JIMBORED, DINOSAUR HUNTER – 2006/7

One thing you find out quickly, shortly after retirement, is that you need some form of activity to fill in the long periods of free time, suddenly, at your disposal. For me, I already had a few. But even those left me with many, many hours each week with little to do. At first, I filled those hours, irritating Ol’ Bubbaloo, up to the point where she offered me a good ass kicking if I didn’t get out from under her feet. I considered her kind offer, however, I decided, instead, to find something else, to use up some more of my time on. I already filled a part of my days with golf, and part of my evenings gazing at the universe through my Hubble, knockoff, telescope. I was also deep into, transferring our 50,000 photos, taken over the years, into digital copies and storing them on my computer. But still I needed more. A friend offered a good solution.

One day he says, “why not grab an old hammer and come with me in search of dinosaurs. “My response is, “let me get my gun, I’m not hunting dinosaurs with a hammer!” My humour had about the same effect on him as it did with Bubbaloo or the young ones. He goes on to explain that Vancouver Island, at various times was high and dry, alternately submerged a few hundred feet under the ocean, and covered in major glaciers, during the ice ages. Because of this it was a treasure trove of marine life fossils. There were no Tyrannosaurus Rex, to be found, but there were marine type dinosaurs of some note. One that had been found very close to Courtenay was an Elasmosaur. This was a serpent like dinosaur about 40 feet long and weighing in just under 15 tonnes. It lived in the late Cretaceous Period about 80 million years ago.

Hell yes, I said, “I’m in!”. A elasmosaur was plenty of dinosaur for me, I didn’t need to find anything bigger. Hence Ol’ JimboRed had acquired a new hobby. So, armed with our backpacks full of rock chipping tools, evidence bags, and our lunches we dove into the bush. My buddy had already been doing this for some time, so he knew a little about how and where to hunt dinosaurs. Much like everything else worth doing, it was not easy. Dinosaurs did not just jump out of the forest at you. Nope, mostly, to the untrained eye, they looked much like the rock they were found in. Nor were many lying on the side of the highway just waiting to be picked up. Before you found even the smallest sample, you needed to find the ugliest, most dangerous terrain imaginable, then risk your life to get near a likely site, and finally pound, chip, grunt and curse while beating on a rock cliff.

The first couple of hours after we started, with no dinosaurs popping up, and feeling cold, wet, tired and bitchy, I figured that this was going to be a short lived hobby. It had all started by scaling down a sheer cliff face, onto a creek bed, then fording the creek and locating, in the jungle, another cliff-face of solid shale. Having found the type of rock we were looking for, we started beating on it, much like you would beat on a rented mule. Surprisingly, shale is not as hard as it looks, and piece by piece we chipped away a couple of layers of black shale. Once again, I am not going to say that this was fun, however for the time being, pounding away at the rock was still far better, than thoughts of re-crossing the stream and scaling back up that cliff-face. I am not going to say, that I had high hopes of finding anything remotely resembling a fossil.

Just about the time, that I was getting ready to give up and start climbing out of this place, my buddy says, “hey come and look at this.” He is standing there, holding a broken off piece of shale, with a clam shell sticking out of it. Now he declares, “this baby is 30 to 50 million years old!” So, I ask, “oh yeah, howdya know that?” I was more skeptical, hearing this from him, than if a stranger had told me this same thing. The reason was, that my childhood buddy was a notorious teller of “tall tales”. In his time he had come out with some “whoppers”. Him standing there and telling me this information, did nothing for me. If he had told me the time of day, I would have checked a second source. He reaches in his pack and pulls out a fossil hunting book of Vancouver Island. It states that the shale layer found under the surface, in this area, was formed between 30 and 50 million years ago.

