Tour the mammoth bone dig site near the Tri-Cities on Labor Day weekend
Tours of the mammoth dig site near the Tri-Cities have been scheduled for Labor Day weekend.
The bones of a mammoth who lived during the ice age are being dug out of an Eastern Washington hillside by the nonprofit MCBONES research center.
Cost to tour the site is $10, with no charge for children 10 and under. Go to bit.ly/McBonesLaborDay23 to sign up and for more information.
Mid-Columbia Basin Old Natural Education Sciences Research Center Foundation will use the money raised for equipment and maintenance at the site. Work to unearth the mammoth bones and learn about the changing environment of the Tri-Cities area over thousands of years is done entirely by volunteers.
Tours set for Sept. 2, 3 and 4 will last about 90 minutes. They include a presentation about the history, discovery and findings at the site, plus a guided tour of the laboratory activities and displays of key specimens at the dig house on site.
Then visitors will spend time at the canyon dig site.
All the dirt taken from the hillside where the mammoth bones are being unearthed is collected in buckets and brought to a canopy-covered area a few yards away. There it goes through the “wet screen” process, where sediment is washed off.
The remains are then examined to find small objects, such as the wing of a beetle, the tooth of a ground squirrel or a mollusk shell.
Changes in objects at different levels of the dig provide clues to past changes in climate conditions in Eastern Washington.
About the mammoth
The mammoth being unearthed appears to be a male, because bone growth plates take longer to fuse in males. He likely was about 40 years old when it died with a front leg growth plate still unfused.
The animal was large, likely standing 10 to 13 feet tall at the shoulder, making it bigger than modern day elephants.
During the ice age flood water backed up as it hit the narrow Wallula Gap to cover what is now the Tri-Cities. The dig site is at an elevation of about 1,060 feet, and floods may have been deep enough to reach the area about seven times.
The mammoth could have been drowned in the flood, and then the carcass could have been deposited on the hillside as waters receded.
The bones have been found relatively intact — the ribs somewhat jumbled, for example, but not scattered over a wide area.
This story was originally published August 27, 2023 at 6:01 PM.