Ashes, ashes, they all fall down!

 OK, I know that was a bad joke. But... there are ashes... and people ask what we do with them, and we dump them into a pit, so they fall...

Yeah. Bad joke. I tried.

But anyway, people do ask where all of the ash goes. After all, we remove maybe the equivalent of a ton sometimes. 

Well, here is a hint: we don't have a bulldozer attached to the bobcat. It is just a big bucket. So you may gather that its not exactly being used to take down the hill or dig for fossils or anything. If you look very, very closely you will see a platform underneath the bobcat's wheels. You'll then notice that that platform leads the garage door that is conveniently behind the bobcat. If you were to go outside the Rhino Barn and up the trail to the visitor's center, you would see tracks leading out of the barn and off behind one of the buildings.

But where does it all go?

Well, at Ashfall, we face a slight problem while excavating the fossils. If you were to look at the ash underneath a microscope, it would look exactly like glass shards. There is a very, very good reason for that. That reason is that it IS glass shards. The ash hasn't been altered since it blew out of the volcano 11.83 million years ago.

Because it hasn't been altered, it is almost as dangerous. While it isn't hot or poisonous, it wasn't when it killed all of the animals here, either. And once it has time to dry out in the sun, the wind has the potential to catch it and blow it back in our faces. The building is protection enough, but we have to remove the ash to see the animals. So what do we do with it? Well, no industry wants it, because its not pure enough to use as cleaner (and ash, we found out recently, is too abrasive to clean anything but cast iron. That kind of destroys the profit in it... that's why it doesn't get used in cleaners anymore.) A few people will buy little vials of it as souvenirs, and some pet owners buy slightly larger amounts to clean exotic pets (yeah, that's new to me, too...) Occasionally a school teacher gets a decent sized amount for a science class and leaves a donation as a thank you. But none of that gets rid of the amount of it we have nearly as fast as we remove more.

Well, we dump the rest of it. But we dump it in a place on the side of the park that the wind won't blow it back into the park, thus keeping it away from our lungs.

But where is that pit? 

Well, today I found it. If you follow our trail around the perimeter of the park and look between two hills on your left between stops 8 and 9, you'll see a white pile between them where the wind can't get to it. And only one thing in this park is that color. Our ash pile. So it is out there, if anyone ever finds a use for it or wants to use it for chemical analysis or something else science-y. Otherwise, it is really going to confuse geologists a couple of centuries down the road.