Nate’s Man Trip – Death Valley

One of the travel traditions we have in our family is finding a unique rock to bring home for our garden. Death Valley is mind-blowingly enormous expanse that is positively littered with rocks.

While driving there, we had the road pretty much to ourselves—no other cars for miles and miles. Several times Nate spotted cool places he wanted to explore, so we just pulled off the road and went exploring, keeping an eye out for a rock to take home.

Many of the rocks were sedimentary, Steve points out that many of the formations were sedimentary rocks, which often contain fossils. So we started breaking them open and, sure enough, finding fossils inside. 

A few hours after leaving Death Valley, Steve uses his phone to do some research on our fossils, trying to figure out how old they might be, which time period generated fossils found in Death Valley.

All of a sudden he goes, “Oh crap.”

As it turns out, fossil hunting is illegal in Death Valley. Mega oops… but we had no idea!