Another geological scouting day in southwestern Utah

Kanab, Utah — My day began with a visit to the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm, where I met Andrew R.C. Milner, the Site Paleontologist and Curator. This museum is built over an extraordinary set of dinosaur trackways. These tracks were not even discovered when I started working in the area, and now this building houses a busy and productive center for vertebrate paleontology in the region.

Andrew is a dinosaur paleontologist and an expert on vertebrate trace fossils, and he also knows a lot about the Carmel Formation and its outcrops in Utah. He gave me local contacts, and will join us in the field when we start the official Utah Jurassic expedition next month. He has been very helpful.

I then drove to Mt. Carmel Junction on the eastern side of Zion National Park, about two hours from St. George. It is a small place with a surprisingly long Wikipedia page. It sits in the center of several extensive exposures of the Carmel Formation, including this cross-bedded unit made almost entirely of crinoid ossicles. These rocks are called encrinites. This particular Middle Jurassic encrinite is one of the youngest known. This exposure is at Stop #5 of Tang (1997). It is still easily accessible at the northwest corner of the junction.

Alas, this great expanse of Carmel Formation, known as Stop #6 in Tang (1997) is no longer accessible, at least not easily. If you look carefully you can see a barbed-wire fence at the base of the outcrop. I could find no evidence of who owns this land, and jumping a fence out here can have serious consequences! Unfortunately there are far more such fences here than were present in the easy-going 1990’s. This makes taking students here harder for casual examinations of the rocks.

I spent the night in nearby Kanab, Utah, where I got to spend excellent time with my Father, who was in the area hiking with two friends. I then drove back to St. George the next morning, passing through a long stretch of northern Arizona. This included driving by the storied Colorado City of FLDS fame. Follow those links if you don’t know the story!