NARG - North America Research Group

Search and Rescue Report

8/24/2004
Oregon Coast - Astoria Formation
By Andrew Bland

I left for Newport at an early time of 3AM Saturday morning to try to get to Bill and Andy's camp by dawn. The low tide for the day was at 6:30AM, which is necessary for one location I wanted to collect. I rolled into camp a little before 6AM with Bill making the all important coffee. Andy popped out of the tent and was having some back pain and thought it was caused by his new cot. Bill and Andy wanted to make this a several day trip and arrived the day before. As Andy started to show me some of the previous day's findings I realized that his sore back wasn't from his cot but from packing out concretions that weighed as much as 40 lbs. They where well worth the effort and one containd a fantastic 7" Musashia gastropod. After filling our coffee cups we where off to a nice little location near Moolack Beach. It's a small slide area where several small species of crabs can be found. We spent about 2 hours collecting tiny concretions but it was slim pickings. We headed back to camp for breakfast where I cracked the handful of concretions I found. For all my effort I ended up with a partial carapace of a Mursia, and a partial agatized gastropod and clam.

Next stop was Ona Beach, South of Newport. There are several exposures South of this beach with some large exposed concretions. I broke one of the smaller balls and found a good sized but poorly preserved Pectin. We headed back North to Lost Creek Beach. The exposure here is also South of the Beach and Andy found another Pectin.

After a quick stop back at camp we headed to a beach area North of Beaverly Beach. Bill and Andy had good luck here the previous day but there where still many large concretions exposed by a small stream that needed popped. We found many nice Pectins and other yet identified gastropods and bivalves. We headed up the beach further and collected several other fossil specimens from the Astoria Formation.

With my day coming to an end we drove North on Hwy 101 to one last location. It was a great day, which brought out droves of people to Fogarty Beach. We walked North of the Beach to some high cliff exposures, which had many concretions exposed but all the float was covered by sand. I did find a few concretions that ended up having small bone fragments. I was a great trip even though I didn't find many crabs and we decided it's really best to collect some of these coastal locaiton in the winter when the sand is off the beach.

Trip Participants:
Attendees: Andrew Bergholtz (Andy), Andrew Bland, Bill Sullivan

Trip Pictures