Boundaries
August 2007

The Future of Stone Rose
by Jack Nisbet

Many residents of Upper Columbia country have experienced the wonders of Stone Rose, a fossil site located above downtown Republic. Young and old, we have split pieces of the bedded rock that spills out of the road cut and seen the jumble of sticks, seeds, leaves, and odder imprints trapped inside. We have heard about the Eocene Epoch, around 50 million years before the present, and listened to helpful interpreters explain the warm upland climate and rich forest that once covered our landscape. We have tried to imagine how parts of that forest filtered down to the bottom of an ancient lakebed, to be covered with fine silt and volcanic ash, then over time pressed into the colorful shale we are cracking open. We have stood in the interpretive room to have our discoveries identified and watched school children, curious travelers, and fossil enthusiasts from all over the world gawk at the astonishing displays on the wall.

With each visit the mystery is reborn. Stone Rose is famous for its early representations of the Maple and Rose family, including several flowering shrubs related to modern species that remain familiar to every back yard and forest patch in the Inland Northwest -- mountain ash and spirea, ninebark and hawthorn, raspberry and cherry. Other fossils leaves like hazelnut, currant, and birch seem just as familiar. But the list of possible finds also includes an assortment of broadleaf trees you would expect to see in the Eastern woodlands, including not only maples but also beech, Carolina bay, witch hazel, Virginia willow, mulberry, sassafras, apple, and dogwood. This is not to mention a series of exotic trees represented today only in Asia, ranging from Chinese golden larch, Chinese yew, and Chinese elm to ginko, dawn redwood, and umbrella pine.

The lake bottom ooze also preserved fish parts of various shapes and sizes, and insect remains that look exactly the same as the ones we battle today: grasshoppers, click and leaf beetles, leaf-footed and stink bugs, ants and leaf-cutting bees, and, most abundantly, march flies that must have swarmed over open water after a hatch like a fly fisherman's dream. Given the difficulty for a human mind to grasp a span of 50 million years, the way these familiar crawling bugs collapse time through the epochs becomes all the more amazing. Although many generations of local tribal people undoubtedly knew about these abundant fossils, the first recorded scientific collection of plant imprints from the Republic area was made in 1902. The Stone Rose site wasn't officially described until three decades later, and only brief accounts of the deposit had been written by 1977, when a few Seattle collectors drove over to have a look. They have been returning to Republic steadily ever since.

Wes Wehr, who was associated with the University of Washington's Burke Museum, was especially taken with the setting. Often accompanied by young explorers like Kirk Johnson and Michael Spitz, he began to systematically catalog and describe their wealth of fossil finds. Repeated visits allowed Wehr and his cohorts to develop close relationships with local families, including the Koepkes and Jenkinses; it was this human element that created the unique blend of academic research and public interpretation that the Stone Rose Interpretive Center maintains today. First directed by Lisa Barksdale and currently under Catherine Brown, the center is approaching its 20th anniversary as an institution. With help and guidance from many sources, its reach has grown far beyond the basic checklist that visitors take up into the quarry.

Collections manager Karl Volkman has been cracking rocks at Stone Rose since he was eight years old; his work both in the field and with the collections allow him to stretch familiar questions into a comprehensive story of ongoing research. Volkman places the ancient lake in northern Ferry County into context with similar lakes that trailed north into British Columbia and have revealed their own complexes of fossil plants: Princeton, Quilchena, Stump Lake, and Joseph Creek. He demonstrates the geologic forces that lifted the land around Republic up to an elevation of around 4000 feet during the Eocene Epoch, and since have relaxed to let the San Poil drainage subside to half that. He points to a solid block of solidified mud, bristling with sticks and bull rushes, and describes how a careful study of wave action has determined that the current fossil site apparently lay near the middle of the ancient lake.

A decade ago the Denver Museum of Natural History, the Burke Museum, and the Smithsonian Institute combined forces to conduct a systematic dig from the top to the bottom of the lakebed. Participating scientists laid out a large square and worked their way down slowly, cataloguing each identifiable form of life in each layer as they descended. Although they could not determine exactly how much time any given layer of silt represented, they generally agreed that they dug through about 2 million years worth of deposition. Everyone was very surprised at how little variation there was in the plant life from the oldest to the youngest layer -- that part of the Eocene apparently maintained a relatively stable climate for a very long period of time.

Core drillings carried out by the local gold mining industry have defined the margins of the fossil deposit, showing that as the Interpretive Center works its way back into the hillside, it will move toward the shoreline of the Eocene Lake. There, Volkman hopes, more evidence of the ancient forest will appear -- different kinds of trees and plants, perhaps frogs and salamanders, as well as fish, in time an occasional drowned mammal or fallen bird. That would be very exciting.

While scientists from institutions worldwide continue to study specific aspects of the Republic flora and fauna, director Catherine Brown makes it clear that Stone Rose will retain its independence as it pursues its stated mission of promoting both public and scientific interest concerning the early environment and geologic features of our region. She describes a comprehensive web site engineered by longtime Stone Rose supporter Jan Hartford, which will allow virtual study of the quarry's many riches. She envisions a new building that could locally house the growing collections. She and the board of trustees are looking for creative ways to dispose of the tons of overburden that will be have to be removed to expose the fossil-bearing shale as it angles downward and toward the edge of the primordial lake. There are always new issues to deal with, and always the possibility of some new species bursting forth from the stone.

The main exhibit at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture this summer features Sue, the famous Tyrannosaurus rex from eastern Montana. A small side exhibit shows fossils from the Inland Northwest that represent all ages of time, both long before and long after the dinosaur epochs. The Eocene portion of this second exhibit features a sampling of some of the most beautiful discoveries from Stone Rose, including the extinct mallow flower Florissantia as well as insects, leaves, and a spectacular fish. Within one of the leaves lies the distinct flight feather of a robin-sized bird, elegantly mirrored in both sides of a split stone.

Karl Volkman points out that while a handful of other downy bird feathers have been discovered in Republic, this is the only clear flight feather of an Eocene bird that is known from Stone Rose, or practically anywhere else. The feather has an interesting little figure very near its tip, a white wrinkle on black background that looks very much like the pattern of color on some shorebird's wing. Some day, Volkman hopes, we might get to know exactly what kind of bird dropped that feather. It would be a discovery that connected us further into the past, and a way to help us see where we stand now.

Illustration by Emily Nisbet. One of the signature fossils from Stone Rose is Florissantia quilchenensis, a beautiful extinct flower of the cocoa tree family.

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones.

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