Area 54

Misc. Jasper & Agate, Area 54

Some rockhounding locations are in the guidebooks. Others are not, either by the author's choice, or because they are new locations, found just as others are exhausted by hundreds - if not thousands - of collectors.  This place was not one I'd ever read about, except on a rockhounding club website. I don't know where it got it's name - Area 54 - but it does give the place a sense of mystery: it sounds like there should be aliens or UFO's around.  All I can say is, I didn't see any...

The truth is, I don't know exactly where Area 54 is, or at least where the club trips go. It is somewhere on the road into the Panoche Hills in Fresno County, California. I never found the exact spot they described, but it doesn't matter. You can look anywhere in a 5 mile radius, or anywhere along that road and you will find colorful, sometimes stunning, material. The pieces I've posted here just came out of the tumbler - but I have much more.

My advice?  Next time you're driving south on I-5 in central California, take a short detour and explore this canyon.  You won't be sorry!

FOLLOW-UP NOTE: June 15.  I've finally gotten these stones all the way through the polishing process, and sadly, they don't polish well. Most have a largely matte finish with only a few seams that took a good polish. I might have worried that I had done something wrong in the process (such as contaminating the batch with heavy grit somehow) but there were a few agates from elsewhere in the batch and they took a perfect polish - so I know it's the stones. So if they are jasper, they are a somewhat softer one.

Back from the Dead

Olympic Orbicular "Poppy" Jasper

No, I haven't vanished off the face of the earth. Attentive readers may notice that I haven't posted anything here since October. The fact is, I have been traveling most of that time on non-rock business. Now that I am home again, it is pretty cold and rainy for field trips. So I am spending most of my free time slabbing some of the rocks I collected last summer.

Among these are two good looking samples of Orbicular Jasper, often referred to as "Olympic Poppy Jasper". This kind of rock, associated with basalt deposits around the Olympic Peninsula. They are not particularly hard to find - one of the best locations is Rialto Beach on the Pacific Coast, where you can pick up a few pockets full of jasper pebbles in less than an hour.

These two are from some other locations where I have found slightly larger chunks, some of them slab-worthy.  I will post more as I catch up with cutting.

Hands and Knees Jasper

Cherry Creek Red Jasper

No, I haven't discovered a new type of jasper - the title of this post refers to how I spent most of my day today...on my hands and knees (in the water)

 I decided to go out this morning to Cherry Creek, near Duvall, Washington, to look for bits of high-quality red jasper. I had been there two years ago, and all I can say is, plants grow fast here in the Northwest. This small creek was walkable last time I was there - this time I was literally crawling up the creek, under an almost solid thicket of shrubs and small trees.

The only upsides to this technique are 1) I was a LOT closer to the stream gravel, so I could see some of the bits of jasper which tend to be small. and 2) I suspect I was the only person willing to put up with this - there was a pretty good scattering of jasper once I left the "easy" part of the creek.

This location has been well-known for decades, and a lot of mineral clubs have field trips to the site,

(see: http://home.comcast.net/~wams1939/trips/cherry.htm)

so it's not exactly easy pickings anywhere. But it is close to home, and there is always the promise of a really nice bright piece of jasper. Not sure I found it today, but I got a nice bag full in a couple of hours.
Having said that, I probably won't be back without a machete...

Rialto Beach Redux

Poppy Jasper, Agate, and....? , Rialto Beach

Last year I made a pilgrimage to Rialto Beach, not far from Forks, Washington (aka "Twilight" Town) to beach comb for orbicular "poppy" jasper. This has been a well-known location for jasper beach cobbles for decades, and every time I'm in the neighborhood, I make a point of stopping by.

I spent a happy hour or two looking for jasper, but also stumbled onto some other nice things as well - some petrified wood, and at least one piece of yellow plume agate. It takes a while to train your eye here: the weather was uncharacteristically dry, so all the beach stones had that pale, scuffed look, making them very hard to identify. I did carry a water spray bottle to test stones -and licked a few - but after a while, I began to see the characteristic smoothness of the harder rocks (mixed in with a lot of rough-surfaced sedimentary rocks, the most common thing on our outer coast).

In the end, I got a nice stash of poppies, and some other things I'll look forward to polishing. Always a great place - and the best part is,  after next winter's storms (profound on this wild coast) there will be a whole new crop of rocks thrown up onto the beach.

Gravel Galore, Rialto Beach

Poppies Transformed

A few months ago, a reader was kind enough to share with me his location for Olympic Poppy Jasper. He  generously took time out of his day not only to lead me to the outcrop, and but to help search for specimens on my behalf. I came home with a boxload  of rough - and only now have started polishing it.  This two-inch piece is small, but with a brilliant color, and striking, naturalistic shape. Needless to say, I'm thrilled.
To be honest, none of the material looked that impressive when I got it home. These scarlet poppies do not normally form massive  blocks: most of what we found were modest little clusters in otherwise rather uninteresting basalt. But trimmed and tumbled, they really pop.
But the best thing about the day was the unselfish attitude of my host. I will remember that every time I look at these handsome stones.

Polisher Preview

Cayucos Jasper, CA

Here are two early pieces of the Cayucos Jasper from the Central California coast I found earlier this month (see below) An astonishing diversity of color and pattern, found within just a few yards of the beach. Definitely a place worth going back to.

Right off the Beach

Many of the stones I gather are truly "diamonds in the rough," rocks whose pattern and color you can really only guess at until the tumbler has scoured off the weathering crust, the scars, cracks and staining.  Then there are the stones that appear, at first glance, as if they have already been polished and shaped.
That was the case with this one, a reddish-purple stone that looks like a translucent jasper/agate. It has a glassy character, but also a granular texture, along with random black dots and faint stripes.

If you have any ideas what this might be, I'd love to know. In the meantime, it is simply a lovely stone of an unusual color.

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.