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One last hurrah in Utah.  I’m lucky enough to have found friends who like the remote places in Utah as much as I do.  Yesterday I went out with Jim to roam around in the deserts of Western Utah.  I love the House Range in particular.  It’s got the formidable Notch Peak, one of the highest cliffs in the world and one of the most staggering views I’ve gotten from a summit.  It has Wheeler Shale, which means great fossil beds.  It’s miles from anything, which means you’re usually alone with just the sound of the wind in your ears and the occasional Air Force presence overhead.

We headed for U-Dig fossils, which is run by a very nice old man and his two dogs.  It’s a pay site, but there’s the advantage of them pointing you right to good layers of shale and having it broken up in advance with some heavy machinery.  It makes finding fossils very rewarding; I estimate we found more than 50 nice trilobites.

After spending a couple of hours breaking up layers of Wheeler Shale, we took our haul and hit one of the long, lonely, gravel roads.  We drove along the east side of the House Range, with the Drum Mountains to the east of us.  One thing I expect to miss when I leave Utah is the long sight lines. 

Topaz Mountain is open to rock hounds, provided they use hand tools only to extract the crystals.  The best rhyolite formations are higher up in the canyons west of the main dig sites.  We parked and climbed about 300 feet up, but weren’t having a lot of luck breaking up the rock.  After about an hour I started back down, but just about that time Jim found a nice pocket and gathered up some topaz.  Below is the view from the spot we were working.

I will miss the hundred-mile vistas.  I’ll miss the dry, harsh desert.  I’ll miss being the only one on the long dirt road.  Nothing gold can stay.