Something about Florissant Fossil Beds has been calling my name for years.
Florissant means “flowering” in French, and it just sounds exotic – flourishing, flowering fossil beds. (Turns out the town was named after its founder’s hometown, Florissant, Mo.) I wasn’t sure what to expect: piles of dinosaur bones or towering petrified trees, man-eating flowers, Jurassic Park on the Continental Divide?
The reality of Florissant, west of Pikes Peak between Colorado Springs and Buena Vista, is more subtle. No dinosaurs – they had been wiped out 65 million years ago, a long time before the Florissant activity went down.
Petrified stumps
Volcanic eruptions at the end of the Eocene Epoch, roughly 35 million years ago, blew the tops off enormous redwood trees, then dammed a valley into a tropical lake. The mineral-rich water from volcanic mudflows was absorbed into the giant stumps and turned them to stone. Insects and plants drifted into the layers of algae, which were covered by thin layers of powder-
fine volcanic ash. The gunk sank to the bottom of the lake, burying fish, pine cones and small mammals. Over millions of years it hardened into sedimentary rock.
The Ute Indians traveled through the area and termed it “the valley of the shadows” and as you look at the artifacts in the visitors center, you will see why. Imprints of insects, flowers, leaves and feathers were trapped in layers of paper shale. At the other end of the scale, massive petrified-
wood formations poked up through the valley floor, and reports from the 1800s indicate that petrified logs were so thick on the ground that it was impossible for carriages to pass.
What nature took 35 million years to create, tourists and scientists carted away in a little more than a century. After their discovery, the fossil beds became an area of intense scientific interest and a huge tourist attraction. As paleontologist Samuel Scudder and his fellow professors excavated layers of shale, uncovering exquisitely preserved fossilized plant life and insects, wagonloads of sightseers began arriving to check the place out. But that didn’t last long. Everybody and his cousin came to Florissant, and everybody who came departed with a souvenir.
Many of the best Florissant fossils wound up elsewhere, from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the University of California at Berkeley. Attempts to move the giant redwood stumps back East failed, but not for lack of brute force and dynamite. And the petrified wood that blanketed the valley floor is all but gone.
Millions of ghosts
Even after an excellent ranger talk, it took a while for us to grasp the big picture as we walked the Petrified Forest Loop Trail. At one of Scudder’s dig sites, a ranger picked up a postage stamp-sized fragment from the ground and easily popped off a thin layer of rock with her fingernail. One layer down revealed a tiny twig. Another couple of flicks of the finger, and clearly visible as a dark gray shadow against the lighter gray rock was a 35-million-year-old fruit fly. Even after years of exploration, scientific study, souvenir hunting and outright vandalism, there are untold millions of ghosts buried at Florissant.
The delicacy of the specimens boggles the mind. You can see the color patterns in the wings of fossil butterflies, veins on leaves, the hairs on the back of a caterpillar and even moss. The scientists who first came upon these creatures celebrated the simultaneous power and gentleness of the Earth. “When the mountains are overthrown and the seas uplifted, the universe at Florissant flings itself against a gnat and preserves it,” geologist Arthur C. Peale wrote in 1873.
The largest and most unusual petrified trees – including a “family” of sequoia stumps the size of small houses – are now bound with metal straps to slow further deterioration and protected by a roofed amphitheatre structure in which rangers give talks. You’re not allowed to chip off pieces or climb them and pose for photographs on top, as the Victorians did.
Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument makes an excellent day trip from Denver, with 14 miles of trail to wander. Activities take place at the visitor center and the 1878 Hornbek Homestead. Bring a cooler of cold drinks and lots of sunscreen, because the Petrified Forest Loop involves very little shade. Learn from our mistake and do it counterclockwise from the parking lot, so the shade comes at the end when you long for it most.
Unprotected till 1969
Until 1969, when President Richard Nixon made it a national monument, Florissant’s treasures were still not protected. Doug, my husband, remembers coming over from Colorado Springs, where he often spent summer vacations. He had to explain to the children that he was probably one of the despoilers, the people who picked up fossils and brought them home. Oh, the shame.
What really lingers in the mind about visiting the Florissant Fossil Beds is the effect it had on our kids’ imaginations. The smallest piece of shale or petrified wood became reason to stop and poke and think about the far distant past, when dinosaurs even older than their parents roamed the earth.
Lisa Everitt is a freelance writer who lives in Arvada. Contact her at lisa@well.com.
The details
The Visitors Center at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. Visit nps
.gov/flfo for information and schedules of guided hikes and ranger programs, or call 719-748-3253.
To look at some of the Florissant fossils, visit “Stone Lace: The Fragile World of Florissant Fossils,” the University of Colorado Museum’s online exhibit commemorating T.D.A. Cockerell’s expedition to the Florissant Fossil Beds in 1906-08: cumuseum.colorado.edu/exhibits/stonelace. Or visit the National Park Service’s fossil database at nps.gov./flfo.
Good chow: The Costello Street Coffee House (2679 W. U.S. 24, Florissant, 719-748-3567, costellostreetcoffeehouse.com.) serves three meals a day in the renovated 1885 McLaughlin House. Located right at the turnoff to the national monument, the restaurant offers exemplary pressed panini sandwiches (the Chuckwagon, Italian ham, salami and provolone, is $7.95), as well as homemade chocolates, lovely desserts and Silver Canyon coffee. Make sure you explore all the treasures on the ground floor, including newspapers that once covered the plank walls and pouches of tobacco with Territory of Missouri tax stamps. Open 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily.