Now the impact of what I am seeing hits me. At that precise moment, I was holding, in my hand, something that lived in the same place, millions of years before. I might say, it was breathtaking. I had to stop and ponder the significance of this one finding. Since the day it became buried in the mud and the mud turned to shale, millions of years ago. NO ONE had touched this clam like shell. Throughout all this time, it had lain in its place waiting for JimboRed to come along and pick it up. Unbelievable came to mind. I was now no longer tired, I felt renewed faith, that there were, indeed, fossils to be had in this area. I commenced to pound and chip away at the shale with renewed energy. That one day made me a keen fossil hunter and added a new hobby to my list.

Now my weekdays were filled with golf on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Tuesdays and Thursdays were reserved for fossil hunting. Both my friend and I began to study the fossil history of this area. We read everything we could find. We looked at maps to identify areas to explore. And in fact we even went to the local Palaeontology club to see if we could learn more. This was a weekly meeting of fossil hunters, that sat around discussing things, with names we couldn’t pronounce. Much like a group of geeks, they also seemed to have learned a language, similar to English, however not really English. We wisely nodded our heads, as if we understood exactly what they were discussing.

What I mostly got out of it, was that this group, collectively, hated and loathed the “Sunday” fossil hunters. The ones that found a shale bank and started, insanely beating on it with picks, hammer and sledges. Most of the time destroying fossil treasures buried in the rock. This because, these idiots, as they called them, did not know a fossil from a piece of rock. I could feel my face, flushing a deep red shade, as I listened to them describing myself and my buddy. I know if they looked at me, it would have been quite obvious that I was indeed guilty of all the sins mentioned by them. My buddy just bobbed his head up and down and promised to hand out an ass kicking to anyone that he found desecrating a fossil. I quickly tucked my grime coated hands, into my pockets. All I wanted to do was get out of there.

We each donated our five bucks for membership in the group, ate a hippie crumpet, and became full fledged amateur Palaeontologists. All the while, I’m trying to break free and go hide from their accusing stares. Not only couldn’t we talk the lingo, we in no way resembled these ponytailed 50ish hippie males, nor their “ban the bra” partners. We looked like we had just come from the golf course. Which we had. To say we struck out like two turds in a punchbowl was an understatement. In any event we attended another couple of meetings before deciding that this was not a group for us. They were more interested in spending their next ten years trying to locate another 40 foot long Elasmosaur in the valley; and then another ten, uncovering it a teaspoon at a time. We, however, were in this for short term results.

I have to say, over the summer months of 2006 and 2007 we scooped up a large quantity of marine fossils. Some were in the 30 million year old, range and some were older, like 50 million or even 80 million years old. None of our finds came easily. I remember one time after scrambling down a steep embankment, through the forest, and over rock piles, and finally arriving at the creek. This was a fast moving stream and looked very cold. Immediately on arrival, I dropped my backpack with all our tools into the water. It promptly disappeared. I had no choice. I jumped in and reached for the bottom. Did I mention this water looked cold? Well it was another level of cold than I had ever experienced. It seemed like this stream was fed off the local glacier about 10 miles from where we were standing. I was paralyzed and clutching a canvas bag full of rock chipping tools. Much like holding an anchor.

I did not have the strength to pull myself up the bank. My buddy offered to help, if I would pass him our precious backpack first. I did, and he half dragged me and pulled me to a place where I could get my freezing body out of that ice bath. Not only had I almost drowned, but now had a severe case of hypothermia setting in. We were on the shady side of the creek bank. It was cool and I was frozen. We now had no choice but to ford the stream and bake ourselves in the sun, until I had a chance to unthaw. At the time, I did not really think about the danger I was in. However, writing about it makes me now realize, that this could have been a very serious problem. And that was not the only time we experienced issues while hunting dinosaurs.

