Lapidaryforum.net
Rock Art => Cabochons, Intarsias, Cameos => Topic started by: victor1941 on August 23, 2020, 01:21:41 PM
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Texas Red Plume (top) from Woodward or Walker Ranch. Bottom is Bouquet Plume. Both cabs I finished last week.
The rest of these cabs were made 5 years ago.
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This blue cab is from Hart Ranch in Van Horn, TX
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NICE!!! Always love plumes and bouquets! :headbang: :headbang: :headbang:
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Nice array of plumes you have there from some iconic collecting areas. Just love that Woodward Ranch material.
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Nice. Always love Plume.
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Fantastic, great materials.
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Those are gorgeous!
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That bouqet plume cab must make a nice display piece, what is the multicolour plumes with the green?
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Teri Smith, a guide in the Alpine area, says the red/green plume is probably from the Bird Hills area that runs through the Woodward, Walker, and Anderson ranches. When I purchased the rough in Alpine about 50 years ago the shop owner thought it was found on the Anderson ranch but couldn't be sure and also said she could not get anymore. Unfortunately, the exact location was secret and only a very small pocket must have existed.
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Love that red plume.
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The Red Woodward/Walker plume was very prolific on the ranches and occurred in 2 different layers on the "bird Hills" as they were called. Boy I had great days collecting that stuff. On one of the trips I drove my truck along the top of the hills and stopped in one of the saddles between 2 of the hills. There the Basalt outcrop was peeking out of the ground about 20 feet from the road (not really a road but just the worn surface free of cactus). I went over and started digging and started pulling out great nodules of Cherry Red Agate with Bright Red plumes. I walked over to my truck and grabbed my 6 foot long bar and rammed it down where I was digging and wedged out a couple foot block of Basalt that had plume biscuits sticking out all over it. Wow what a day. You can see from the pic with my old truck in the background how big the chunks were that I was prying out and then look at the close up on the actual eggs. You can also see on my tailgate a bunch of eggs that I had already dug out before even hitting these big ones.
The ranch when we first started going had Biscuits everywhere. If you walked to the top of any of the bird hills and just inspected any of the Basalt outcrops there were biscuits with plume exposed just sitting on the surface everywhere. It was like shooting fish in a barrel no need for a secret spot on these ranches.
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You definitely hit the jackpot and found some great material. I never had the opportunity to hunt much in the less traveled areas but know great beds existed because some rock hounds in Austin, Texas indicated they had buckets of this material. Unfortunately these ranches are not open for collecting. The main difference is the green plume.
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For all the collecting I have done down there which was quite a bit I have collected green and red from Needle Peak and from the ranches below Marfa but never found a single green plume on Walker or Woodward. There is always the chance since the material is not self collected that it was misidentified. Anyone else on the forum ever find Green plume on the Walker or Woodward?
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I would also like to know where this material was collected. The Alpine shop had about two gallons of material and I judged it to be seam agate and not eggs. The exterior had a broken down dark soil like material.
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No green plumes from either ranch, but I do have a bit of green moss from the Walker. I think
I picked it up on the far southeast corner. A chunk of white matrix with green moss on one half and red moss on the other.
I thought the cabs here with red/orange/green looked like Sonora plume, which has a lot of variety.
Craig