Saddle mountain on April 16th went great! We had a couple of club members and a bunch of 4-H kids from my group! We had so much fun despite the SNOW! YIKES! The weather is very weird this year.
We met at the Mattawa Shell Station at 10am and promptly ran into the Puyallup rock club! We had a great chat and exchanged some friendly info on the site. We saw them up there later on the mountain and it was all good fun.
Once we traveled up "R" road to the Saddle Mountain BLM land, we were happy to see that the roads have been satisfactorily maintained. There were just a couple of spots that a car had to be cautious. We had a mini-van in our group, as well as a small sedan, and they all made it, albeit slowly in some spots. Good driving skills help! The bigger trucks and SUVs were just fine.
We decided to go to the classic site, sort of below the cell towers in the well-dug holes. The kids had a BLAST. I soon pointed out all the pieces on the ground, and discards from other diggers. Buckets and bags were getting filled up quickly. A few kids and parents got down into a hole and started digging, but most of the kids enjoyed the chance to run around like feral children. It did begin to snow not long after we got there, so the running around was almost necessary to stay warm!
After a couple of hours, folks started to trickle out, but I advised everyone to check out the rock shop near Ginko Petrified Forest in Vantage. Hopefully a few of them took us up on that suggestion! We were some of the last to leave, but we still had plenty of time for the stop. That shop is always fun because of the HUGE rounds of petrified wood out front, and the dinosaur sculptures always make for some funny pictures and entertainment. I found some new little fossils that I could not live without, and then we headed back home.