What a field expedition actually looks like

Curious what a field expedition actually looks like? 🦴🏜️

It’s a lot of wandering through a formation with your eyes glued to the ground, looking for anything that doesn’t quite belong.

It’s yelling, “HEY—come look at this!” across the field, only to find out you’ve discovered… absolutely nothing. 😂 And sometimes, it turns out you’re holding something really freaking cool that hasn’t seen daylight in roughly 250 million years.

It’s walking the formation, sitting in the formation, digging in the formation, and eventually becoming approximately 40% formation yourself. Dust. Everywhere.

It’s watching storms roll across the desert and wondering what the weather is about to throw at you. It’s sunburns, sore legs, dirty clothes, heavy packs, and being completely exhausted by the end of the day.

And then there’s camp.

Everyone comes back tired and dusty, but somehow there’s still enough energy left for a campfire, a lot of laughing, stories from the day, and inside jokes that probably stopped making sense somewhere around day two. There’s a camaraderie that comes from spending all day out there together—searching, learning, getting excited over tiny pieces of rock, and occasionally yelling at someone to come look at yet another questionable object.

Eventually everyone reaches the same conclusion: we are way too tired for this.

So we crawl into our tents, sleep for a few hours…

and get up to do the whole thing again.

Because we’re curious. We love the science of it. We want to know what was here, what lived here, and what these little pieces of the past can tell us.

And somehow, through all the dust, sunburns, sore legs, storms, and exhaustion…

it is SO. MUCH. FUN. 🖤🦴