Succor Creek Wood

Petrified Wood, Succor Creek OR

Haven't been out into the field lately, but I am still working on the material I collected at Succor Creek in early June. Although most is high-quality jasper, including some with nice "picture" designs, I also found a fair amount of petrified wood.  Here are just a few of the pieces I gathered along the creek.  I'm sure there's a lot more out there...

Hope to make it back to the area later this summer. In the meantime, I will be exploring some locations closer to home. Stay tuned.

More Succor Creek Jasper

Succor Creek Picture Jasper

I've been home from Owyhee country for two weeks, and am starting to get some of this material polished. These are probably not the most dramatic picture jasper pieces I've ever seen, but they have a wonderful variety of color and pattern.  I am also very pleased with some of the petrified wood that came from the trip.

I have much, much more to go through - and some will be reserved for the day - one day - when I actually buy a saw, and cut some slabs. I have hesitated to invest in a saw up until now because 1) they are expensive and 2) because I have no interest in making jewelry. I really only do this for the pleasure of discovery and the beauty of what emerges after simple tumbling. In every hobby there is the inevitable choice - do I keep this casual, or invest in more equipment with some larger goal.  Frankly, I'm not there yet.  But as I find larger, better pieces, I will be tempted to cut slabs from them - if only to enjoy the larger canvas for the art of the stone.

Return to Succor Creek

Succor Creek Canyon,  E. Oregon

I've come out to eastern Oregon/Idaho for a few days to do some photography - and also to do some rockhounding in one of my favorite locations - Succor Creek in the Owyhee Mountains.  It is a beautiful place, and a terrific location for jasper, agate and petrified wood. I have done well with all three, simply by poking around the extensive gravel bars along Succor Creek.
Last time I was here it was a month or two earlier in the year, and the water was much higher, faster and colder - so getting to any gravel was hard. But now the river has dropped - but the fierce summer heat hasn't hit yet.
I spent 4 hours out there today, and came back with about 100 pounds of tumbler material. Most was found just along about 200 yards of overflow river bed - see photo below. I am really pleased with some of the picture jasper pieces and some large chunks of wood.
Every time I come here, I plan to explore the hills around the creek, which is presumably where all this stuff comes from - but I do so well just scavenging the river bed that I've never gone much farther afield.
I'll post pictures of some of my better finds when I get home this weekend.

Gravel beds, Succor Creek

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...

Discovering Ancient Forests

Petrified Wood, Puget Sound

Every time I open up the tumbler at the end of a polishing cycle, it's like Christmas all over again. Some stones, especially soft sedimentary rocks, never take a polish - but those that do can reveal some stunning patterns and colors. And one thing that I am always happy to see is Petrified Wood. These came out of my tumbler just this morning, pieces of wood I have found along the beaches of Puget Sound over the last few months.

On the beach, they are not always easy to recognize. Although they take a beautiful polish after the fact, they show none of this luster and translucency after they've been tumbled in the surf for a few thousand years. But somehow these caught my eye anyhow - and I'm glad they did.

I have begun to see recurring styles of wood: jet black with tan bark remnants, yellow/orange with strong ring patterns etc.  To me, this suggests a couple of specific (but unknown to me) source locations in the Puget Sound basin.  Logic dictates that the more abundant a certain rock type is, the closer the source. (Or maybe it means that some distant sources are simply more productive)

Wherever the source, they are beautiful.

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...

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.

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.

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.