Images of Fossil Butte National Monument – Southwestern Wyoming, taken in June 2018.

A great lake covered this area over 52 million years ago and once gone left some of the most well preserved fossils ever found. The Green River Formation, and more importantly the crucial 18-inch layer of limestone sediment and organic materials, preserved in Fossil Butte National Monument contains everything from insects to 9-foot palm fronds but is most widely known for its broad array of fish fossils.

This is a relatively small park with a paved road that stretches several miles from the Visitor Center and then becomes a one-lane dirt road as it climbs to the top of a butte and extends itself to the park boundary. Here there are several fairly flat, easy trails that take one over the top of the butte where you get a nice view of the surrounding area and it is here that I found an unusual chunk of limestone with what looked like some kind of fossil imbedded in it. You can’t remove something like this as it is forbidden in any of our National Parks but I did take a picture of it and showed it to the rangers in the Visitor Center. They seemed a bit perplexed because of the area where I found it but said it could…could be some kind of fossil. Not the next great discovery but interesting nonetheless.

The top of the butte is also where I was able to get up-close with a small group of Pronghorn Antelope. Of course it took me several trips and I more or less had to hunt them down but you do what you have to do when you are pursuing a goal, in this case getting a great shot of a male Pronghorn. I had similar “issues” with Bighorn Sheep; always getting solid images of females or young males but never getting that shot of the fully mature male…until I did. And like the Bighorn Sheep this hunting expedition is over and I now have my trophy Pronghorn. However, unlike hunting, after I take my shot the prize walks away unharmed but I can still hang my trophy rack on the wall…