Things of Beauty

So far, no one has asked me why I collect this stuff (and why our garage is filled with rocks waiting to be polished - or disposed of). Hard to explain really, but let me put it this way. I find the abstract patterns and designs in nature to be stunningly beautiful. It has been argued that nature is ultimately the inspiration for all art; certainly I find the variety of color and design I find on the beach to be as lovely as anything I have ever seen.

This rock, for example, with its subtle shades of color and striking web of black lines, is not so far from classic abstract expressionist art. In fact, I might take up a brush and try painting something like this.  Until then, however, I am content - delighted, in fact - that such beauty exists in so prosaic a setting as the cobble beach below my house.

Washington State Gemstone

I didn't know until recently that petrified wood is Washington State's official gemstone.  It makes sense: we have some wonderful sites for petrified wood around the state, most notably at Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park above the Columbia River near Vantage. There are many other sites as well, many accessible to the rockhound - and some, memorably, in people's back yards.

But to my knowledge, all of the best sites are scattered around Eastern Washington, many associated with lava flows and ash deposits from Washington's long volcanic history. There are far fewer really good sites on the western side of the Cascades. But for months I have found chunks of this black and brown petrified wood among beach cobbles here in Seattle (See August 25 post). I have found enough of them in fact, of very similar color and composition, that I can only think they are from a single source - somewhere north of here. (But as I have said many times, the glaciers that carved this area could have brought them from hundreds of miles away)

Still, it's always a treat to find them, though in their rough, surf-tumbled state, they are not always easy to recognize...

Home from the East

Opercula

I'm home from Sulawesi, but without any rocks. Most of my time there I was on the coast where everything is limestone and coral rubble. No chance of interesting minerals there. But although I came home without any rocks (and with lighter luggage than usual) I did stumble onto one interesting collectible - the "cat's eye"operculum.  These are the hard "doors" to some species of turban snails and they were common along the shoreline. They are graceful little things and - of course - I brought some home. Probably too soft to polish with stones, but I'll experiment.

Heading East - the FAR East...

Black jasper/agate, Puget Sound

I thought I would post one more local stone (from a Puget Sound beach) before I leave this weekend for Indonesia. It is a highly fractured, but rather lovely, agate-like piece, semi-transparent and hard.

My destination is the island of Sulawesi, and my mission is to document the life history of a unique bird that lives there - the Maleo.  But in the little reading I have done on the island, I have learned that it also has a complex geology including a mix-up of volcanics, and both ocean floor and continental  rocks.

I have no idea whether I'm likely to find any collectible rocks, but as always, I will keep an eye out... Back in a couple weeks.

Patterned Quartzite (?) and Petrified Wood, Olympic Peninsula

I set out this morning to look for a source of variolites, the polka-dotted rock I have posted about in the past, and which probably originates in the basalts of the Crescent Formation on the Olympic Peninsula. I tracked down a couple possible source areas - and found no evidence of variolites. In fact, I didn't find a single one, which is unusual - I have found them in a variety of locations along the Olympic coast. This would suggest that the source is somewhere further west than where I was looking today.  So another expedition is clearly required...

However, I did get some time to poke around the coast near Sequim, where I found - among many other things - these two beach cobbles: a stained quartzite (or Jasper?) and a handsome piece of petrified wood. Not bad for a quick beach walk.

Missed Opportunity

Owyhee Picture Jasper

I had big plans to head back to the Owyhee country in eastern Oregon this fall to search for more jasper. I had been there in the spring, but high water made access to some of the best collecting sites too difficult, so I promised myself to make an autumn trip.  Well, the rains have started, and autumn has arrived faster than I expected - and my schedule is now too full to allow a minimum three-day trip to the desert. I guess it will have to wait until next year.

These three fragments, polished chips from a piece I collected last spring, will remind me of what I'm missing: one of the greatest collecting locations in the Northwest.

What the Glacier Dragged In

Unknown Rock, Puget Sound beach

By now you will understand that patrolling the beaches of Puget Sound for unusual stones is one of my favorite spare-time activities. This rock helps explain why. I spent an all-too-short half hour on the beach recently, not finding anything special when this one caught my eye, full of stripes and marbling.  Agate, maybe?  Or something softer like travertine or diatomaceous earth?  I need to test the hardness.

