Saturday 9/3/2004: After about 6 hours of sleep and a quick breakfast we drove to the first collecting site of the trip. It is a small road cut exposure of Lincoln Creek Formation. After an hour of digging we came up with 43 concretions we are hoping contain nautiloids (Aturia). After a quick stop to re-ice the coolers we headed Southwest to a location near Brooklyn, WA. This site has produce some of the highest quality of crabs (Pulalius vulgaris) we've found to date. Although the exposure doesn't give them up without effort they are well worth the work. After several hours of hard work we came away with 10 concretions that you can tell just from the shape contain a good crab specimen.

We met up with Bill and Andy, who where eager to collect nautiloids. We drove back to the collecting site and dug our a few more concretions before heading to camp.

Sunday 9/4/2004: Broke camp and return to the nautiloid site. We found an area that produces small them not in concretions but in the mudstone itself. One thing that we didn't bring was stabilizer, which would have been useful in aiding their extraction. They are very delicate but have beautiful nacre. Our next stop was a creek near Raymond, WA that we heard produces agatized marine inverts. We got lucky when we stopped to talk to a local who lives on the creek. Being familiar with the treasure the creek holds he pointed us in the right direction and gave us advise on screening for them. We hopped in the creek and found a gravel bar. We loaded up our screen boxes and started sifting. Andy was the first to come up with a nice agatized clam. In all we found 15 pieces most of which where partial clams with only 3 being complete. We also found several fragments of dentialium and a few others that we have yet to identify.

Trip Participants: Steven Bland, Andy Bergholtz, Andrew Bland, Bill Sullivan