exhibits featured in Harper’s Ferry Center newsletter
• Friends announce partnership with Peruvian conservation group

Spalding also organized the Monument’s first Junior Ranger Day on July 21, 2007. Young visitors learned about fire safety, fossils, and wildlife with activities such as making plaster casts of animal tracks and splitting shale to find fossils.

“The new Junior Ranger book has more activities and reaches a wider audience,” Wolin says. “The activities are engaging, educational, and fun.”

The Friends and the Junior Ranger Ambassador Grant paid for the printing of the new activity book, which was published in December. Kids and parents love the new program:

I wanted to send a thank you to all of the staff and the ranger who assisted our family on Saturday this past week. Traveling to NPS sites is a hobby and something we have done for some years now. You have an excellent site. But you have excellent people which just adds to the site.

My daughter loves the Junior Ranger Programs and as I shared that day, yours is the best I have seen out of the dozens we have done. The staff who assisted her just continue to build that passion for history and nature and I cannot thank you enough for this.

That was one of the best mornings we have spent and I thank you for the experience. I hope you will send this to your district supervisor because our next generations are being educated by some great people…you. As both a parent and a citizen, I can not stress enough how impressed I was with your work.

Greg Block

The Junior Ranger Program is always available during the park’s visitation hours. For more information, call 719-748-3253 or ask at the front desk in the Visitor Center when you visit. Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is open 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., 7 days a week, except Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day.

-Melissa Barton

Photo Credits: Friends Vice President and park volunteer Sally Maertens helps young visitors make casts of tracks (NPS Photo), Ranger Jeff Wolin and Junior Rangers take the Junior Ranger Pledge (NPS Photo)

Exhibits of Friends history were displayed in the yurt all day, along with the items for the silent auction. At left, sketches and other materials related to the design of the Friends t-shirt and patch, as well as the Junior Ranger patch. All of these were designed by Dorrie Bradley, whose husband Rick was the first president of the Friends.

The Friends have been involved in organizing many events, from March for the Parks to Homestead Days at the Hornbek Homestead. There was also an exhibit of seminar photographs and past newsletters, as well as photographs from last year’s T.D.A. Cockerell Expedition Centennial.

Dr. Bill Dexter, the third president of the Friends and a former seasonal paleontologists at the Fossil Beds, led a guided hike on the Petrified Forest Loop in the afternoon, starting at the “beginning of life” and walking to the “present.”

Ranger Shawn Frizzell answers a question about wildflowers before the hike starts.

A view across the ancient lakebed towards Crystal Peak. The Petrified Forest Loop winds around the edge of this field, past several fossil redwood stumps (including the Big Stump) and back to the Visitor Center.

In the afternoon, Lead Interpretive Ranger Jeff Wolin, volunteer Ron Haberkorn, and museum technician Melissa Barton gave a short program on the design and assembly of the new exhibits. Here Ron discusses techniques for cutting foam nests for fossils so they won’t slide around when drawers are open and shut. Volunteers like Ron were crucial in assembling the new exhibits, and did excellent work.

After nature songs with Ranger Jeff, the Florissant Jammers and the caterer set up. During dinner, past Friends presidents and former park superintendent Jean Rodeck made remarks, and awards were handed out.

Most notably, Jeff Wolin received both the annual Visitor Service Award from the Friends and an NPS STAR Award in recognition for his huge amount of work this past year, both on the new exhibits and Junior Ranger Program and his usual coordination of the interpretive program and supervision of interns and seasonal employees. Jeff worked many long days and wore even more hats than usual, and fully deserves both awards.

The Friends also presented the park with a check for $3000, which will help fund remodelling of the Visitor Center bathrooms, among other projects.

The anniversary was a wonderful reunion and celebration for the Friends. Although we are a small group, we have accomplished many important projects for the park over the last 20 years, thanks to your time, skills, and financial support. Here’s to another fun and productive 20 years!