Whatever it is, it is unlike anything I have ever found on the local beaches. Who knows where it's from? My hope, in fact, is that someone somewhere seeing these posted pictures will recognize the rocks from their part of the Northwest. It would be fun to know where the glaciers found them...

Brazilian Gravel Revealed

Unknown Jasper, Amazonian Gravels

As I mentioned in my previous post, I found some extraordinary rocks in the gravels used to line trails at a field camp in the Brazilian Amazon. I have now had a chance to tumble them for a week or so and reveal their color and structure.  As I suspected, they are stunning, full of stained veining like some of the best US picture-jaspers.

The raw pebbles were clearly river rocks - they had the characteristic rounding and light polishing that rocks get from natural tumbling - but no one seemed to know where the gravel was sourced.  A pity, since it is clearly a rich area for fine quality stone. More research is needed...

In the meantime, I have 20-30 very unusual additions to my collection.

POSTSCRIPT : After posting the above I sent an email to a contact in Brazil, hoping to get some details about the source for this miraculous gravel. To my surprise, I already heard back - this gravel is commercially available everywhere in Brazil.  Interesting - and surprising - but sadly, that fact alone doesn't get me any close to finding a source for the original stone!

Back from Brazil

Just back from a month in Brazil where, among other things, I was photographing rare giant armadillos (see here ) in the Pantanal. But, as always, I kept my head down, with an eye for interesting rocks - especially since Brazil is one of the most mineral-rich countries on the planet.

Well, not where I was. In fact, most places I visited (Amazon, Pantanal) are flat sedimentary basins with little or no bedrock visible - and frankly not even many rocks. Mud mud and sand, mostly. In fact, the best looking rocks I found were some jasper/chert (not sure which) mixed in with gravels used to line pathways in the Amazon!  I have no idea where the gravels came from - no one seemed to know - but some of them exhibited some striking color and pattern.

While I wait to see what the tumbler reveals, I thought I'd show this pebble I found on a Puget Sound beach a few months ago, a handsome, multi-colored rock of unknown provenance and composition. This is the joy, and the frustration of Puget Sound rockhounding: you find a rock like this, and then never see another. It could be from anywhere...

Meanwhile, stay tuned for shots of the Brazilian gravel. If I'm not mistaken, there could be some real winners from that pathway.

A Map of the World

Agate/Jasper, Puget Sound

Another pebble from the beaches near my home, this one reminds me of a slightly wobbly planet with golden continents surrounded by a deep blue ocean.  Hey, you've gotta have imagination.

Meanwhile, I leave Friday for a month in Brazil. No, not rockhounding, but you better believe I'll be keeping an eye out.

The Corner of the Eye

Petrified Wood,  Lincoln Park, Seattle

A walk on a beach used to be all about the view: not anymore.  Start me walking on a cobble beach, like so many here in Puget Sound country, and it's all I can do not to stare down at my feet as I walk. It's usually better to do this on my own, rather than impose my distractions on friends and family, who might wonder why I never look up...or speak...

Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to stop scouring the gravel for something interesting. In the great tradition of treasure-hunters and fishermen there is always the forlorn hope that something miraculous is about to happen: your pan will reveal a gold nugget, a massive fish will bite, or (in this case) a beautiful, unexpected stone will suddenly appear at your feet.

Consider this: there may be several million cobbles on a hundred yards of beach. So how do you train your eyes, and your reflexes, to ignore the multitudes in favor of the unique?  I have no idea. I look for bright color, of course, or a striking pattern. I'm guessing it was the latter of those that drew my eye to this thing, off to one side. No reds or blues to catch my attention, just an eye-catching irregularity that made it jump out.

There is a maxim in beach-rock-hunting : a dry rock is, by and large, an ugly rock. That's why it makes sense to patrol the water's edge, where the surf has dampened the rocks, revealing the true color and pattern of the otherwise gray shapeless cobbles that cover the beach. (You can also go on a falling tide, or better yet, a misty day.)  This one I liked it so much, even dry, that I couldn't wait for a wave, and simply gave it a quick lick - sanitation be damned!

This salty exercise revealed a small, slightly glassy agate-like stone, but with a distinctly non-agate structure.  Who knows what it is or, as always, where it originated?  But it's one I was delighted to find.

