Aurora Fossil Festival --- Playing in the Sandboxes!

Hey, everyone!

I just recently joined, so this is my first attempt at posting a Trip Report… hoping I don’t goof it up too badly, LOL.

My wife and I have been “regulars” at the Aurora Fossil Festival for the past few years, and always really enjoy it. Now, granted, hunting the spoil piles in town isn’t like a day in the mine, but it beats the heck out of sitting at home!

Last year was quite a wet Saturday morning. While it didn’t stop me from playing in the very muddy ‘Pit of the Pungo,’ we hoped for better weather (and a larger turn-out for the town) this year!

Thankfully, we did have 3 really nice days.

We almost always leave very early on Friday morning (5-hour drive down from southwestern VA), and stay through at least mid-day Sunday.

This year we left at 4:00AM and arrived a little before 9:00AM. There were already a couple of peeps in the back piles, and several more in the front piles next to the museum. (“Darn it, I told you we should have left at 3:00AM again!”)

We got on our aprons, kneepads, and sunscreen, then did a quick ‘walk through’ of the piles in the back. Since they were fresh off the slurry from the mine and hadn’t had much sun, they were pretty wet. (Not as ‘soupy’ as last year’s were, straight from the mine, though!)

Since we weren’t too impressed with what we saw/found during our check, we proceeded on over to the piles in front of the museum.

We started to immediately find a few interesting items there, so we settled-in for some serious searching. I started the “Pungo Crawl” and quickly located a nice sized Mako with a dinged root. (I much prefer to crawl instead of digging… I let my wife take care of that!)

Within a few minutes the dump trucks were rolling through the streets. Their first dump into the area in front of the museum “sucked” nearly all of the other hunters to the fresh offering, which suited my wife and I quite well, as the majority of the other piles showed little to no sign of attention, anyway, and were a bit drier, to boot.

We hunted religiously without turning up anything overly large or out of the ordinary, and the vast majority of what we were finding were all ‘dingers.’

(The larger teeth were in notably worse condition this year than either of the past couple, and we found far fewer large teeth this go round…)

But it was a very pretty day and not too many ‘competitors’ in the piles, so we weren’t unhappy.

We noticed an older lady who was sitting in one spot near the cinder block wall, slowly and consistently digging, and never moving. Around mid-day we went to make sandwiches and walked past her. She had a small sifter that she had lined with a paper towel to store her finds in, and, friends, she WAS a findin’!

I told my wife, “That woman is kicking our butts!” Finally, prolly around mid-afternoon, she and her crew got ready to leave, so I walked up and asked to take a peep at what she had found. I was duly impressed, too! While her friends had hunted a bit and loafed a lot, this lady had never moved from her original area. She literally had one of the small museum sifters 3/4 full of teeth, including at least two 1 ½” or larger Chubs along with several appreciable Makos and Sandys, and lots of dinger teeth. I said, “Wow, your patience and perseverance have really paid off!” To which she replied, “You just can’t get in a hurry. This stuff is so wet that you have to rake it out, let it dry, then go back through it; then the teeth just fall out!”

Sadly, I despise digging and don’t have the patience to sit in one spot all day as she did, anyway, so I couldn’t follow her sage advice… But it darn sure worked for her!

 We pooped-out around 4:30 or 5:00 after having a good first day, and went to the motel to grab much-needed showers and a bite to eat.

Saturday we were back in the piles before 7:00AM, and although we stayed until about the same time as on Friday, our finds were far fewer. LOTS of folks in there digging, which I love to see (especially kids), but my norm of going behind them afterwards and being rewarded with sweet finds just didn’t pan-out this time, for whatever reason.

Sunday we again hit the spoil piles around 7:00AM. While early morning showers ran us out a couple of times the first hour, or so, we were blessed the rest of the day without getting wet. Even though we left around 1:00 to head back home, this was likely our best day: I found the vert with the large bite mark in it; my wife found the largest tooth of the trip in a badly dinged-up 2 ¼” Meg; and I nearly missed a really cool tooth...

It was about 12:15, and I was starting to get that ‘let’s head on home’ feeling. I told my wife that we’d let the museum open (12:30) so that we could sign the book and make a donation, then we’d grab a quick bite to eat, and leave. The whole time we were talking, I was looking around where some guy had literally excavated-out almost half of one pile. Didn’t see a thing, and I was pretty well pooped, anyway, so I was getting ready to take off my kneepads, apron, etc to prep for the trip home. Then I noticed something at the very top of this pile where ‘The Digging Dude’ had shoveled out the mass of wet matrix. Root up, tip down, flat against the back wall, and covered in mud was a sweet 1 ¾” lateral Chub!

That poor guy had left, and will likely never know how close he came to finding what was--- for me--- likely the best tooth of the whole 3 days! 

A great note on which to complete our trip!