-Melissa Barton

Photo Credits: Melissa Barton

Carly Thorson, who led our tour, is very knowledgable about the many plants of the ranch, as well as its history. The flower to the left is chinchweed (Pectis papposa), a lemony-scented plant with several medicinal uses. We also saw a petroglyph and some historical sites, including the cabin used by Wild Bill McKinney of Quantrill’s Raiders.

The Middle Ordovician (c. 450 million years old) trace fossils were found by Thorson’s father, Bennie C. Thorson, who worked the site for five field seasons with now-retired Colorado College professor William A. Fischer. The site was designated as an NNL in 1979. The voluntary NNL program, administered by the National Park Service, provides a way to recognize and protect important natural resources on any type of land, including private, local, municipal, state, and federal. Not all NNLs are open to the public, and many others require landowner permission to visit.

The Indian Springs Trace Fossil Site consists of a shallow excavation exposing a single bed of the Harding Sandstone, representing an “instant” in geologic time. The quarry is 16-18 feet above the base of the Harding. Much of the overlying sandstone has been eroded at this locality. The Thorsons keep the site covered to protect the exposed trace fossils, which remain in situ according to family policy.

Body fossils are rare in the Harding, including at Indian Springs, but trace fossils are abundant. Bony plates from ostracoderms (armored fish) and conodont elements are found there, but the site’s primary significance lies in its spectacular trace fossils from various animals moving across the Ordovician seafloor. At right, you can see a track left by a sea scorpion (eurypterid).

Ostracoderms were some of the earliest vertebrates. They lacked jaws, but were covered with bony plates, and were also the first organisms to use gills exclusively for respiration. Ostracoderms were bottom-feeders and probably relatively slow-moving. Here you can see a feeding trail of an ostracoderm. The close spacing of the feeding marks indicates that food was abundant on the Ordovician seafloor.

Tracks of several species of horseshoe crabs are quite common. The feeding traces typically curve either left or right according to the species. Horseshoe crabs are not actually crabs–they are more closely related to sea scorpions, and distantly related to the spiders–and they have evolved little since they first appeared in the fossil record. They are tolerant of harsh environments and protected by their sturdy shell.

This trace fossil shows an abruptly ended ostracoderm feeding trail, as the fish became a meal for a predator. The preservation of interactions like these is one reason the Indian Springs fossil site is so important. Other trace fossils at this site include tracks from trilobites, merostomes, and polychaete worms.

After Indian Springs, we drove back through Phantom Canyon (Stops 19-20), the location of several historical railroad sites, as well as more outcrops of Precambrian granodioriate and metamorphic schist and quartzite. We didn’t manage all of the stops on the Gold Belt Byway–that would take at least two days–but we had a great field trip.

-Melissa Barton

Photo Credits: Melissa Barton

Geologic Guidebook to the Gold Belt Byway, Colorado, by Thomas W. Henry, Emmett Evanoff, Daniel A. Grenard, Herbert W. Meyer, and David M. Vardiman (Gold Belt Tour Scenic and Historic Byway Association, 2004), is available at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument Visitor Center for $19.95 plus tax.

More Gold Belt Byway Posts:

• Stops 1, 2, 3, 5: Seasonal Training Field Trip (Florissant Area)
• Stops 4, 17, 18: Dome Rock and the Shelf Road
• Stops 12, 14, 15, 16: Garden Park and Skyline Drive Fossil Sites

We then visited the nearby Marsh-Felch Quarry (Stop 15), where the first specimens of several well-known dinosaurs, including Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus were collected, as well as the first Jurassic mammals collected in North America. Marshall and Henry Felch excavated this quarry for Marsh, and their correspondence and other historical information (and lesson plans for teachers) can be found at Hands on the Land’s Marsh-Felch Quarry website.

The Felch brothers completed their excavations in 1888, and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History worked the quarry in 1900 and 1901. Although fossils are generally not visible on the surface, the photo at left shows the cast of a removed dinosaur rib, and there are a few sauropod tracks as well.