Beach Cannonballs

Concretion, Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington

Along many of the beaches of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, these striking stone eggs (and spheres and even weirder shapes) weather out of the siltstone cliffs. They are concretions, composed of cemented sediments that grow within softer existing strata. They sometimes form around hard objects: including other stones or in the most exciting cases, around fossil animals like crabs.

I found this one (about 9" tall) on a recent trip out to the straits, and I brought it home to break open with my grandson - with the hope that it would reveal something interesting inside. The first challenge, of course, was simply breaking the thing open. After failing to make a dent with my rock hammer, we resorted to copying our neighborhood crows...and tossed it off our deck onto the street.  Bingo!

It broke, of course, but we didn't find anything obvious inside. Too bad.  Still, I'm pretty sure Theo thought the coolest part was just busting it open... 

Broken open - no Fossils

Living Opal

Ammolite chip, Canada

Ammolite is a rare opal-like gem derived from fossilized Ammonites, found only in Western Canada.  No, I didn't find this on a Puget Sound beach: it was in my mother-in-law's estate.  She was a talented jewelery-maker, and had planned to make a necklace out of this remarkable stone.

I post it today just to show the stunning diversity of color and pattern to be found in the mineral kingdom.

Complex Stories

Banded Agate/Jasper, Olympic Peninsula

When I studied geology at the University of Washington, my favorite class was one called "Structure" in which we tried to piece together the sequence of events that have altered rocks and landscapes by reading the stories within them. If one continuous layer in a sedimentary rock is offset along a plane, for example, you could infer that a fault had shifted AFTER the deposition of the layers. (see the faulted jasper in my August 25 post). Sometimes, however, multiple events can overlap, creating a very confusing picture.

That's what's happening with this rock, which I found among beach cobbles on the Pacific Coast of the Olympic Peninsula. I'll call it an agate/jasper (or "jaspagate" as I've seen it written elsewhere) which is simply another name for a rock that has features of both: the transparency of agate and the opacity of jasper.  Whatever you want to call it, this small pebble seems to tell the story of fracture and fill: an existing red jasper was fractured, possibly several times, and injected with quartz solution - both clear and vivid red. How did this happen?  I have no idea, but whatever the story, its this complexity that helps create this handsome visual pattern, one with tantalizing hints of the paintings of Jackson Pollock.

Faux Feces

Pseudo-coprolites, Salmon Creek, WA

Coprolite is  fossilized dung. (Greek : copros = dung, lithos = stone) It is a rare, but oddly compelling, fossil, especially if it can be shown to be from an exotic source, e.g. dinosaurs.

For many years, collectors have been finding what looked like coprolites in abundance along Salmon Creek in southwest Washington State.  I was there recently, and easily found dozens of these things.

However, most paleontologists say these are not coprolites at all, despite their similar morphology, but some sort of unexplained mineral deposit. Coprolites, it turns out, contain fossilized remains of plants (or bones and hair for the carnivores), or whatever the diet of the animal which left it.

These "psuedo-coprolites," by contrast, show no such structure, and their chemical signature is all wrong.

Too bad.  I think my grandson would love to have a piece of real dinosaur dung...!

Back to Mt. Rainier

Sunset and clouds on Mt. Rainier

 It takes about 3 hours to get from my house to Paradise, on the 5000 foot level of Mt. Rainier.  I dashed down there yesterday hoping to get some shots of wildflowers, which so far are about 6 weeks behind their normal bloom schedule. Well, after hiking up to my favorite meadow, I found the flowers just emerging from under the snow. If they bloom at all this year, it will be a miracle.

Driving home, I made a short detour to have a look at the Greenwater River just northeast of the volcano. There are few gem quality rocks on the mountain itself: too young and too active. But the volcano we see today rose through much older volcanics, many of which produce large quantities of agate and jasper. There are a couple of well-known areas for agate in the hills above the Greenwater, but today I decided to just poke around the riverbed to see what was washing down from the surrounding watershed.

In an hour or so I had a bag full of small agates, some jasper and even a nice piece of petrified wood.  But the find of the day was this good-sized multi-colored agate which I pried out of the riverbed. I haven't decided what to do with it yet - it seems criminal to whack it with my sledgehammer and run the risk of it shattering, so I may wait and cut it open - or polish the whole thing with the hope that it will reveal some nice patterns.

