If you get the chance, be sure to stop in. We stopped in the tiny hamlet of Rachel to visit the Little A’le’Inn, a souvenir shop, diner, and motel. On the way home, we took Nevada Highway 375, known as “The Extraterrestrial Highway” because it runs close to the infamous Area 51. (He tagged along with my success to dig nearby.) The day we were there I only saw one other person. But if you go, be aware that many people who go there don’t find anything. Given that I didn’t have to pay to dig and it took considerable effort to find anything, I have to say this was the more enjoyable day of digging. I haven’t yet gone through them in detail to make good identifications but they look primarily like Olenellus species, which are what you will predominantly find. While we found a few cephalons among the loose pieces of shale, I had much better success digging out larger slabs and splitting them. It turned out to be a mini mother-lode of cephalons but no full trilobites, which apparently are very rare. Then I moved to yet another location and immediately saw a cephalon so I knew my luck was changing. We spent the first couple of hours without any luck as I moved from one location to another. You can tell when you are at the site because it is littered with broken pieces of shale and there are potholes all around where people have been digging. in addition to my tool bag, I was carrying a Harbor Freight pry bar and my brand new Estwing PaleoPick, so I was happy to shorten the walk. That makes it an easy walk, especially if you are carrying a lot of tools. If you’ve done your homework, though, you’ll know you can continue another short distance and park just at the base of the swale where the trilobites are. Most people park there and walk a quarter mile along a developed path to the dig. The parking area is about a quarter mile from the highway down a good dirt road (but not a 50-mph road!). We got there just after lunch and spent the afternoon there. This is another Cambrian site with the possibility of finding several species of Olenellus trilobites. There is no fee to dig here, which means there is no one to advise you, you’re on your own. The next day we headed out to Caliente, Nevada, to dig at the Oak Springs Trilobite Site just off Highway 93. They are cheap, so I’d recommend you take one or two along. I found it much easier to use thin rock-splitting chisels like these. They show you how to split the shale with the chisel edge of the hammer, but I found that to be a fairly coarse way to do it. I brought all my own stuff and am glad I did. They will provide you with a chisel-edge rock hammer, a 2-lb sledge and large chisel, and a bucket to hold everything you find. Lots of prep work still remaining, and I’ll probably split several of the slabs again to see what else I might find. Most, however, were only molts or partials, we got very few full trilobites. I have to say we weren’t as successful as on my last visit, but still got a good haul. This was my second time there (the first was 8 years ago), and my wife’s first time. We were pleased with the support we got from Gene and if you’ve never been there, I would recommend it. Other people on this forum have posted about their experiences at U-Dig, so I won’t spend a lot of time repeating the basics. The last 20 miles is a drive along a well-maintained dirt road (good enough that with my stock 4WD SUV I could drive 50-55 mph along most of it). We got to U-Dig mid-morning of the third day and spent half a day there. Along the way, we stopped in Austin for lunch and helped the owner of a nearby trading post identify an unknown fish fossil they had for sale (you can read about that here). We spent the second night in Ely, Nevada. After driving across California, we spent the first night in Reno, then headed out on Highway 50 toward the U-Dig fossil quarry out of Delta, Utah. It was a 5-day trip, with a total of about 8 hours of digging spread across 2 days, but well worth it. My wife and I just got back from a 1700-mile road trip from our home in Northern California to do some trilobite hunting in Utah and Nevada.
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