After visiting the Marsh-Felch quarry, we stopped by the Bureau of Land Management picnic area across Fourmile Creek from the Cleveland Quarry (Stop 14), worked in 1954 and 1957 by Edwin Delfts for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. This area produced one of the most complete known specimens of the long-necked sauropod Haplocanthus delfsi, as well as fossil eggs that may be from the small dinosaur Othnielia.

We didn’t have time to visit Dinosaur Depot (Stop 11) in Cañon City, where casts of some of the famous Garden Park dinosaurs, a 20-foot-long fossil tree, an active paleontology preparation lab, and other exhibits can be viewed. Instead we continued to Skyline Drive (Stop 12), where dinosaur trackways are preserved in the Early Cretaceous Dakota Sandstone (approximately 100 million years old), which overlies the Morrison.

Most of the Skyline Drive tracks, carefully exposed by volunteers with the Garden Park Paleontology Society, were made by ankylosaurs, a type of armored herbivore. In the image at left, you can see the lone therapod (carnivorous dinosaur) track overlapping one of the ankylosaur tracks.

At right, paleontology intern Eva Lyon looks at the dinosaur trackway. Other fossils found here include tree roots and branches, fossil shrimp burrows, and other trace fossils. For more information about the trackway, visit Dinosaur Depot’s Skyline Drive page. Dinosaur Depot also runs educational tours of the Garden Park Fossil Area and Skyline Drive.

After Skyline Drive, we continued on to the Indian Springs Trace Fossil Site, a much earlier (about 450 million years old) marine trace fossil site.

-Melissa Barton

Photo Credits: Melissa Barton

Geologic Guidebook to the Gold Belt Byway, Colorado, by Thomas W. Henry, Emmett Evanoff, Daniel A. Grenard, Herbert W. Meyer, and David M. Vardiman (Gold Belt Tour Scenic and Historic Byway Association, 2004), is available at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument Visitor Center for $19.95 plus tax.

More Gold Belt Byway Posts:

• Stops 1, 2, 3, 5: Seasonal Training Field Trip (Florissant Area)
• Stops 4, 17, 18: Dome Rock and the Shelf Road
• Stops 19, 20, 21: Indian Springs Trace Fossil Site and Phantom Canyon

Earlier this summer during seasonal training, we visited several of the stops in the Florissant area (Stops 2, 3, 5; the park’s visitor center and petrified forest are Stop 1). If you want to take the Gold Belt Byway Tour yourself, Geologic Guidebook to the Gold Belt Byway, Colorado, co-authored by Meyer and 4 other geoscientists, is a beautifully illustrated self-guide to the 21 stops and a great introduction to local geology and paleontology.

Last Friday, we visited several additional stops, in reverse order to the Geologic Guidebook. We began with a stop overlooking Dome Rock (Stop 4), an exfoliation dome of 1.07-billion-year-old Pikes Peak Granite. Exfoliation domes form in some granites by the processes of chemical and physical weathering, particularly the action of ice.

At left, you can see a dramatic example of the difference between ecosystems on north and south-facing slopes in the Rocky Mountains. This is because south-facing slopes receive significantly more sun and are warmer and drier. North-facing slopes are moister and colder. After driving through Cripple Creek, we took the scenic Shelf Road to Cañon City.

The Shelf Road (Stop 18) continues through 1.7-billion-year-old granodiorite, considerably older than the Pikes Peak and Cripple Creek Granites. Unlike the Pikes Peak Granite, this granodiorite tends to weather linearly rather than producing exfoliation domes. Sometimes this weathering produces natural arches, like the one at right.