Agate from Greenwater River

Fractured Jasper

Fractured Jasper Pebble, Puget Sound

Jasper is one of the most common, colorful rocks among the beach cobbles of Puget Sound. It is composed of micro-crystalline quartz (e.g. its crystal structure is too tiny for the eye) and therefore is very hard and takes a nice polish.  Often the samples I find are broken, fractured or badly-shapen.

This one, however, had both a nice shape, and a handsome fracture pattern similar to the "crackle" in pottery glazes. Despite its symmetrical shape, I did not cut it, but simply polished the stone as I found it, which rounds out sharp edges, but otherwise changes the rock very little. To be honest, I enjoy these "natural" shapes much more than cut cabochons so popular in the jewelry business.  It will never be a necklace, but I enjoy it all the same.

Rock Revealed

Unknown rock, polished

A month ago, I posted about a trip to the outer coast of the Olympic Peninsula, and about the variety of rocks I found among the beach cobbles - most specifically this one.  I noticed it as distinct from all the rest even in its rough, straight-off-the-beach state. (see July 28 photo) .

Now, a month later, it has gone through the polishing cycle, and its really unusual patterning has been revealed.  It is hard, and has taken a good polish, indicating something silica-rich (rather than a softer, sedimentary rock) but beyond that, I haven't got a clue. A strange jasper formed at the boundary of two rock types?  The multi-colored zigzag pattern which is its most striking feature, makes it look like it was liquid at one point.

Anyhow, whatever its name - it's a beauty. But like most of the others I find, from an unknown source.

app. 3" long

Mystery Solved... "Variolites"

Variolite cobble, Crescent Formation, Olympic Peninsula WA

For several years I have puzzled over the origin of this stone type, which is a remarkably common component of beach gravels around the Olympic Peninsula. (See my earlier post of July 19) It is so common, in fact, that it argues for a local source.  I haven't found that source yet - but I think I have discovered what it is.
The answer came from Scott Babcock, Professor of Geology at Western Washington State University, who has studied the Crescent Formation extensively.  He proposed that they were something called a "variolite" said to be a metamorphosed basalt (possibly pillow lava).  He sent me Googling for the quite-famous (though not to me) variolites of Durance, France.  Bingo.
A quick look at some photos of the Durance rocks was all I needed - these are clearly related.  (And there is a LOT of  basalt in the Crescent Formation here.)
As I said, the outcrop source for this rock is not known, at least that I've been able to discover, but maybe one of these days...

Variolite from Maguelon, France (www.variolite.fr)

Further note : I was also able to confirm the name, and provenance of this rock with Rowland Tabor, Geologist Emeritus at the US Geological Survey and author of the Guide to the Geology of Olympic National Park. He refers to it in his book (page 67-68) as "globular devitrification structures."  Wow, that's a mouthful.  However, he wasn't able to confirm a bedrock source. That, I guess, I am going to have to find for myself!

Big Stories...in Miniature

Mini-faulted Jasper

I have just finishing polishing some recent finds from beaches along the Puget Sound shoreline that I've gathered over the past few months.  Two of my favorites are here.  The first, above, is one I like because it shows big ideas -- in miniature.  The rock is only 1.5 inches tall, but clearly shows the offset layers caused by movement along a very small, but obvious, fault. This phenomenon is common enough in nature, in scales both micro and macro, but it is not often displayed with such precision in a rock you can hold in your hand.

Petrified Wood

This is also a handsome miniature, an inch-long pebble of petrified wood. Not wildly colorful, but displaying the layers of both bark and what I can only assume is some darker heartwood. I knew I had a beauty when I found this one, but had to wait a month for it to go through the tumbling stages.

Both rocks beg the same question I mused about in a previous post: where could they have come from?  Found on a Seattle beach, both could very likely have been scraped off an outcrop in the BC coast range, or somewhere on Vancouver Island, by the massive glaciers of the Pleistocene. They could have been worn down to pebble size by ten thousand years of surf and tide. I'll probably never know.

The truth is, I just get a kick out of imagining the journey these rocks have taken to my desktop. Go figure.

