- Snohomish County (snohomishcountywa.gov)
Snohomish County is located on Puget Sound, between Skagit County to the north and King County (and Seattle) to the south. Covering 2,090 square miles, it is the 13th largest county in total land area in Washington. Snohomish County’s varied topography ranges from saltwater beaches, rolling hills and rich river bottom farmlands in the west to dense forest and alpine wilderness in the mountainous east. Glacier Peak, at 10,541 feet, is the highest point in Snohomish County and one of the highest in Washington State. Sixty-eight percent of the county land area is forest land, 18% is rural, 9% is urban/city and 5% is agricultural.
- Dave Tucker (geologist) (Wikipedia)
David Samuel Tucker is a geologist, author, and union organizer in Washington state. He is a research associate at Western Washington University. He was an instructor at North Cascades Institute, and the director of the Mount Baker Volcano Research Center (now closed). He writes the blog Northwest Geology Field Trips, a blog aimed at laypeople detailing where to find interesting geology in the Pacific Northwest. In 2015, he published a popular book on Washington geology, Geology Underfoot in Western Washington. He resides in Bellingham, Washington. In the 1980s he worked as a mountaineering guide in the Cascades, Mexico, and South America.
- Racehorse Creek (wa100.dnr.wa.gov)
Racehorse Creek, a small waterway near Deming, Washington, is a must-see destination for fossil aficionados. The area is known for its fossil beds—50 million-year-old leaf fossils, including sycamore and swamp cypress, await dedicated collectors. In addition to abundant fossils, the creek boasts the impressive Racehorse Falls, a 169-foot-tall multi-stage waterfall that’s a short 0.6 mile hike to reach.
- Blanchard Mountain was once covered in a massive sandstone deposit called the Chuckanut Formation. Over time, this sandstone unit grew to be more than 10,000 feet thick, trapping many fossils of ancient plant and animal species.
- Chuckanut Formation (Wikipedia)
The Chuckanut Formation in northwestern Washington (named after the Chuckanut Mountains, near Bellingham), its extension in southwestern British Columbia (the Huntingdon Formation), and various related formations in central Washington (including the Swauk, Roslyn, Manastash, and Chumstick) are fluvial sedimentary formations of Eocene age, deposited from about 54 million years ago to around 34 million years ago. The nature of the deposits and included plant fossils indicate a low-lying coastal plain with a subtropical climate; the nature of the sediments indicates metamorphic sources in northeastern Washington.
