I ended up with 361 miles on the bike this month, 90 miles each week, which is my new norm. I’m still limited by left knee pain, but it’s been a bit better lately, so I’m trying to get stronger on the bike. More months like this one, where I had other medical issues, would be nice. I had six outdoor rides, and six rides on the trainer, this month.
Today’s route.
I made another trip to a Grayson County creek yesterday. I had visited this spot once before. It was muddy and the water was a bit higher, but I still don’t think we’ve had enough rain to really wash out a lot of new fossils. Here are some teeth as they lay. Click on the images to be able to zoom in for a closer look.
Here is what I brought home. The larger teeth are all pretty broken.
But I did find this fish vert. It always makes my day when I find a larger one.
My favorite tooth of the day.
Here are the other teeth I liked.
I’ve been wanting to check out some of the construction sites in Eagle Ford areas in north Texas, but most of those are well north of Dallas. I’m 60 miles southeast of Dallas, so I’m not often willing to drive that far to scout sites, most of which probably won’t have anything anyway. But yesterday, I had a doctor’s appointment in Dallas, plus needed to make a shopping stop in north Dallas, so I decided to do a little scouting further north. It was to be just scouting, and I wasn’t dressed for any actual fossil hunting. I had on shorts and sandals, and didn’t even bring my hat. But, don’t you know it, I brought home fossils.
One of the construction sites was on a hillside, so the grading done to level it went deeper there, and I stopped to walk a little of it. I found a rock that just looked like a piece of concrete, but I’ve learned that some of the Eagle Ford fossiferous matrix looks a lot like concrete, so I routinely waste a lot of time picking up concrete pieces. There were no visible fossils in this rock, but when I turned it over, it looked like gray sandstone on the other side. That told me it wasn’t concrete, and every time I saw another rock that looked like it, I picked it up. Sure enough, one of the rocks had a small tooth so close to the surface, I was able to pluck it off the rock with my fingernail. Here is that tooth.
Of course, I’m aware that not all material at construction sites actually comes from that site, but the spot where I found these rocks looked to have been graded, but nothing else, so I really think these rocks are from this spot, uncovered by the grading. I ended up picking up five rocks, and carrying them home. I soaked them in warm water, to clean them and see how much that might soften them. They remain very hard, so removing fossils from them isn’t going to be very easy. I’ll add to the post later, to show what I extracted from them, but here are the rocks.
This side view of the biggest rock does the best job of showing their makeup. You can see the dark gray sandstone on the bottom, the brown sandstone in the middle, and the concrete-looking harder matrix on the top.
This view of the top of that same rock shows several teeth, above and below 170 on the ruler, above 140, and above 20. All of the teeth I see in these rocks are very small, more similar to the teeth I found in the Kincaid formation in East Texas than what I’ve found in Eagle Ford. And the matrix the teeth are in is attached to different rock than I’ve usually seen in Eagle Ford. Perhaps these photos will tell some of the experts in The Fossil Forum what part of Eagle Ford I was in.
Here are the other rocks. You can see several teeth in this one. The biggest is just to the right of the ruler.
One tooth visible on this one, above 90.
Nice teeth visible on this one above 100 and below 160.
Nothing I can definitively say is a tooth visible on this one, but I suspect they’re there. I’ll post more after I’ve retrieved some teeth from these rocks. Not sure how easy that’s going to be.
Tomorrow is my 71st birthday. Riding your age in miles on or near your birthday is a thing for many cyclists. I did it for quite a few years. With all the long rides I was doing, it wasn’t a particularly hard challenge. Of course, the older you get, the more of a challenge it becomes. I had written in this blog that I wasn’t so sure about 80 miles at 80, but that 70 miles at 70 would be easy. Of course I was wrong. 70 miles at 70 last year not only wasn’t easy, it was impossible. I had a severely cratered heart valve, and was waiting to get it replaced. The valve was so bad that my doctors had advised against exercise until I got it replaced, and I wasn’t riding at all. And I still had such severe shortness of breath from the severe COVID I’d had, that even without heart valve problems, I don’t think I could have managed 70 miles. So there was no birthday “Ride my age” ride last year.
And it’s been one health problem after another since. I’ve mostly recovered from the pneumonia I had in January, but the left knee problems that have limited me since December are still here. My knee has gotten a little better in the last few weeks, so I thought maybe it was time to start trying some longer rides. I had not done a ride over 40 miles since my severe COVID in October, 2020. I had built up to some 40 mile rides last fall, but limited myself to 30 mile rides or less ever since my knee problems in December. I decided I wanted to try a 50 mile ride last week, and that Tuesday, I took off and rode 50 miles. I was thinking about the possibility of riding my age this week, so wanted to see how my body handled a 50 mile ride. I had a lot of knee pain the last half of that ride, and decided there was no way I could ride my age this week.
But I reconsidered after I thought about it. That Tuesday, I rode my usual 50 mile route out to near Athens. It’s not a super hilly route, but it’s much hillier than my closer to home Mabank route. And the wind was terrible that day. I rode against it while it howled out of the southeast going out, then it changed to the southwest as I rode back, and I was still riding against it. I thought that if I rode a flatter route, on a less windy day, and took my time doing it, I might be able to ride the 71 miles. So that’s what I did today. I rode my Mabank route as a loop. It’s not completely flat by any means, but the inclines aren’t steep at all, more suited for a balky knee than my Athens route. I loaded the bike on the rack on my pickup and drove to a starting point near the loop. That way, I could start earlier than usual (I knew it was going to take me a bunch of hours to finish this ride at the easy pace my knee required), without fighting the bad morning traffic near my house, plus if I needed to bail out of the ride, my truck would be nearby.
I started right at 8:00 am, and did my ride. I hate riding at such a slow pace, but after soft pedaling for so many months, even if my knee suddenly improved, the rest of my body is now de-trained to the point that it wouldn’t be capable of much more speed than that anyway. So, I took my time, babied my knee, and finished the ride shortly before 2:00 in the afternoon. That’s a terrible time for a 71 mile ride, but considering that I wasn’t even able to ride my age last year, I’m just going to raise my clenched fist and celebrate completing today’s ride.
I ended up riding 390 miles in March. 250 miles of that was on the trainer indoors. Now that milder weather is here, I’d like to do most of my riding outdoors for the next few months. Next month is my annual checkup with my primary care doctor, and considering how long the pain in my left knee has lasted, I think that will be the time to get a referral and see what I can get done for it. Hopefully, I won’t lose too much time off the bike. I’d sure like to get stronger on it again.
Today’s route.
I took off Monday morning and drove to Sherman to hunt a Grayson County creek again. With the drought we’ve had, all the creeks there were getting pretty picked over. But, much of the county had had 1.5 inches of rain in the past 14 days, and I wanted to see if that was enough to wash much new material into the creek. The spot where I visited is one of my favorites. It’s too short a hike from the access point to escape a lot of hunting, but it usually holds quite a few fossils anyway.
It was obvious from walking the creek bed that the water from the rains had gotten above the lowest gravel beds, but it looked more like a gentle wash, and I got the impression that while the water may have helped uncover a few fossils, it wasn’t enough to really wash in more fossils. We need more of a floor for that, it seems. But, as always, I did find some cool fossils. Here are a few, as they lay on the gravel bars. Click the photos to be able to zoom in for a closer look.
Even without new material washed in the creek, I was able to find over 100 teeth. It’s amazing, the number of fossils the creeks in this area produce.
Here is the biggest of the five Ptychodus teeth I found. A real beauty, I think it’s my favorite of the day.
I think this is the prettiest of the other teeth.
Here are the other teeth I took individual photos of.