Inside the Rock

Ape Cave Lava Tube, Mt. St. Helens

No, I'm not really rockhounding here - I'm exploring this remarkable two-mile-long lava tube on the southern slope of Mt. St. Helens.  Lava tubes are rare here in the Northwest, where the Cascade volcanoes tend to blow up, rather than extrude a lot of liquid lava.  Still, this is one of the finest lava tubes in the US, a near-perfect tunnel that you could nearly drive a bus through.

Very cool.

Petite Poppies

Orbicular or "Poppy" Jasper, Olympic Peninsula, WA

I first stumbled onto this rock as an intriguing pebble on a beach along the shores of Puget Sound, covered with tiny red orbs against a dark matrix. Only later did I learn that they are referred to as Olympic "Poppy" Jasper, from Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Although some sources (like Jackson..see below) describe an outcrop of the stone just west of Lake Crescent, most people find this along the coastal beaches. These were all from a brief walk along Rialto Beach just north of the Quileute River near Forks, WA (Home of the "Twilight" stories)

Most are small and uncommon, but as you train your eyes for them along these cobble beaches, they start to jump out at you. I filled a bucket full of them, although many are badly cracked and pitted and will probably not take a good polish.  These were some of my favorites which have been tumbled for a month or so - yet still show some cracking and pitting - testimony to the brittle nature of the basalt they weathered out of.

Still, they are handsome little stones that I am happy to have found. Someday I may go look for the outcrop, but for now, these will do.

In the Trenches

I am fairly new to rockhounding, and rely on published guides to help steer me towards locations with interesting rocks.  I have several :

Gem Trails of Washington by Garret Romaine

Rockhound's Guide to Washington Vol. 1 & 2, by Bob & Kay Jackson  (ca. 1970)

Both cover a lot of the same ground, but help a beginner like myself get started.

The downside is that many of the areas described in both books have been pretty well picked over by generations of rockhounds before me.  What that means in practice became clear to me this week, when I went to explore Salmon Creek near Toledo, Washington.  Known in the past for its carnelian agate and jasper, Salmon Creek may still produce new material, especially after winter storms scour the watershed.

Carnelian/Agate, Red and Green Jasper, Salmon Creek

To me, however, Salmon Creek looked like a war zone. Pocked with craters and rock piles, this was as close to industrial rockhounding as I've ever seen, with the stream diverted, and every gravel bar turned upside down. Not only did this look like a waste of my time - and it was - it was disheartening to see the creek degraded this way. I know there are State rules for digging in and around streams, and although I don't know all those rules, I'm sure most of them were broken here, certainly in spirit. If there were once salmon fry in this stream, I doubt many of them survived this onslaught.

In the end, I bushwhacked up the river a mile or so, and found a spot where, although there were still pits and piles, there was not the devastated look of the lower, more accessible, parts of the river. I found a few nice pieces of agate and lots of lovely green and red jasper. I'm sure others have found better before me, but at what cost? I did no digging, or screening.

This experience made me resolve to search out other, less-publicized locations, and maybe find a few of my own. Either way, I will do everything I can to minimize my impact on the environment around me.  I have never been a fan of open-pit or strip mining: why should it be acceptable for rockhounds?

A Visit to Mecca

Succor Creek Jasper

About two months ago I drove over to the Idaho/Oregon border to search for Owyhee Picture Jasper, one of the most spectacular in the world. It was my first time in the area, and I concentrated on the Succor Creek region SW of Homedale Idaho. Many people come here for Thundereggs, but I really wanted to find jasper - and I did.  However, because of heavy snows, the creek was still running too high to get across to some of the better jasper areas, so I concentrated my efforts in a few drainages coming out of the hills to the west.

My technique was simple, just wade up the still flowing stream, and look for things that looked interesting in the cold, clear water. I quickly trained my eye to spot the tan color of the jasper and filled my collecting bag in no time. And a second time, and a third time. Before I knew it, 9 hours had gone by and I had a car full of rock and an aching back!

Much of this jasper does not look like much in rough form; the colors and patterns are too subtle. But whenever you hit a rock and it breaks in conchoidal fractures (e.g. smooth glass-like flakes)  you know you're into jasper.

