Finished!

22 July 2007

Well, we finished excavating and sieving and closed up the pit (at least temporarily)! We had quite an interesting last week. We got some visitors to our sieving site last week from a houseboat that was docked nearby. There were quite a few kids and they were very interested in the bones and the sieving process. It was very fun to show them what we do and they even helped us find bones on the sieves. We also had some visits (to our neck of the woods, not to use personally) from DEA agents looking for marijuana plantations. It's not every day you can follow humvees full of men in camoflauge holding machine guns on your way to work! In the middle of this, we also saw a wakeboarding video being filmed right in front of us. It was great to see some top wakeboarders, but after a while the boat wakes and the helicopter noise from the camera crews got to be tiresome.

Luckily, the middle and end of the week was quiet and fun. We got a lot of rain, with lightening and thunder, on Wednesday, so Ronny, Xue and I drove up to the town of McCloud to see the upriver portion of the McCloud arm of Lake Shasta. We stopped at Castle Crags State Park on our way back and did a quick hike. It would be great to go back to CCSP for a full day because it seems like a great park! On Thursday, an intern with the Forest Service Public Affairs Office joined us for the day- he is planning on writing an article about what we are doing. Finally, on Friday we closed up the pit and finished sieving! (Here's a photo of me coming out of the cave for the final time this season) It was quite a long and momentous day.


And now, I'm back home. It was quite a feat to pack everything into the truck. All of our stuff barely fit, but luckily we were able to close all the doors and made our way home safely. Now it's time for the identification to start!

Our last week

14 July 2007

Well, now it really is the home stretch! I got to the bottom of the pit on Thursday (pictured at left), so all we need to do is map the stratigraphy of the pit and shore up the walls so we can close it up for the winter. I'm not going to fill it in completely, in case we need to get additional samples, but I am going to put a top on it and disguise the location so people can walk all over it and never know! Not that many people will be walking around in that part of the cave!! So, we're in Redding today buying wood and groceries. We also have some sieving left, and tomorrow we are going to explore the inner part of the cave!


I am getting anxious to get back to Palo Alto and start looking through the matrix. Luckily Xue and Ronny will still be with me for 4 or 5 more weeks, so we can charge through it together. They have been busy mapping out the floor plan of the cave, which will be a great visual to have for conferences and papers. We also have all been trying to learn the trees and shrubs of the area (a maddening experience for non-botany types!!). Luckily, my friend Andrea came up to visit recently and showed us a couple of plants before she had to get back to her real botany job!

home stretch?

29 June 2007

Well, it feels like the home stretch to me. Carrie left on Thursday and Xue and Ronny arrived early in the week, so we now have the “permanent” field crew in place. We excavated and sieved this week. We are down to Level VIIb, which is where we found the horse tooth in the main deposit. We haven’t found anything quite so flashy again- in fact, we’re not finding many large animal teeth at all. Tomorrow, we will probably go back to the pit and see if we can hit bottom. After that, it’s time for all of the little details necessary to finish up the summer (with the possibility of additional excavation)- vegetation surveys, mapping the floor of the pit and the cave, characterizing the stratigraphy of the pit, etc (with breaks for 4th of July and my friend Nicole’s wedding!).

lots of help!!

23 June 2007










Well, I had quite a week and lots of help. We hit the floor in a large part of the pit, so we decided to extend the pit east about 50 cm and start anew from the top. I had four wonderful field assistants to help me do this: Bob Feranec, Carrie Glenney, and my parents (Steve and Barbara Blois). Bob and Carrie excavated with me in the beginning and the end of the week, and my parents got into the cave on Thursday. By yesterday, we were about 50 cm deep and seemed to be glimpsing the top of the floor in the new location. I am hopeful that we can get another 20 cm down before we hit the floor again.


The sediment is really interesting- it’s very dry and loose, and very easy to excavate. Sometimes it’s so easy, it makes it difficult to avoid going to deep! We found quite a few intact jaws as we were excavating on Friday- a Lepus (probably the black-tailed jackrabbit), a Sylvilagus (a bunny rabbit), and a sciurid, probably Spermophilus beecheyi (California ground squirrel). It will be interesting to see if we find more stuff while sieving. I head up on Sunday or Monday with Carrie and Xue, a Stanford undergrad who will be helping me the rest of the summer. And Ronny, another Stanford undergrad, will join us on Wednesday. It will be great to have so much help to finish the excavation and the other small little details of wrapping up!

Pleistocene??

15 June 2007

I was up in the field earlier this week with Liz. We started sorting through some teeth and found...a horse tooth! This is really significant because it means we have transitioned into the Pleistocene! We may have found some other things- a bovid and an extinct pig- but those ID's are more tentative. I am very excited and can't wait to get back into the field on Monday to excavate some more!!!

New blog element

9 June 2007

Well, I'm back home for 2 days and have been organizing things. I added a link to this blog in the upper left corner that takes you to my Picasa photo gallery. I'll try to post photos from each trip on Picasa so everyone can access the photos.

busy week and weird teeth

5 June 2007

I'm back up in Shasta with two wonderful assistants from UC Berkeley (Kelly (left) and Lauren). We have been busy excavating and sieving. I am past the 1/2 m mark in the pit and may have just hit the floor. There is a very large rock ~20 cm wide that spans the pit, though there is still sediment on either side of the rock. So, we'll see how much farther I can go down! On the sieving front, Lauren and Kelly found some interesting things yesterday- a large deer tooth, something that looks like a worm cast, a carnivore canine, and a completely unknown piece of bone/tooth. So, things are getting busy up here!

It poured down rain last night, but we were nice and dry in the cabin. Today, we're in Redding resupplying our groceries and checking our e-mail. More soon!