- Racehorse Landslide Fossil Beds- big rockfall; trail is brushed out (nwgeology.wordpress.com)
George Mustoe (WWU Geology Department) visited the famous Chuckanut fossils in the Racehorse Fossil Beds a few days ago. He sends a report on trail access. (If you aren’t familiar with this place up the Nooksack east of Bellingham, this is the site of the 2009 landslide that exposed the 11-inch-wide foot prints of the 300 pound, 7-foot-tall flightless bird Diatryma, and a host of other animal tracks and plant fossils from the 55-million-year-old Chuckanut Formation. Directions follow George’s trail report. There are many reports on this website about the fossils and the landslide.
- Honeycomb weathering in sandstone of the Chuckanut Formation (nwgeology.wordpress.com)
Honeycomb weathering is found in many rock types, including granite and rhyolite, as well as sandstone. It occurs in humid and desert environments, cold and hot. Honeycomb weathering produces intricate and highly photogenic structures in seaside exposures of Chuckanut Formation sandstone…
- Blowers Bluff, Whidbey Island (nwgeology.wordpress.com)
This is the second installment in the series of field trips to glacial and interglacial stratigraphy on Whidbey Island. The thick stack of geologic strata at Blowers Bluff are spectacular! Here is colorful and intricately stratified sediment from Whidbey interglacial times right above the beach, overlain sequentially by the Possession glacial till and glaciomarine drift, thin Olympia interglacial deposits, Vashon advance outwash (Esperance ‘sand’), Vashon till and, at the cliff top, the Everson glaciomarine drift. However, the sequence is in places deeply eroded, with Vashon sediments sitting directly on Whidbey, or even right at beach level. Refer back to the table listing Pleistocene glacial and interglacial units on Whidbey Island.
- I do not know (and I am not affiliated with) Dave Tucker, but I highly recommend his book and block. It was an article from Tucker that introduced me to the fossils near Racehorse Creek, starting a long sequence of adventures for which I am grateful.
- 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.