Local geologist Curt Talbot to speak next week

WORLAND – Worland resident and geologist Curt Talbot will be speaking at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Washakie County Library located at 1019 Coburn Ave., in Worland and at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Ten Sleep Senior Center located at 204 2nd St., In Ten Sleep. His discussions at both places are sponsored by the Washakie County Libraries.

During his discussions he will begin talking about how the Big Horn Mountains at one time in history were once 22,000 feet in elevation and how the changes have affected the local area and many other areas throughout the years. He will also present rocks and fossils that he has found throughout the area and around the world. "I worked and hunted fossils in Morocco, Russia, Europe and other places. Stuff I find comes from all over the world," Talbot stated.

People who attend will be able to bring in their fossils and rocks to be identified and aged. He explained that it's hard to know if someone has a fossil, unless you know what you are looking for and knowing the age of the fossil depends on where the fossil was found. "Basically you know how old the fossils are by knowing the age of the rocks in which they occur. Some only occur in one age and some you have to look at the rock and see what the age is," he said.

Talbot has been interested in geology from an early age and although "retired" he still enjoys working as a geologist in every aspect of the word. "I am a geologist, I've always been involved in geology, I started working in geology as a scout years ago and as I grew up, I enjoyed it, did it in undergraduate school and graduate school," he stated.

Talbot worked for many years in many different roles, many of them at the same time. He taught at colleges, grade, middle and high schools. "I taught geology, hydrology, engineering, mathematics and teacher education classes. I've taught for Northwest College, University of Maine, University of Wyoming and some others along the way just single classes here and there," he said.

He continues teaching for schools to this day and offers his services for free to schools across the country. "I take them one classroom at a time based on what the teacher needs. Take in exactly what the teacher wants and talk about that area to go along with what they are doing in school. For instance, in Cheyenne I did 32 classrooms last year in a week. I would do one, maybe in the library and then they would bring another class to me or if I am in one class I will move to another class maybe. But I did 12 different schools in that week," Talbot explained.

Fossil Hunting

Many times while teaching the students, Talbot takes them out fossil hunting. He explained that many adults are conditioned that certain places don't have fossils and enjoys showing people that fossils are everywhere. "I had an opportunity to teach in a school just outside of Dover, Delaware. The teachers said, 'well that's nice, you come from where there are a lot of fossils but there are no fossils here.' I said I bet you that there are. I went to the geology department for the state and I said OK where can I take kids to get fossils? They told me to take them where they had dug that canal. They dug a canal across the state, so that during the war, World War II, the ships could come up and be protected by land. When they dug the canal they threw all the dirt to one side, so we went down to the dirt on the one side and we were finding samples of fossils that were anywhere from 60 to 90 million years old and the kids had a blast and the teacher had to redo her whole idea about fossils," he said.

"I was teaching in a school in Cheyenne. They had me teach in each of the classrooms, I'd been through about four of them. It was lunch time so I ate in the cafeteria so I could visit with the kids and know what's going on. In the middle of the lunch a little kid comes running in 'I found a fossil, I found a fossil.' The teachers wouldn't let her talk to me for a while and then eventually they let her come by and sure enough she had a fossil 330 million years old, coral. See the school is built on granite, so the argument is that there are no fossils there, it's all granite and here comes this little girl with one. Because she wasn't set in the belief that it couldn't be there. Sure enough she found one," he added.

People have a hard time finding fossils because they are bypassing the little ones in search of the big ones, Talbot said. "I have a hard time getting people to conceive that the reason that they are not seeing them is because they are looking for the big guys, but if you are always looking for the big things, you miss the little things," he stated.

Finding Wells

As a geologist Talbot has assisted in the drilling of thousands and thousands of both water and oil wells across the country, his most famous water well was for Cowley. "I get paid to find artesian water and provide artesian water to farmers, ranchers, businesses and towns. My most famous well is the artesian well that I brought in for Cowley. Years ago Cowley was getting their water from the canal. They had put two up (wells), but they (wells) had failed. I said, give me a chance at it, so I talked the mayor into applying for a grant and I picked a spot and said drill here. We drilled down and we got artesian water that came up over the top of the rig, it was cool. And then we got another grant to fund a pipe line from there down to town," Talbot stated.

I do oil wells too, I like oil wells as well, don't get me wrong but oil wells are sort of like, you don't think that you are helping anyone in particular. With a water well, when you do it you know that it's going to benefit someone that you know. Oil wells may be helping someone somewhere else but water is helping a person right there or a town right there or a ranch right there, Talbot explained.

Geology today is much different than when Talbot started. In Talbot's day everything was rolled into one and now everything is specialized. "When I became a geologist the mining, the water, all the different parts of it were in one thing. They were all part of the same degree and you got the degree and you could do anything. Now geohydrology is one thing, mining is another, petroleum is another and engineering is another. It's all separated out," he stated.