None of this was slabbing material : it was destined for my non-stop tumblers, which always have a series of rocks being polished. The small sample above, about 1.5" high, is one of my favorites. Not spectacular, but handsome enough that I enjoy having it, and many others like it.  Can't wait to go back.

Mysteries on the Wild Coast

Seastacks, Olympic Peninsula

Good weather on the coast lured me out to one of my favorite rockhounding locations.  As in my "Conveyor Belt" post a few days ago, many of the rocks that end up on the beaches of the Olympic Peninsula have been dumped there by glaciers and the massive rivers that they spawned. Although most of the rocks that comprise the many dramatic seastacks on the coast are sedimentary, there are plenty of interesting rocks from somewhere else. Several areas on the Peninsula have thick strata of what could only be ancient river beds, with rounded water-transported rocks that are clearly not local.

I found some terrific rocks on this trip, the most intriguing is the one below, which displays a color pattern like nothing I have ever seen before. It is dense and hard, and should polish nicely. Jasper?

Colorful rock, Olympic coast

This is what rockhounding is for me : a constant treasure hunt, and a vehicle for discovery.

Ventifacts

Ventifact, Wright Valley, Antarctica

In 1980, I worked for a season as a field assistant at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Among my most memorable adventures during those 4 months - and there were many - was a visit to the "Dry Valleys", a series of remarkable ice-free canyons.  I joined a group of scientists doing some sampling in the saline ponds there - see photo below - but also just enjoyed exploring this weird, lunar landscape.

The floor of the canyon was littered with rock, of course, mostly basalt (dolerite) chunks from a series of sills high on the ridges on either side.  What really made them unique, however, was their having been carved by the incessant wind into smooth, graceful objects - sometimes referred to as "ventifacts" or wind-carved stones.  I grabbed a couple of these mini-sculptures but left thousands more...including some perfect stone pyramids 6 feet tall, as smooth as if made from polished granite.

This little pyramid is only about 4 inches tall, but you can see the smooth, polished surface and the faceting caused by sitting in the exact position in the prevailing winds for many decades, perhaps centuries.  I have carried it with me for the past 31 years since that trip, and it is one of my most treasured possessions.

This is a similar process, by the way, to the "Topoliths" in the post below, though this is much harder rock, and polished over much longer periods of time.

Wright Dry Valley, Antarctica 1980

Mystery Rocks

Mystery Rocks, Olympic Peninsula

I would love to figure out what these rocks are. I have found them repeatedly among the beach gravels of the northern Olympic Peninsula, along the Straits of Juan de Fuca, but have not managed to figure out where they are from - or what they are.  (I found them in many locations but they are especially abundant around the mouth of the Elwha River)

They are brittle but soft enough that they do not take a polish, despite the superficial resemblance to the Orbicular Jaspers (with red spots) found in the same region.  But the raised dots are odd, and I can't think what rock type these might represent.  Anyone recognize them? The matrix is grey-green and apparently crystalline, but whatever it is, it's a really distinctive rock.

No mineral value, of course, and no one is going to make jewelery from this material, but if there is a geologist out there that recognizes it, or where it outcrops, I'd love to hear about it....

POSTSCRIPT : One reader asked whether the blebs are just surface marks, e.g. barnacle scars, but I broke some open and the spots are distributed throughout the rock.

POSTSCRIPT TWO :  MYSTERY SOLVED 8/26 !  More on a later post...

"Topoliths"

"Topoliths" , Eroded shale, Falkland Islands

A few years we discovered a location in the Falkland Islands where the ground is littered with these wind-carved pebbles of shale/slate. Because of the layering, and the incessant wind, these stones erode into wonderful "topographic" shapes, akin to the contours of topographic maps. (I particularly like the "map" of California above, app. 4 inches long).  Because of their similarity to contour maps, we call them "topoliths."

We have dozens of these remarkable little stones.  Let us know if you'd be interested in having one.

The Conveyor Belt

Beach Cobbles, Lincoln Park, Seattle

One of the best rockhounding locations in the Pacific Northwest is so close...that I can see it from my house. Seriously, one of my favorite rock-hunting spots is along any of the cobble beaches along the shores of Puget Sound. You can never tell what you might find out there including a variety of jaspers, agates, petrified wood, and just some beautiful stones of unknown origin. In fact, almost all of the rocks are from somewhere else.  Why?  Because almost all are leftovers from the Ice Age, when a glacier 5000 feet thick carved Puget Sound, and, like a gigantic conveyor belt, carried rock from a hundred locations to the north and dumped them here.

