Author Archives: Bud Baker

NSR – May 20th

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I made a hike down the North Sulfur River bottom today, and as usual, there were fun things to be found. There are shell fragments everywhere in the shale at NSR, but most of them aren’t from ammonites like this one. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

This ammonite imprint in the shale actually had two pieces nearby which fit together nicely.

I found this almost complete ammonite in a creek wall, but it sure is trying to fall apart.

And a beautiful fish tooth, even if it’s broken. It’s from an Enchodus.

The most common fossils at this part of NSR are baculites and barbed wire. They’re both everywhere. I left all the barbed wire, but kept these two baculites.

I keep telling myself I’m not going to make that long hike down the river bottom with another heavy Egogyra Ponderosa oyster in my backpack, but then I find a beauty like this.

April rides

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I managed 12 rides in April, for 459 miles. That’s about what I should be riding in April. For a change, I got in some outside riding. 10 of those 12 rides were on the F-5, on the road. I had to modify my routes, with the closing of Purtis Creek State Park, which is where I usually turn around on my shorter routes, and stop in on my longer routes. It has likely reopened now, but not wanting the human interaction at the gate, I’ve continued to ride my closed park routes.

I ride past the state park, then on to FM1861. I usually turn around at mile 15, and on 40 mile rides, I’ll turn onto FM316, and ride some miles out it before turning around. On my longer routes, I still ride out FM1861 to State Highway 19, then back. I just don’t stop at the state park like I usually did before.

My last ride of the month on the 27th.

NSR – May 1st

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I walked the North Sulfur River yesterday. I was surprised at how low the water is. There had been a 3 1/2 foot rise at the gauge downstream just a couple of days earlier, but it’s obvious there has been no rain at the FM2990 bridge. There is not much water flow at all. No fresh water made me wonder how picked over it would be, but there always seems to be interesting things to be seen at NSR, so down into the river bed I went.

I found these two ammonite fragments lying, half buried in sand, exactly in the position in this photo. If they are halves of the same ammonite, there is some material missing between them. These are the largest ammonite fragments I’ve found at NSR. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

More ammonite pieces.

A lamniform shark vert.

And the bones. Most are mosasaur bones, but the thought in The Fossil Forum was that the bone in the lower right and in the bottom photo is part of a fish skull, a Xiphactinus, to be exact.

NSR – April 25th

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I headed back to the North Sulfur River yesterday, trying out a new access point. I haven’t been finding ammonites at NSR, but found these yesterday. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

I also found what look like mosasaur bones. The top left is a vert, the top middle looks like a transverse broken off a vert, and that looks like a rib on the left. I’m not sure what the smaller lower bones are.

Post Oak Creek – April 20th

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I made my first trip to Post Oak Creek today. There had been rain in the forecast for yesterday, so I hoped for some newly washed out fossils, but Sherman got no rain. So, I knew things would be pretty picked over, but I decided to go anyway, and just hike a bit further down the creek than I normally might, to see if I could find a few teeth anyway.

I stayed about three hours. The knee pads I bought yesterday were definitely a good investment. These old fart eyes need to be close to the sand bars to get within reading glass distance of those small teeth. I had also made a sifter, and carried out half a bucket of sand to go through at home. I had fun. That creek is an amazing fossil place. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

You really can’t appreciate just how large of an area on the banks, and creek walls in places, that are covered with fossilized shell filled rocks, until you see it. I brought home this one rock to remind myself of what the place looked like, as well as try to explain it to others.

There are truly fossil fragments everywhere on those sand bars. I was mainly looking for teeth, so I tended to ignore all the other stuff, but I couldn’t resist picking up these two small gastropods.

Up until now, I had hardly found any shark teeth, so it was fun picking up teeth today. The tooth in that last photo is a Ptychodus tooth.


NSR – April 16th

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I made another trip to the North Sulfur River yesterday. I spent too much time hiking and exploring, but still found some interesting things. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

A really nice Egogyra Ponderosa I couldn’t resist bringing home. It’s amazing how many fragments of these there are in the river, but I don’t usually find one in this shape.

