The Iguanodon femur taller than a human? The giant three-toed tracks in sandstone slabs? “A rock hound heaven!” a visitor exclaims. Others gush: “My kids were amazed,” and “Cool museum, um, I mean shop.” Ottinger’s first encounter with dinosaurs was as a 12-year-old, at a museum in Denver his family visited during a stopover on a train ride to Oregon. “I went straight to look at the dinosaur fossils,” Ottinger says. “My sister, mom and brother looked around and said, ‘Let’s go.’ Mother wanted me to see the rest of the museum, but I didn’t see anything else in the museum that day.” Ottinger returned to the Colorado Plateau decades later in the mid 1950s, after a fellow enthusiast at a rock and gem show in Idaho showed him a uranium sample from Kane Creek, Utah. By then Ottinger was already an accomplished
amateur geologist – better known as rock hound. With a few weeks to burn before starting a new job with a lumber company in northern California, he and his wife brought the family to Moab to see what luck they might find in the area. A camping trip in the area turned into employment with a mining company. At turns a miner, a prospector with numerous claims in the area, a skilled mechanic, an imaginative naturalist, talented photographer, and allaround savvy businessman, Ottinger became one of the first of what is now the classic Moab entrepreneur. Lin’s son Sonny Ottinger remembers prospecting with uranium mining legend Charles Steen; he describes a childhood spent freely roaming the streambeds and mesas around Moab. “Mom would take us up to Sand Flats road and tell us to go play,” he says. “As we played around, we found things.”
Top left: Lin Ottinger with his mother, his wife, and his five children in the 1950s. [Courtesy Ottinger family] Top right: Lin, with his son, Sonny Ottinger, in August 2017, in front of the Moab Rock Shop at 600 N. Main Street. [Photo by Murice D. Miller] MOAB AREA REAL ESTATE MAGAZINE – September 2017
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