I thought I’d post a few photos of our trip. We started out in Boise and attempted to do some collecting in Idaho first, but we did not have much luck. We went to the sites near Sommercamp road south of Boise, but even with permission to enter the Queenstone jasper collection site we only found one very small piece of picture jasper. The sites listed in the Rockhounding Idaho book were mostly worthless in this area.
We had a lot more fun the 2nd day when we went into the Graveyard point sites in Oregon. We found material pretty much everywhere there. We thought there’d be a lot of digging and hard rock hammer and chisel work to do, but instead we found it was pretty much just walk around and find plume agate here and there just weathering out. We collected a lot of material that 2nd day, but it’s hard to know how good it will be until we slice a lot of it open with a slab saw.
3rd day we collected a bit farther north of the Graveyard sites in Oregon. Slow going in the morning, but in the afternoon we did quite well. At another site where we granted permission to collect on we found sticking out of the ground a very nice plume agate with some white and peach colored plumes and a bit of black tossed in for good measure. That’s the photo with the pick. It was a fair bit of digging to remove, but WELL worth it. After digging some more we were able to get a few more pieces out, but it got harder and harder. I imagine the vein goes on for quite a ways. When we got it home I found that the material was extremely hard with very few pits, and polished up to near glass finish. I decided that for my tastes it looked best cut somewhat thin and then backed with a different translucent stone, or just glass. This way it looks less muddled, and if mounted with an open back the colors will likely really show through. There’s a photo of one cab I made so far from this material.
4th day we headed to the Glass Butte site in Oregon. What a fantastic place. At first we were wandering around and finding quite a number of pieces, but a lot of it was so-so in quality. My wife liked the bubbles appearing in the jet black obsidian she named ‘Cosmic’ obsidian, but I figure all those bubble will be hard to get the cerium oxide out of when the time comes to polish a cab. We did not realize that we were just not in the right places. After driving around a bit we were astonished to see the material that could be collected. We were able to find silver sheen, gold sheen, some of what you might call fire, every form of mahogany, and some not bad rainbow. The rainbow required a wicked road trip to get to, but was worth it. The one type we could not find, but had been shown of a piece of was what I’d call ‘gold spot’ obsidian. Just could not figure out where that was despite getting some hand waving directions from some very nice folks we met. The photo shows the ‘rivers’ of obsidian that occur in many places at the site. I was amazed to see that you can actually see these ‘rivers’ on the satellite images. Also in the photos is a slab I cut from some of the gold sheen, one from the rainbow, and a cab I cut from some of the ‘fire’.
After Glass Butte we headed to Prinville, OR and attempted to collect material based on their ‘Rockhounding’ map. Pretty disappointing. We spend a full day at the Richardson’s ranch near Madras. Collected from the two rough site they still recommend (sunset jasper and rainbow jasper I think they called it). We also of course dug about 40 lbs of thundereggs, mostly from the ‘moss agate’ bed. It was super easy digging in the wall at the moss agate bed, but the green colored eggs (the ones that are supposed to have the moss in them) were a lot harder to dig out. We clearly got a few good ones, but I’ve not cut any of these open yet. The photos are of the brown colored eggs. Some really fantastic patterns in some of these. Bands, crystals, yellow and brown bubbles, etc. There’s a cab in there of one that I cut.
On our way back to Boise we stopped by the Succor creek area and went to the site for the Thundereggs. Really tricky driving, and we decided we could not drive even the four wheel drive car up all the way to the dig site. Anyhow, we got quite luck and found exactly the right spot to dig. There’s a photo of my wife at the bottom of the hole we were finding eggs in. Again, fairly easy digging, but it looked like things were about to collapse. Again we got a couple dozen lbs. of eggs in just a few hours. I sliced a number of them open. Lots of blue agate, a few with bands, crystals, some small brown/yellow bubbles and some dendrites here and then.
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Topic: Rockhounding Trip to Southeast Idaho and east/central Oregon (Read 9461 times)