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.

Beach Surprise : "Plume Agate?"

Beach agate, West Seattle

It's been a while since I was out on the beaches near home - blame it on cold weather and too many buckets already full of rocks, waiting for the polisher.

But on a handsome sunny winter day, I hit the beaches near Alki Point. I am always attracted by color and design, but especially if there is any sense of transparency, e.g. that glass-like quality that suggests "agate."

Here's one I found yesterday, an already well-rounded, naturally polished agate. My first thought was that it was what is known as a plume agate, in which impurities grow into the quartz often in lovely, lacy patterns. But when I took a close look at this, it does not have the typical "plume" patterns, but instead appears to be some sort of brecciated rock into which quartz has filled the gaps. Hard to tell what the green stuff is, but it's clearly fractured and shattered. Now, of course, it is suspended in the quartz matrix. Not sure what to call it, but it's handsome nonetheless.

I'm Back...with a Mystery

Mysterious Rock, Puget Sound

I have not posted for quite sometime, not having had much time - or weather - for rockhounding. But every chance I get to walk on the beaches below my house, I typically find something. In this case, a few weeks ago, I spotted this interesting cobble (about 2" long) and threw it in the tumbler. The polish revealed a fascinating pattern which I can't identify or explain.  Any ideas? A kind of agate?

(Click on photo to see a little bigger)

Owyhee Agate Vein

Agate vein, Succor Creek, Oregon

Although most of what I found in the Succor Creek area of the Owyhee mountains earlier this summer was jasper, I did come out with some other interesting pieces. One of the most intriguing was this thin agate seam cutting through another rock I don't recognize. The agate is bright and colorful, and completely unlike anything else I have found in that area. Who knows where it came from, but the Owyhee country has so many spectacular rocks, both agate and jasper, that nothing should be surprising...

I'll be heading out there again next month for a week of rockhounding. Can't wait.

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

Out of the Tumbler

Cayucos Jasper - Revealed

Tumbling stones, esp. hard jaspers and agate, takes patience.... and I am not a patient man. So when a batch's time in the grit is up (and maybe a few hours early) I open it with all the enthusiasm of a kid on Christmas morning.

This batch was one I particularly looked forward to since recent months have generated some exceptional collecting opportunities. A sharp reader will recognize these, for example, as polished Cayucos jasper : I posted some of the rough in this blog on May 2. All are of red jasper, with quartz/agate intrusions. Handsome stuff.

Also included in this batch were some pieces of Idaho Japer-Agate I collected in late June (see my July 4 post). One of them came out of the tumbler today with some lovely patterns and colors.

Idaho Jasp-agate

Surprises

By now, you will realize that my idea of heaven is to wander along local beaches picking up interesting stones and trying to piece together the stories behind them. I often fill a bag within an hour or so, and only weeks, if not months, later get to polishing them. So I can maybe be forgiven for not exactly remembering where I found this one, which emerged from the tumbler today. It is of a free-form yellow jasper together with what looks like a pinkish agate. Pink agate?  Never heard of it before - and as always, I have no idea where this rock originated, thousands of years before it landed on the beach where I found it. Yes, it would be nice to know: I'm guessing there are more like it...

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...

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.