Near the end of the Shelf Road, you can see a contact betweeen the 1.7-billion-year-old granodiorite and the Ordovician Manitou Dolostone (more commonly called the Manitou Limestone). This gap of missing time in the rock record–about 1.2 billion years–is what geologists call a noncomformity. The Manitou Limestone, Harding Formation, and Fremont Dolostone span the time period of about 500 to 439 million years ago. All contain marine fossils such as brachiopods, clams, trilobites, snails, armored fish (ostracoderms), corals, algal mounds (stromatolites), and nautiloids.

We then met Melissa Smeins from the Bureau of Land Management in Cañon City and her intern, Charlie Bondy. Bondy has been working on an educational tour of the area which overlaps partially with the Gold Belt Byway Tour, and she led the next part of the tour, through Red Rock Canyon State Park, the Garden Park Fossil Area, and Skyline Drive. Red Rock Canyon State Park (Stop 17) exhibits excellent outcrops of the Pennsylvanian Fountain Formation (deposited 296-290 million years ago). The Fountain is composed of sandstones and conglomerates, and represents an ancient alluvial fan deposited by rivers entering a shallow continental ocean.

At left, you can see crossbedding created by sediments deposited on the trailing edges of sand and gravel bads. Crossbedding indicates deposition in moving water, and is one piece of evidence for the Fountain Formation being an alluvial fan deposit. The large size of many of its clasts (component pebbles and cobbles) also indicates that the sediment did not travel far from its source–in this case the Ancestral Rocky Mountains. Only a few fossils have been found in the Fountain Formation, due to its coarseness, but these are important for reconstructing the paleoenvironment. These fossils include tracks of an extinct amphibian, marine fossils, and some early plants, such as “scale trees” (tree-sized relatives of modern clubmosses), tree-sized horsetails, and seed ferns.

Next we continued to the historically and paleontologically important Garden Park Fossil Area, where Bondy interpreted the history of the area for us.

-Melissa Barton

Photo Credits: Melissa Barton

Geologic Guidebook to the Gold Belt Byway, Colorado, by Thomas W. Henry, Emmett Evanoff, Daniel A. Grenard, Herbert W. Meyer, and David M. Vardiman (Gold Belt Tour Scenic and Historic Byway Association, 2004), is available at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument Visitor Center for $19.95 plus tax.

More Gold Belt Byway Posts:

• Stops 1, 2, 3, 5: Seasonal Training Field Trip (Florissant Area)
• Stops 12, 14, 15, 16: Garden Park and Skyline Drive Fossil Sites
• Stops 19, 20, 21: Indian Springs Trace Fossil Site and Phantom Canyon

In honor of National Park Week (April 22-29) and the first National Junior Ranger Day (April 27), Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument announced that its Junior Ranger Program will now be free. This decision has been made possible with assistance from the Friends and the Rocky Mountain Nature Association.

The park’s Junior Ranger Program consists of a book of activities to complete, after which the participant can choose either a Junior Ranger badge or a patch showing a paper wasp, possibly the park’s most iconic fossil.

Since the park is installing new exhibits, the Junior Ranger booklet will need to be updated. Last summer’s Teacher-Ranger-Teacher, Greg Spalding, has been hired to revise and coordinate the Junior Ranger Program this summer.

A park ranger of tomorrow

While many young visitors to parks participate in Junior Ranger Programs, few are as enthusiastic as Chandler Johnson of Rome, Georgia. After participating in her first Junior Ranger program at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, she has gone on to complete over 100 Junior Ranger Programs.

Johnson wears a vest covered with Junior Ranger badges and patches when she visits national parks. She hopes one day to complete every offered Junior Ranger Program. Johnson enjoys hiking and viewing wayside exhibits, and believes it is important to respect our national parks.

“I believe the country should know that national parks, historic sites, and recreational areas are all very cool places that our nation has made for us,” she says. “Go visit some of the national parks and learn something new!”

-Melissa Barton

“A park ranger of tomorrow” is based on an article by Norton Canfield, Park Guide at Harry S. Truman National Historic Site.
Photo Credit: Larry Villalva, Superintendent at Harry S. Truman National Historic Site.