Walking down the canyon we are flanked by grey polished limestone walls and big views of the Armargosa Valley below us. Circular white indentations cluster the walls like flower designs on cheap 70s wallpaper.  

These crystalized swirls are anything cheap, nor from the 70s, they are Gastropods from the Mississippian era that date back to around 350-400 million years ago.   The brail readings that I get when I lightly sweep my hands over these fossils is a feeling of distant ancient history documented by a geologic footprint of community and diversity. 

Its always interesting to see a few fossils but imagine the floor and walls to your left and right are covered in these ammonites, welcome to Fossil Snail Canyon. Some more information can be found on Wikipedia:  Here is some more information about the metamorphosis: 
Due to their free-swimming and/or free-floating habits, ammonites often happened to live directly above seafloor waters so poor in oxygen as to prevent the establishment of animal life on the seafloor. When upon death the ammonites fell to this seafloor and were gradually buried in accumulating sediment, bacterial decomposition of these corpses often tipped the delicate balance of local redox conditions sufficiently to lower the local solubility of minerals dissolved in the seawater, notably phosphates and carbonates. The resulting spontaneous concentric precipitation of minerals around a fossil, a concretion, is responsible for the outstanding preservation of many ammonite fossils

On a beautiful February morning, Heather and I opt out of watching the super bowl for some canyoneering in a remote section of the National Park called the Funeral mountains. 

The Funeral Range is home to many canyons that have some interesting challenges with big views and a lot of fossils to see in the rock. 

Fossil Snail canyon is a relatively new canyon that was discovered by Scott Swaney and crew in the early months of 2016.  

A few more groups have been here recently but there are a lot of canyons to choose from here which make this range a nice one to visit. 

Heather and I got an early start for the approach hike which consists of a 4 mile approach, a .7 mile hike up the mountain, a traverse, and about a mile of down canyoneering with another 4 miles back to the car. 

If you enjoy desert wilderness hikes along with dry canyoneering in seldom visited places, than this range is for you. 

We made the ridge and started to notice slabs of limestone full of Ammonites.  These are the modern snail but with some added character to them. 

There was one that we found that looked like a Kosmoceras which had spikes on its shell and might have been from a later time. 

Once we got to the top we took the bypass route that is mentioned by Scott Swaney on ropewiki.com 

This took us across a scree pile and up to a ridge that we traversed and found another talus and scree pile to gain. 

The vista views were incredible and the weather was perfect!  We made it to the top and descended down into the canyon. 

Once we got down we had lunch and started to make our way down into the canyon. 

The fossils were not only present but there were so many of them that they were, at times, the rock itself. Gastropods were crystalized and frozen in time from a once ocean floor over a 1/4 of a billion years ago!

This is before the big popular dinosaurs where multiple oceans and ice ages dominated the planet. 

I am willing to bet that the actual ground that we were walking on was positioned around another section of the planet, possibly near Africa, and through tectonic restructuring, the continents moved here and the funeral mountains uplifted to where they are today.  

We encountered around 10 raps that were upto around 140ft in length. We brought a 210 ft rope, a 90ft rope, and a 70ft rope.  We also had some webbing but the anchored appeared to be in a good condition at the time that we went. Your experience might be different. 

Please bring extra webbing and replace the existing webbing.  The sun will bleach and rot the webbing which can create a big problem if one of the anchors webbing material rips apart. 

We came down to the bottom of the canyon and we had our four mile hike back to the car with a lot of sunlight left. We headed back and made it to the car in around 8 hours time. 

This was a very unique canyon and I am privileged to have so many amazing places around us that are all not to far away. I highly recommend Fossil Snail Canyon for a nice day trip. 

The raps were straightforward and although the hike is long, it is not too difficult to navigate and find your way to some fascinating paleo history and beautiful Death Valley Canyoneering.