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ON A WET SPRING MORNING in a plywood shed along the Big Springs Creek, Dr. Mike Voorhies and his wife, Jane, imagine the world under their feet.
It is a world built by layers of time. Some time can be forgotten, but not this paleontological time. It is waiting – waiting to be revealed by those who will simply dig.
When he was a child, Mike found a 12-million-year-old camel tooth along this stream near Orchard in northern Antelope County. Now more than 60 years later he returns for months at a time to that same magical spot of his first fossil discovery. Each spring and summer morning, he awakens with his digging tools, and Jane, by his side.
Depending on the day’s work, his tools might be a shovel, a horse-hair brush or a team of paleontology interns from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Whatever the tools, there’s only one place that Nebraska’s most recognized fossil hunter wants to be. It’s here in his home county of his home state.
The “shed” is summer quarters for Mike and Jane and is retreat from the city life of their Lincoln home.
Little more than a roofed plywood enclosure with a door and eight windows (including one skylight), it has what they need, and according to Mike and Jane, is the most luxurious field camp they’ve ever had.
“Jane and I spent the first two years of our married life in the summers living out of the back of a station wagon, visiting one ranch after another here in Northeast Nebraska, just walking out the little canyons, and scrambling up the creek banks and checking out every little gleam of rock exposure,” Mike said.
Mike and Jane have become honored heroes in his hometown. Inside the shed, a newspaper clipping taped to the window ledge above a desk shows Mike and Jane riding in a convertible as grand marshals of Orchard’s celebration of its founding 125 years ago. They have a bed, shelves to store supplies, a sink for washing dishes, a kitchen table, a gas kitchen stove and a coal stove that belonged to Mike’s parents. Mike’s doodles and sayings illuminate the exposed wood in permanent marker.
As a child growing up in Orchard, Mike’s mom and dad encouraged him to explore. The cool water of the Big Springs Creek made it a favorite summer getaway for Mike, his parents, and his two sisters. There was a commercial fish farm here. Though the business and the old character who ran it are both gone, the fish ponds still remain.
Cottonwoods, elms and willows make a canopy over Mike and Jane’s shed, their artesian well, a one-hole outhouse and their solar shower. A fire pit near the creek reveals a recent cookout.
Water from the underground Ogallala Aquifer feeds the creek that cuts switchbacks across the ground, revealing the layers of time that Mike loves to explore.
The top layer is the recent black soil made from generations of dead decaying trees and critters. Below is a gravelly bed that washed down from the Rocky Mountains 3 million years ago. Below is an older ledge of sandstone, then a layer of silt and finally, at the bottom, sand from ancient streams that meandered across the area.
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Mike scans the eroding creek bank as he walks along deer trails and across a timber plank bridge. There is no telling what secrets this ground holds. Mike filled the space between his childhood bed and bedroom floor with Indian arrowheads, rhinoceros bones, stones, zebra teeth and other ancient finds that he gathered here. Many of his treasures made their way back to this creek because his parents let him keep only what could fit under his bed.
One treasure that didn’t get away is just up the road, and it continues to give Mike reason to use his digging tools. On summer breaks from college, Mike and Jane often would set out to this region of Nebraska. During a summer fossil-hunting expedition here in 1971, Mike was poking around a ravine on Melvin Colson’s pasture ground. Mike saw a skull eroding out of a volcanic ash bed. He brushed around the skull and soon realized there was more here to discover than one man could do in a summer. He left the fossil and marked the location for further research. Six years later, now as an employee of the university, he returned with a team of university paleontology interns and began to probe into the hillside.
What Mike and his team discovered was a watering hole and its animals from 12 million years ago. A volcano 1,000 miles away in present-day Idaho had erupted, and the wind-born ash suffocated and entombed camels, sabre-toothed deer, rhinos, three-toed horses and other animals that gathered there to drink. At least one rhino was carrying a baby in its womb. That first fossilized bone that Mike saw protruding from the ash layer six years earlier turned out to be the skull of a rhino calf still attached to its body.
Mike continued excavations on the site through the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1991, the site opened to the public as Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park, a partnership between the Nebraska State Historical Society and the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. Today, a giant steel shed called the Hubbard Rhino Barn provides shelter to Mike’s greatest fossil find. Generations of paleontologists will be digging here long after Mike is gone.
What makes Ashfall Fossil Beds so special is that it is the only place in the world where people can see three-dimensional fossils still intact. One striking set of fossils shows a rhino mother with calf nestled next to her where they both died.
Each day during the busy summer tourism season, Park Superintendent Rick Otto surveys the license plates of the cars in the parking lot and finds that visitors come from across Nebraska and from dozens of other states. The park is a national treasure, literally. It’s been designated a National Natural Landmark.
