- Grays Harbor (Wikipedia)
Grays Harbor is an estuarine bay located 45 miles (72 km) north of the mouth of the Columbia River, on the southwest Pacific coast of Washington state, in the United States. It is a ria, which formed at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels flooded the Chehalis River. The bay is 17 miles (27 km) long and 12 miles (19 km) wide. The Chehalis River flows into its eastern end, where the city of Aberdeen stands at that river’s mouth, on its north bank, with the somewhat smaller city of Hoquiam immediately to its northwest, along the bayshore. Besides the Chehalis, many lesser rivers and streams flow into Grays Harbor, such as the Hoquiam River and Humptulips River. A pair of low peninsulas separate it from the Pacific Ocean, except for an opening about two miles (3 km) in width. The northern peninsula, which is largely covered by the community of Ocean Shores, ends in Point Brown. Facing that across the bay-mouth is Point Chehalis, at the end of the southern peninsula upon which stands the town of Westport.
- 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.