A shark tooth and some kind of fish tooth.

And these look like Hamulus worm tubes.

An ammonite segment.

Fossil Hunting the NSR

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As I work less and have more free time, I have added a new hobby, and I’m going to post some new things from it here. It’s fossil hunting. I have always been fascinated by rocks and fossils, but my first real fossil was found on a fishing trip at Benbrook in 2013. In the roots of a toppled and half submerged tree, I found this. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

I had no idea what it was, but I was sure it was some kind of fossil. So I joined The Fossil Forum and made a post asking what it was. It is, of course, a piece of an ammonite. It was all enough to really get me interested in fossil hunting, but between work, family, and all my cycling, I really didn’t have time for a new hobby. I vowed that when I retired, fossil hunting was something I was going to consider adding as a hobby. That time has now arrived.

The trip I made to the North Sulfur River today was my third fossil hunting trip, and the first one I had finds I deemed worthy of posting here. Here is what I posted in The Fossil Forum:

I made my second trip to the North Sulfur River today. I had planned on going yesterday, but it was pretty chilly early, and today was forecast to be much warmer, plus the water was still coming down, so I settled for a 50 mile bike ride yesterday, and headed for the NSR this morning. I seem to be making the most of this time of social distancing / off work. A bike ride yesterday, NSR today, and I’ll be crappie fishing tomorrow. If this is a preview of retirement, sign me up. Once again, I just went to the Ladonia Fossil Park. I hiked downstream, the opposite of the direction I headed last time.

I’m still finding out what my physical capabilities are for this kind of trip. With all my bike riding, my legs are strong, and I’m in great aerobic shape, but at 69 years old, and after almost 50 years of heavy machine shop work, my back and shoulders are pretty cratered. I’m not sure how I’ll hold up for long hikes down treacherous river bottoms, or climbing in and out.

I probably pack my backpack lighter than most here. But after hiking a couple of miles down the river and back today, I feel fine. So, maybe I can hold up to these trips better than I thought. I’m ready to try getting in and out of the river at some other spots. I drove over to the FM2990 bridge and looked at that access. I’ll tackle it, but I’m definitely going to do it on a dry day. That rope climb back up looks tough.

I’d also like to try out the river downstream at 24. A question for those who know the area: Google satellite photos show a lot more water in that area, with hardly any sand bars showing. Is the water that much higher there, or is it just when Google took the photos? Do I need to wait for lower water to try that out? Water level today was 2.08.

I thought this ammonite segment was cool.

And here is a bacculite piece.

But the find of the day was this fish vertebrae.

Rode My Age

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Every year on my birthday, I ride my age in miles. My birthday this year isn’t actually until Sunday, but with rain forecast for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, today looked like the day for my birthday ride. So I took off on the F-5 shortly after 8:00 am, and rode to Purtis Creek, then on Farm to Market 1861, then on State Highway 19, then back, for 69 miles total. It was cool and breezy at the start, but after a few miles, I wasn’t cold at all. The wind kept blowing, but was a quartering tailwind on most of the return ride. I only do short rides all winter, so this ride is always more than I’m used to, and always wears me out. But there it is, done for another year.

I ended up with 284 total miles ridden in the month of January, and every bit of that was on the Xstream on the trainer. January was actually pretty mild this year, but I worked quite a bit, and just never managed to be able to ride on one of those mild and dry days. I had a serious cold the second week of the month, and only rode 25 miles. That’s why I ended up with less than 300 miles for the month. Still, compared to past Januarys where I did nothing but outside rides, this year’s mileage wasn’t bad.

February was a chillier, wetter month, and I only managed three outdoor rides that month. I ended up with 415 miles for the month, so not bad. March was another wet month, and I only got in five outdoor rides. I ended up with 459 miles for the month. That’s a decent March for me, and I need to keep increasing that mileage as the warmer weather comes. I’ve taken at least a month off work because of the pandemic, so getting my miles in should be easier for at least the next few weeks.

