The Bones of Art: Discoveries in the Desert

IMG_1449

Managed to get this photo without even having to get out of the car! 😀 

From the start, when I rolled at of bed at 4:00am to head to the airport and catch our flight, I knew that this was going to be an adventure that I would never forget. Even though the first day was almost all traveling (we didn’t actually make it to camp till about 9:00pm) I still wouldn’t call the day a waste. During the longs drives I got to see the breathtaking landscapes of Colorado and Utah and Bucky started explaining some of the geology of the area, along with the how and why Paleontologist frequent this particular region of the country. It turns out that the sedimentary rock layers in the part of the country and crucial for understanding the fossil record and geologic time.

      IMG_1472 IMG_1452

I think I did pretty good with just my finger and an iPhone

Once we got to camp, set up our tents, and the stars started coming out the realization of just far away from civilization we really were started to sink in. The star were breathtaking. For those of you who don’t like camp or go deep out into the wilderness, away from the lights of the city, it is really hard to explain the unbelievable quantity of stars that are really out there. Hundreds of thousands of stars everywhere you looked and the band of the Milky Way streaked across that night’s sky made it one of the most beautiful sights out of the whole trip.

There were two main types of things we spend our days doing at camp, Quarrying and Prospecting. Quarrying involves going on a relatively short hike to a pre-established site where dinosaur bones had already been discovered. Then we unearthed them by slowly digging away at the rocks surrounding the bones, exposing them enough to cover them with plaster and extracting them from the site. Prospecting on the other hand, involved looking for new sites to quarry. This entailed fairly long hikes through wilderness, across deserts, and up and down mountains looking for bits of bone on the surface hoping to find some or most of skeleton.

IMG_1558 IMG_1523 

Quarrying and Prospecting both took us to some truly amazing places ( And yes, we climbed that mountain in the picture one the right 😀 )

I was lucky enough to have an almost even split between prospecting and quarrying during my time at camp. Between the two I personally like the novelty and discovery that came along with prospecting the best. There’s just something indescribably awesome about knowing that you are the first person to ever have laid eyes on something that is millions of years old, plus hiking through Utah’s landscape let me experience some really beautiful sights. Don’t get me wrong the bone quarries were fun too, especially at Suicide Hill where there was a ton of bone to be discovered, but if you were just moving rock and not expecting to find bone, like what I was doing at Fortunate Son it can be pretty boring and painful just sitting on a pile of sharp rocks hammering at rocks all day. Though after an hour or so of looking down you’d look up and remember where you were and the sights from the quarry alone would make it worth it, that and the fact that you’re helping DIG UP DINOSAUR BONES! Plus if that wasn’t enough you’d remember that for some reason you volunteered for this and no one likes a whiner.

IMG_1580 IMG_1566

Most days just turning around made me feel like I was on Tatooine from Star Wars

There were two really awesome things that happened with Art during my adventures. The first was when I got to see some of the ancient desert people’s petroglyphs that they carved onto the rocks near where we were quarrying. I’d never really seen ancient art history before but I immediately knew I wanted to incorporate what I saw into my Art History lessons on Native American Art and Prehistoric Art.  

IMG_1569

Art can be found even in the most unlikely of places

The second happened on the last day we were out there, only a few hours before we were about to leave. About an hour before lunchtime a huge thunderstorm rolled in and the desert became a muddy, slippery wasteland and while getting back to camp from Fortunate Son was an adventure in and of itself what happened when we got back to camp was the really interesting part.

IMG_1816

The rain was so thick you couldn’t see past the first mound! (compare to the view in two photos up)

After everyone had dried themselves from the rain, we all gathered in the main tent and some of the other campers had started making sculptures out of the desert mud and that made me start thinking about the true purpose of art the big WHY. And that’s when I realized something about my job that I’d never really thought of before, what my profession is about for all the students who will never become artists. The art that ‘non Artists’ make is frequently about joy, about filling that sadness that comes from boredom with the joy that comes from making. Sure their Art will not sell for millions of dollars, but the act of making brightened someone’s day and that realization makes me so happy to be an Art Teacher. I even started to wonder if the Native people who created the petroglyphs did it similarly simple reasons too and made me think what is the true nature and reason that people create Art? I doubt we’ll ever have a definitive answer to that question, but it is awesome to me to think that I had such an interesting train of thought about the very nature of art because of this trip, and that I will never forget. 

IMG_1620 IMG_1735

Selfie’s at Bryce Canyon and with a Large fossil fragment we found

Before Utah I liked adventuring, hiking, and backpacking. Going out into the wilderness and exploring and seeing all the beautiful sights that nature has to offer. Now I love it and I can’t wait to go back, to keep exploring, seeing new things, and finding out more about myself in the process. Furthermore, I know I want to use those future experience to discover or study something, maybe not paleontology, but what about a field experience with a botanist or an entomologist, or even a anthropologist. I am very interested to see how I can improve my Art Teaching by studying and learning from professionals in other disciplines and I think full blown field experiences would be an excellent way to do that.

In the next few days I’m going to create a typed version of my journal entries for each day I was in the field, supplemented with the pictures I took that day, so stay tune because there will be more from my adventures in Utah soon!

4 thoughts on “The Bones of Art: Discoveries in the Desert

  1. abcdbelair

    What an amazing experience! I’m excited that you are thinking of more outdoor adventures in other fields of science to enhance your art – can’t wait to see what transpires!

  2. jhumphries

    I had tears in my eyes when I read your words about “non-artists”…YES! Art brings joy to so many people and is really only a profession for a few. This is why it saddens me so when the budgets are cut or art class is viewed as playtime. Keep doing what you do! The kids need you!

  3. skparry

    Chris, I didn’t know that you got to go. How incredibly awesome. I’m so pleased for you, and thrilled to read your account of the trip. I spend a bunch of years in Utah, got my masters in environmental education there, and did a lot of hiking in the desert and the canyons. I’m going to get back one of these days soon. I’d love to hear more details when we next see each other. Great revelations about art and non-artists.

  4. Lisa Hibler

    Chris, I’m jealous. What an amazing experience. I look forward to hearing more about your trip and more importantly to learning about how you use in your classroom. Please add dates to the Google Classroom Implementation calendar so I can visit and experience the integration of art and science in the classroom along side your students.

Comments are closed.