Susie: So, my mom is from Casper, Wyoming, and her father, Ernest Stanley, was a geologist. He's from Nebraska, so he's a western guy. My uncle Bud, his brother, was like a real cowboy. He had cows and boots and rode around. He used to tell me every summer he would just [go] fishing and make pie. That's all I did, all summer. They were really cool people and Grandpa loved to show us around when we would come to Casper every summer. So, me and my brother and sister, we [would] come out for most of July and August, every year of our childhood, and stay at Grandma and Grandpa's house. And I think now that I'm a parent, I realize my parents probably just needed a break.

So, they took us there to be with Grandma and Grandpa and be out of their hair a little bit in the summer. But what I remember [about] it as a child, is that we would go up on the mountain with Grandpa and his pickup truck. We definitely didn't wear seat belts. We were in the back of the [truck in the] jump seat that faced backwards.

We would go back there, and he'd set us up with little tools and toothbrushes and bags; I think my brother was into it, he had actual rock tools, picks and stuff. And we'd go and just mess around the mountain all day. We'd pack a lunch, and we'd look for dinosaur bones. I think we genuinely never found a dinosaur bone of any kind.

But Grandpa was very patient, and he would identify every rock we brought. So, we would bring him a rock and he'd tell us what it was. Then he also meticulously labeled stuff. He would put a little Whiteout on the rock and then, with one of those skinny Sharpies, label where we found it and then what kind of rock it was and the date. It was the best.

So, we did that and then fished for minnows. Occasionally, we played putt putt golf. It was our whole summer. It was the best. Then when my Grandpa passed and then my Grandma passed, kind of recently, we cleaned out their house, and we found all the rocks. Some of them were real, like significant fossils, or real rocks that meant something that he had labeled in their house. But then a lot of them were just the rocks that we found as kids and that we'd labeled and he'd kept. So that was sweet. We have them all now.

Actually, in his life, he did find something, one time. He and some colleagues of his helped find a mammoth bone in Casper that's now in the Tate Geological Museum at Casper [College].

They found a part of a mammoth and then it was a pretty big complete mammoth. It's in the Tate Museum and I think they had offers to send it elsewhere outside of Wyoming for it to a bigger museum, you know, like the field in Chicago or something.

And they said no, they wanted it to be there. It was their mammoth. So, it's there still. [After] my grandpa passed, we all made donations to the Tate Museum. So, his name's on a mammoth femur.

Note: The transcript above has been condensed from its original audio recording to improve the flow and readability of the story.