It can be pretty entertaining to find odd little things lying lost or discarded while hiking around the lakebed at Folsom. It may be some object that’s fairly easy to identify — like the various pairs of sunglasses lost overboard by summertime boaters; and then there are the mysterious pieces, old and new. Are they of historical interest or just useless scraps? Have they been lying undiscovered for decades or just a few months? Some questions may never be answered… but it’s still fun to speculate.
It took me an embarassingly long time to realize this (above) was a piece of styrofoam and not a skeletal fragment of some strange animal.
I believe this is some company logo meant to look like like a fish or a shark; the “eye” in one corner is actually a hole, and I can imagine it hanging from a keychain, but I haven’t been able to identify it so I’m only guessing.
Glass bottles are always potential artifacts! On the other hand, it might not be very old — I don’t know enough about bottle shapes to tell.
Somebody’s probably wondering whatever happened to the lid of their pricey insulated coffee mug.
Just a stick tangled in some fishing line, hanging from a tree branch. It made me look twice! But it’s also a reminder that fishing line can be a serious problem to wildlife and the environment when not disposed of properly. I also should note that whenever I’m outdoors I try to leave nature as I found it. It pains me to see litter scattered on the ground, and I’m careful to pack out everything that I brought with me.
This has clearly been underwater for a long time! With all the pitting, it’s hard to read but I can make out “Patented” and a date — maybe 1947? These are the type of things I love to find and photograph.
You might recall seeing this skull on the blog a few days ago. I had photographed it from afar when I first spotted it on February 1st; so on our next trip, a little over a week later, I went back to get a closer look. (I obviously have a fascination for skulls — if it had been anything other than a skull, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.) I discovered the skull had fallen or had been moved and was now lying on the rock on the other side of the trail. I also set it upright for a better shot, below.
But that’s not the end of the skull’s story! Because as I was looking back over the photos I had taken in mid January, I realized I had passed along this very same stretch of trail, with great walls of granite rising on either side. And what should I see in my photo dated January 14 but that tiny plastic skull, hanging over my head on the end of a dead stick.