I find this fascinating. Some of the rocks I pick up along the beach may have been plucked from an outcrop in British Columbia, or have fallen off a peak in the North Cascades.  There are igneous rocks, metamorphics, and, of course sedimentary rocks as well: to be honest, I have no idea what half of them are!  Here are just a few samples from the beaches here, mostly jaspers, and at least one petrified wood.

All in a Day's collection, Puget Sound

Where are they from?  Who knows? Yes, sometimes it's a little frustrating to find a real stunner on the beach, knowing that you probably won't see another one, and with no clue where it originated. (It is rare, in fact, to see two rocks that appear to have come from the same locality.)

Having said that, most are beautifully rounded, making tumbling a snap. No surprise: they've been getting tumbled in the ocean for 10,000 years!

Far, Far, Away

Polished beach pebbles, Chiloe Island, Chile

Yes, I know, this blog is supposedly about Pacific Northwest rockhounding, but it is also a chance to highlight some of the oddballs in my collection.  Last year, I spent 2 months working on the island of Chiloe in southern Chile. While there, I was told by locals - who knew about my interest in rocks - about a nearby beach with "beautiful stones." Intrigued, I had them take me there. It was a nondescript little bay, like many others along this ragged coast, but I did notice that the beach pebbles had a striking variety of patterns, and the smoothness and heft of silica-rich stone. I collected a few pockets-full (God, how I wish now that I had gotten more!) and brought them home to polish.

The six samples above show how wildly different the stones were, in patterns and colors, yet all had the same relative hardness, and shine. But none are recognizable as agate (no transparency) or jasper: some have what looks like sedimentary layering, while others have no linear structure at all.  Clearly there is something interesting going on in the geology of this bay, but I have not been able to find any references online.

If anyone can suggest what these rocks are, I will tell you where I found them. I only wish I had an excuse to go back...

Mystery Solved...

Brecciated Cherts, Channel Islands, CA

I collected these stones along the shore of Santa Cruz Island in California's Channel Islands last year. They were obviously silica-rich and took a nice polish, but were structurally all over the map: some were clearly banded like a conventional sedimentary rock, while others were fractured and chaotic.  I collected a dozen or so, but could not seem to find out what they were.

Then, recently, I struck up a conversation with a California geologist, who turns out to have done his PhD on the rocks of the Monterey Formation and immediately identified these as nice examples of brecciated cherts from the Monterey!   I still haven't figured out the exact mechanism of their formation, but they are pretty unusual in any case.

St. Kilda Oddity

 Granite/Dolerite Breccia, St. Kilda, Scotland

I collected this rock two years ago on the remote island of St. Kilda, off Western Scotland. It is about 9 inches long, about the size of an enormous russet potato.  I was stunned by the structure of the rock, composed of angular blocks of dolerite (Basalt) "floating" in a granite matrix. This was the largest one I could carry - but much of the island ( a World Heritage historical site) is made up of this stuff. No gem value, obviously, but just a wonderful piece of geology.

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Owyhee Jaspers, Succor Creek, Oregon 

I am starting this blog just to record details of my completely unprofessional hobby of rockhounding.  I studied geology at the University of Washington three decades ago, and have always been interested in the subject, but only recently have I started actively looking for rocks as objects of beauty and design.  No, I am not a jeweler, and so far have resisted the temptation to invest in cabbing equipment and expensive polishers. Instead, I prefer the naturalistic forms of tumbled stones, particularly jaspers in all of their astonishing varieties of color and pattern.  As my wife can testify, our house is increasingly filled with polished stones.

These jaspers were all collected in a small streambed off of Succor Creek in Eastern Oregon, one of the best rockhounding locations I've ever seen.  Walking in the water, where the true colors of the stones were better displayed, I quickly filled up my collecting bag, not once, not twice, but three times - all in less than half a mile. I couldn't stop myself!  By the end of the day, I was more physically exhausted than I have ever been,  having spent 12 straight hours bent at the waist. That's the true nature of obsession...

More to come.