Apparently Oregon isn't getting a winter this year. It's terrifyingly dry and warm. We'll be hurting for water all summer long if we don't get a good snow dump and though the warm weather and early grass will help birth weights for wildlife, there won't be forage through July and August. It reverses our seasons- everything grows in winter and dies in summer.
That said, the roads are dry and the air is warm, so there's been opportunity for some unseasonable outdoor adventures.
Went back to the palisades formation. This place is 'just out the back door,' relatively speaking. It's a ten minute ATV ride or a thirty minute walk and contains free-standing agatized tree trunks, with gold moss agate and bright red jasper nodules heaving up from the bentonite seeps on the hillside below. It's on a swatch of enclosed BLM, so no public access right now but still protected land. Usually we can't get back in here until spring and it's closed from July to December, so seeing it so early was nice. I took some friends in to see it on foot and they went nuts over the petrified trees and the immense arch on the far side. A few even started picking up jasper. I think I have successfully infected them...
Gold moss from below the palisades:
The streamers are a yellow crystalline material that dries, crazes, pits and looses its color. It probably can't be polished so it's earmarked for display rock and maybe a coaster.
Sheep Shack jasper, just over the hill from the palisades. One of the better pieces I've cut from there. This will go into the tabletop mosaic.
Cut from a new material, just have one chunk of it. the streamers are clear quartz in a green jasper, the dots may not let it polish but cool material anyway.
Old Military Road thunder eggs from yesterday, just collection photos. That road is another one that crosses half a dozen springs and is thus not attempted until May, but with so little rain several springs were dry and the rest were at summer-levels. There's three thunder egg occurrences along this road that I know of, probably more, as it winds in and out of the t-egg layer. Two parts of the road are built out of big thunder egg conglomerate blocks.
Chalk eggs sometimes contain zeolites like the orange clinoptilolite. The big plate is an interior surface of an enormous chalk egg (they get big, but break easily). The pink with the calcite is new and I'm excited to clean that one up, I think it'll make a really cool display specimen. It's half a double egg. The other half was also hollow and the top came off it following a rather long bouncy ATV ride. It contained loose strands of orange crystalline fuzz with the consistency of spiderwebs in sawdust. I'm not sure if it is spiderwebs and powdered zeolites, or just a really weird zeolite formation. If you've ever discovered wool moths in your whole wheat flour, that's exactly what it looked like inside.