Out of the Tumbler

Beach Cobbles, San Simeon, CA

As I posted back in March, I spent a pretty mind-blowing day collecting on the beaches near San Simeon, California, on my way up the coast. Why was it so great?  Because nearly every rock on the beaches there is of something interesting, whether a brecciated jasper, or an interesting agate, or some things that I don't even know the names for. But whatever they are, they have loads of color and striking patterns and polish beautifully in the tumbler.

They do especially well in the tumbler since they are already well-rounded by the wave action. In fact, I usually skip the first coarse grit step in the polishing process and go directly to the finer 120/220 silicon carbide.

I'm still processing rocks I found months ago, and by the time I'm done, it'll be time to head South again to find some more!

Christmas Morning

Owyhee Jaspers revealed

One great advantage of a rock saw is that you can non-destructively look inside a weathered rock whose outward appearance is almost nothing like its inside. I have just come home from eastern Oregon with huge amounts of jasper from the Owyhee country, but very rarely are the patterns and colors obvious through the weathered crust. Some things that look intriguing on the surface are dull inside. However, the reverse is also true - some real treasures have no outward sign of what's inside until you break them open - or use a saw.

In the past I had nothing more than a rock hammer to see what was inside - but jasper is really just a natural glass, and often cleaves and shatters in unexpected, and unwanted, ways. I hate to think about the number of really fine rocks that have disintegrated under my hammer! A lot of weathered picture jaspers, for example, are riddled with cracks, which is precisely why there are such great patterns in the first place. These clearly have no business being hammered...

The saw, meanwhile, provides a window into the rock, without risking damage. Now, all I have to do is choose the pieces that look good - like the three above, which I just cut yesterday from very humble fist-sized pieces. The best  go into the tumbler to smooth out the rest of the stone.

After this last trip, I've got many, many more waiting to be opened up.  Can't wait.

Skokomish Obsession

Orbicular Jasper, Skokomish River

Somebody stop me. I have made two trips now to the Skokomish River looking for orbicular jasper. Today was a beauty, sunny and warm, and the river was running gin clear (see photo below). Good conditions for looking for jasper. As before, there are loads of interesting jaspers on this river, but very few have well-defined red orbs, so you spend a lot of time picking up stones, and then discarding them.

This one was high and dry on the gravel bar, and jumped out because of its vivid color.

I found others in the water, as in the photo below. The only trouble is...you can't see the water. Believe it or not, these rocks are under a smooth sheet of water, e.g. just about perfect for scanning for rocks. And surrounded by drably colored rocks, the red jasper almost jumps out at you!

The Skokomish Runs clear in August

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...

Rock Saw Discoveries

Over the past year or two, I have been collecting rocks from a variety of sources - from the deserts of Idaho, to the Pacific coast, to the beach just below my house. Most end up being polished in my two Lortone rock tumblers with terrific results.

However, until this week, I was never able to cut into the middle of larger pieces: I needed a rock saw. Well, after hemming and hawing, I finally bought one last week on Craig's List. It is an antique Lortone LS-10, well-used, but still working - and I have been cutting ever since. I had a large box of large rough under my workbench that I had been waiting to cut into, and now I am finally getting to see what is inside these pieces.

Examples above : a pale jasper from western Idaho, and a piece of Succor Creek Jasper from the Owyhee country.

Cutting a rock is like Christmas: you never know what you're going to get. Sometimes you find great stuff - sometimes you get nothing. Still, it's another tool in the arsenal. Next, I'll have to start polishing the slabs.

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.

A Polished Gem

I was photographing birds along the shore this morning (see below) but out of the corner of my eye noticed a shiny, rounded pebble with an unusual pattern. I pulled it out of the sand, and rinsed it off. What was immediately obvious was that it was heavy, hard and already very smooth - as if it had already been through a tumbler (which, I suppose you could say, it had).  I will polish it further but hopefully this striking pattern is not just on the surface and will survive the experience.

Speaking of surviving the experience : here's a gull trying to swallow a starfish on the beach below my house this morning. Amazingly, he finally got it down - but he didn't look altogether happy with the decision.

Finding Jade...?

For some time, I have wondered how to identify jade in the field, especially because the literature suggests it comes in many colors and forms. There is plenty of jade in the Pacific Northwest, so there are almost certainly pieces of it on the Puget Sound beaches I normally patrol.  I found this one a few days ago, and the brilliant color jumped out at me, even in the drizzling rain.  It has the translucence associated with jade, and does not scratch with a steel knife - but how do you know?  More importantly, does it matter?  This will eventually polish into a handsome specimen, jade or not. Still, it would be nice to know.  Any suggestions?

Ancient Mystery : Fossil Whale Bone?

I found this fist-sized rock along the shoreline yesterday, and immediately noticed some unusual things about it.  It is very heavy, and filled with linear vesicles - and reminded me of bone, especially whale bone. I don't know if that's what it is - fossil whale bone - but it certainly seems possible. I am going to do some tests, and maybe have someone look at it who might know more than me (which is almost everyone).  Stay tuned.

Follow-up  4/10/12 :  I took the sample to the Paleo team at the Burke Museum today to see if they had any reaction to it. They did, and it pretty much coincided with mine, e.g. "it might be bone....or it might not."  Hardly the conclusive verdict I was hoping for. But yes, it is pretty weathered, pretty small, and does not have any obvious structures that would help identify it.

MAY 2013 UPDATE: I finally got around to cutting  this puppy open and you know what?  It was nothing - some sort of mudstone devoid of any interesting pattern or structure...

Oddballs and Snowcones

Jasper with graceful seam, Discovery Bay, WA

Sometimes, when walking the shoreline looking for rocks,  you stumble onto complete oddballs - rocks so weird that they just jump out at you. That was the case for this one. I was walking the western shoreline of Discovery Bay, a place I'd never been before, picking up odds and ends during a brief, but intense, hailstorm. I found lots of the usual: bits of quartz, agate, red jasper.
Then I came across this thing. I think it's a piece of jasper with a white quartz seam running through it, but not quite like anything I've ever seen before, sort of like a melting scoop of ice cream. The bold pattern jumped out at me, and it went straight into my collecting bag. Can't wait to polish it and see what that reveals.

Using the "Search Image"

Petrified Wood, Alki Point

When I patrol the beaches near my home, looking for colorful or unusual rocks, I try to keep a mental image of what I am looking for, what scientists call a "search image." This refers to having a visual sense of what you're after when you set out, which can give you an advantage in spotting one specific kind of rock among thousands. Normally, I look for bold patterns, or bright colors - the easiest things to see. But today I made an effort to look at black rocks. My goal? To find specimens of petrified wood.

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, there is a form of black petrified wood that I have found many times on local beaches, though normally as small cobbles that reveal their patterns only after polished. I have no idea where the rock originates, but I am guessing it is somewhere relatively nearby, simply judging by the relative abundance of the stuff.

So I set out today with the idea of concentrating on finding these pieces of dark wood. This may be why I found this piece within 15 minutes of searching the beach, by far the largest piece of petrified wood I have ever found along the shore.  Did my "search image" make the difference, making this rather drab piece of rock stand out?  I think it did.

Though this piece looks drab now in its unpolished state, I will try and post a picture of it after polishing - look for it a few weeks from now. Until then, I will probably be back looking for other pieces of streaky black rock...

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...

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.