One time we had climbed down a long, steep forested bank to a stream where we scraped and hammered away at a shale bank. The way down was so overgrown with ferns and bushes that we were in no hurry to climb out. However, eventually we had to. It was every bit as tough as it looked like it would be. We would crawl up 20 or 25 feet thru the tangled undergrowth, and then slide back 15 feet down the slope. All this while loaded with our packs and weighed down with our fossil collection for the day. I might say that both of us were exhausted when we broke free of the jungle. We sat there huffing and puffing. I decided to call Deysi and let her know we were coming soon.

Upon reaching in my pocket, I discovered that my cellphone was missing. I searched all over but soon realized, that somewhere between the creek and the top of this tangled slope, I had lost my phone. Panic set in. We tried calling it with my friend’s phone, and could faintly hear it ringing in the distance. The thought of climbing back down thru that tangled mess, to look for that phone in a jungle, also made me a bit panicky. The undergrowth was at least 3 feet thick. And very dense all the way from the top of slope to the edge of the stream. I suggested we go for a look. My pal suggested that I go ahead and he would wait for me at the top. I weighed the pro’s and con’s and the amount of abuse I would suffer at the hands of Ol’ Bubbaloo. I then decided that another bout of me thrashing around in that jungle, was not going to uncover my phone. It was well and truly gone. As we walked away, I could hear it’s forlorn bleating in the distance.

Another time, down along the Bloedel Creek, we were walking the edge of the water. Sometimes we were knee deep will bypassing a cliff or fallen boulder. Other times walking along the shore. We eventually come to a place with a sheer shale wall rising vertically from the stream. It looked like a fossil hunter’s paradise. We unpacked our gear and got busy chipping and hacking away on the rock. At one point I had worked my way up about 10 feet above the stream. I worked on a series of tiny ledges, where I clung to the cliff face with one hand, while beating on the rock with the other. All of a sudden I felt a loosening of the rock face. I jumped a bit to the side and downwards a few feet. All of a sudden, a great slab of shale, about 6 feet square and a foot thick, broke away from the cliff face and came crashing down into the water. “Geezus”, I think, if that would have hit me, I for sure would have suffered a broken leg or two.

I managed to escape this mini landslide and stood kind of quietly, while I considered the possible outcomes of that huge chunk of rock, hitting me. A shudder went down my spine. Once I could move again, I looked at this piece of rock. It lay there half in and half out of the water. It had sheared into two pieces and exposed the most incredible find. I could not believe my eyes. There laying half imbedded in the shale was a perfect fossilized remains of an Ammonite. These were a marine creature that had become extinct more than 60 million years ago. They looked like a shelled creature laying in a coil. By 1000% this was the most spectacular thing we had ever found. My heart literally raced. I could not believe my eyes. As carefully as I could, I extracted it from the shale, and applied protection around it for packing it out.

Over the course of the past few weeks, I had learned some interesting things about fossil preservation. For instance if you were working in shale, you needed to be very careful with water. Shale soaked in water for even a short time, tends to fracture and disintegrate. A nice piece of fossil imprint would quickly turn into a handful of tiny shards, of shale, if exposed to water. What you once had in your hand, became nothing but a pile of bits and pieces once exposed. It was amazing! What I also learned was that spraying your fossil with leather waterproofing spray, kept it from disintegrating. However, at the appropriate time it could be wiped off leaving your fossil in the same state as when you found it. Or for a more permanent seal, spray on super glue worked best.

As I said earlier, like everything else I ever did, I was soon deep into the study of VANCOUVER ISLAND fossils. We read about them, catalogued them, described and pinpointed the location where each was found, and took reference pictures of the ones that we could identify. We worked on preserving the fossils, so moisture could not fragment them. In short, I became as obsessive compulsive about Dinosaur hunting as I did with everything else, that I touched. Then, all too soon, my buddy moved on to greener pastures. After he left, I knew Bubbaloo, was not going to crawl down any embankments or wade any streams with me. She was, also, not going to let me go into the bush by myself. So my fossil hunting days were over. However, to this day, when we happen to walk thru the bush, I still have my eyes open for treasure. I am done for now. Stayed tuned.