Primitive Enterprises: April 2015

I was talking with my parents several months before I had spring break and they said that they wanted to do a rock trip to me. Kentucky is not too far of a drive from us (MI), so I decided to do research and plan the trip for there. That decision was also influenced by the fact that Kentucky has some of my favorite chert types, mainly hornstone. My mother had also found an awesome deal on tickets to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Unfortunately, several days prior to us leaving, a severe weather/flooding warning was given for regions of Kentucky. I was afraid that this would cause all of the rivers to be flooded and make it impossible for me to collect flint in streambeds. I was determined to look anyways.

The first day we drove to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY. It is just over the border from Cincinnati, Ohio. We had a fun time there, I saw some cool stuff.

Mastodon or mammoth bones, I cannot remember which.

I absolutely love chameleons, this one was trying to get on that grating above his head. He eventually gave up on trying that.

His friend was cool too.

This animatronic Utahraptor was disturbingly realistic.

If you want to visit the Creation Museum, visit the this link: Creation Museum . It is an informative, family-friendly, and thought-provoking museum that has well done exhibits.

That evening I met a local knapper named Frederick. We got to talk for over an hour and we traded materials, I got a bucket of Ft. Payne chert and I returned the gift with novaculite and a point. It was a pleasure meeting him!

Ft. Payne chert.

From there, the nearest place to look for chert was Muldraugh, where we were supposed to be able to find Muldraugh chert. I did not find any of that, however, I found another type of flint. As we were driving along, we saw a sign that said, "Blast sight 500 feet." Apparently, a construction crew was building a street across a field, but no one was there due to scattered rain showers during that day. In the sticky, nasty, wet clay, I managed to find Sonora hornstone. We didn't stay that long since we did not know if our presence at the site could have been an issue.

Isn't that stuff just beautiful?

The view from where we parked.

The area where I was finding the best pieces. That clay is as bad as it looks, about five pounds would stick to each shoe when you walked through it.

All that I found in the ten minutes we stayed.

This site wasn't super productive, although I do wish we had found more.

Next, we made our way to the town of Sonora, where more Sonora chert was said to occur. That area was quite flooded and I didn't find any, maybe next time. After that, we headed to Christian Co. where St. Genevieve hornstone was said to outcrop, according to several internet sources. We found a river near where I thought might be flint, but there wasn't a place where I could get down without trespassing. So I decided that I would ask the landowner for permission to collect chert. I knocked on the door and talked to the resident, who turned out to be a really nice guy and an artifact hunter. After chatting a little while, he told me some spots on his property that would be good places to look. Once we got down to the river, we were on a limestone shelf that had nodules of St. Genevieve hornstone eroding of it. The river was beautiful, and the flint was very high grade and in decently large pieces.

The first nodule I found. It made me a happy knapper for sure.

A cannonball-shaped nodule encased in the "parent" rock.

This picture shows what the site was like.

Me, posing with rocks.

A close up of a nodule.

More flint eroding out of the limestone. This piece was crappy so I left it.

After loading up there, we went to a spot we found on my last rock gathering trip. That location has a lot of flint but most of it has cracks, fossils, or other inclusions, so one has to check every piece thoroughly. I did find a couple of bucket's worth of nice pieces. Collecting here also meant that we had checked every specific lead that I had for western KY. Since we still had time left we decided to drive back to eastern Kentucky and look for Carter Cave chert.

After driving for the majority of a day, we made it to the area that where Carter Cave chert outcrops. It took us a while to find a spot where we could park and get down in the stream bed. Soon, I started finding small to medium sized pieces of Carter Cave chert. I was so excited! Carter Cave is a rare and desirable material to knap, so I felt pretty blessed to find it.

A shot of the gravel bar.

Posing with the largest piece I found, which was a great quality too.

Checking rocks with potential.

Here is the total haul. I did well on this trip, especially when one considers that there was flooding going on and I was there only Wednesday-Sunday.