Field Trip Week!

Learning here at Bryce is always happening. Yesterday we had a botanist named Dr. Bowns take us on a field trip to teach us more about the plants here at Bryce Canyon. He is a teacher at Southern Utah University and really knows his stuff. We began at Mossy Cave and learned about the plants growing in that ecosystem and then continued up to the burn zone from last year and on to the highest point in the park by Rainbow and Yovimpa Point, encomasing 3 seperate ecosystems.

Today was a geology day. Gale Pollock is our resident geologist and took taught us so much about the incredible forces that shaped this area and made it what is is today. We started with the oldest layers and worked our way up to the youngest layers found here. In the Tropic Shale formation we got to dig for fossils on some private land near past the town of Tropic. That was a really neat experience. At the begining we were all so excited when we found little fossilised oyster shells on the dirt. After an hour or so and about 1000 oyster shells later they werre not too exciting and everyone was digging for something more rare. Almost everyone found something they were happy about. This is what I discovered while digging around...



We continued our way up the layers and ended around 4:00pm with the conglomerate at Boat Mesa layer from Fairyland Point. It was extreamely informative and I learned so much about this area. A big thanks to Gale Pollock and all the preperation that went into this field trip!!!