Today’s birthday route.

Happy New Year

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2020 has arrived, and I’ve added up all my mileage for 2019. Since my last blog post in October, I’ve ridden 410 miles in November, and 435 miles in December. That’s more than I usually do in December, but with my terrible mileage start in 2019, it took that many miles to reach my mileage goal for 2019, which was 5,200 miles. I ended up with 5,214 miles for the year.

In past years, every mile I logged was actual outdoor miles ridden. That changed in 2019. For the first time ever, in March, I set up a bike (my Xstream) on a smart trainer, joined Rouvy, and started doing virtual rides, watching a video. As you climb a hill on the video, pedaling gets harder, and the effort versus miles ridden is very comparable to actual outdoor mileage on my F-5, so I’m going to add those miles to my outdoor riding to calculate my logged mileage, from now on.

In 2019, I ended up with 2,779 miles indoors, and 2,435 outdoor road miles. So, over half of my riding for the year was on the trainer. I don’t know how that will compare to future years, but I’m not missing those outdoor rides on days that were too wet, cold, hot, etc, so I’m going to stay with this riding plan for the foreseeable future. It’s a concession to age, I guess. Only five of my sixteen rides in December were outdoor rides.

My last outdoor ride of 2019, on Christmas Day.

September mileage.

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I took off on the F-5 just after 8:00 this morning and rode 40 miles. I rode 30 yesterday afternoon. It was cloudy and 86 degrees when I took off yesterday afternoon, but as soon as I was riding, the sun came out and it got pretty steamy. I’ll be glad when we get some actual fall weather and the afternoon rides are cooler. Yesterday’s ride was a reminder of why I’ve been doing most of my afternoon riding indoors lately. Yesterday’s ride gave me a total of 494 miles for September. That’s probably less than I usually try for in September, but with my trainer set up for the winter, I don’t feel the need to get extra miles right now, since the winter miles will be easier to get this year.

At a time when everyone seems to be moving their mileage logging to online, I find myself doing the opposite. My bike mileage is at three places online right now. Every since shortly after I started riding, since January of 2005, I’ve been logging my mileage at bikejournal.com. A lot of rbent people were doing it there way back when, I had no Garmin to track a lot of data, and so I used bikejournal.com. But now I also have mileage at Garmin Connect, where my Garmin gets uploaded by default, as well as my trainer mileage at rouvy.com. So I’ve been logging all that mileage to bikejournal.com, too.

But bikejournal.com hasn’t been free for many years and also separates trainer mileage from road mileage when showing totals, so since I’ve set up the trainer this year, I’m not liking that. But I’m not in competition with anyone else and have never felt the urge to be trying to claim KOM mileage at somewhere like Strava, so I just decided it’s time to find software to log all my miles on my own computer, and back it up on a cloud. CycliStats has been freeware for a few years now. It’s nice software, so I’ve installed it and started importing all my rides from everywhere else. That’s proving to be quite a chore, but it’s a blast from the past and a reminder of many fun and adventurous past rides as I do the importing.

Importing new rides from Garmin Connect is easy. I’ve never had a power meter on my bikes, so that data is missing. CyliStats estimates it. And older rides had less data, and needed massaging to get missing data, including miles from being slow to pick up satellites at the beginning of rides, especially my work commuting miles, which the return rides started around some tall metal buildings. Elevation is also missing from those older rides. Rouvy exports tcx files that CycliStats won’t import, but I’ve found that TCX Converter makes short work of getting them into a form that CycliStats will import, so I’ve been using it. It’s going to take a while to get everything imported, but once that’s done, the monthly chore of importing from Garmin Connect and Rouvy after that won’t be too much of a hassle, and CyliStats does a pretty nice job of showing everything I want to track, as well as a lot more.

Today’s ride route out to Purtis Creek State Park.