Andrew Harrelson still has a few foggy memories of the day his parents came home with a woolly mammoth tusk strapped to the back of a four-wheeler. “This big, old log-looking thing,” recalled Harrelson, who was about 3 years old at the time, growing up in the Norton Sound village of White Mountain. “I had no clue what it was until they told me.”
Andrew knew it must be important. His mother, Luann Harrelson, had spotted the 79-pound fossil that day in the gritty, strange-smelling muck of Fish River and posed her son for a Polaroid beside it.
That was 1992.
On Sunday, Andrew made a discovery of his own at precisely the same river bend just two miles outside the village.
Peppered across northern Alaska, tusks of the extinct species range in age from 12,000 to 400,000 years old and advertise for as much as $75 per pound on the resale market. Here is how a mother and son each made the discovery of a lifetime, 20 years and 10 feet apart.
A bend in the river
Once the site of an Inupiat fish camp, White Mountain is a community of 200 people about 60 miles from Nome. Every spring it balloons into an Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race checkpoint as dog teams park on the still-frozen Fish River.
Luann Harrelson grew up there. As a child, she said, villagers sometimes traveled to the river bend 2 miles from home to collect permafrost for ice cream.
“It would stink, like something was rotting in that mud,” she said.
In the early 1990s, after Luann had begun dating her future husband, Daniel Harrelson, the couple went for a boat ride in search of trout. They anchored at the well-known bend where villagers had previously found mammoth teeth.
“I think at one point, thousands of years ago, it must have been a mud hole or something that animals got stuck in and then died in it,” Daniel Harrelson said. “Everything froze in there and then slowly, over time, thaws out a little bit year by year.”
With the fishing finished and their young daughter asleep in the boat, Luann’s job was to hoist up the anchor. As she prepared to leave she saw an unusual shape about 10 feet below the surface. A piece of wood maybe. But it looked too smooth. There were no knots or branches.
Curious and suspecting that they had found a fossil, Daniel motored the family home and returned for a better look. Leaning halfway out of his boat, he fished the blue-black tusk free using a rake and a rope.
“Within an hour, he came back with the tusk on the back of a four-wheeler and said, ‘Hey, look at your piece of wood,’ ” Luann said.
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