Local father and son bond searching for artifacts

Soon-to-be five-year-old Tate Wolff is quite an accomplished archaeologist.

One day a few weeks ago, the youngster was feeling pretty down. His father Tyler, a local rancher, had just had a calf die, and he was taking it rather hard.

Wolff decided he would take his son on a short shed hunting trip. He hoped that if they found an antler or two, it would cheer his son up. Instead, the duo found an old stone knife point. Tate was excited.

"I can look all day and not find a thing, but bring Tate along and he's my good luck charm," Tyler Wolff told the Eagle.

Wolff said he now has thirteen old stone artifacts consisting mostly of knife points, spear heads and scrapers in his collection.

"It takes an awful long time to find your first one," he said, "but then your eyes get trained and you find a lot more of them."

Apparently Tate's eyes are trained.

Wolff said he and Tate find about two or three artifacts per year now. He doesn't know a lot of history on any of the pieces or the age of them, and admits he doesn't know how to tell. He believes that most of what they find is originally from North Dakota.

"Most of it is a chocolate brown color and there's not a lot of flint around here," he said.

Flint is a hard, tough chemical or biochemical sedimentary rock that breaks with a conchoidal fracture. It is a form of crystalline quartz that is typically called "chert" by geologists. Flint is highly resistant to weathering and is often found as pebbles or cobbles along streams and beaches. Early people who used flint to make tools often prospected these areas to find nicely shaped pieces of flint for making specific tools.

The pair have their best luck when they search the sand bars along Boxelder Creek on the ranch after the creek runs each spring.

"Most of them we find from the Boxelder water shed. I did find one out riding up along the Long Pines though. It's pretty cool to find them, but I hit my head a lot looking down," Wolff said.

It all started for Wolff when he was a young boy himself. His great-grandparents found a couple of old stone points at Powderville and he was fascinated by them as a youngster, spending hours on end looking at them. Now, he is happy to share that interest with his son, who is not only excited about finding them, but is also pretty darn good at it.

"I try to take Tate down as much as I can to the sand bars cause we both like looking. We only spend probably ten minutes here and there looking for them. Once in a while, I'll take the family out for an afternoon walk. I'm always looking . . ."

Currently, Tyler and Tate get away about once per week to go look for artifacts.

"It's a good break from being in the tractor," Wolff said.