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[lithicbeads]

Packlithic and I spent the week in the Pullman, WA area looking for housing for packlithic. The place looks prosperous until you actually start looking at the housing stock. Quite a large percentage of which is very old, dilapidated trailers. This we knew because goodearth warned us as he is parked over there for a few years while his wife is in school. We also scoped out the area for fishing and birding spots and found an excellent dirt road that runs at the level of the snake river for about 20 miles with nothing but public access. On the way home we stopped at a spot that I used to hound a lot. It has been thirty years and things have sure changed. We went past the diatomaceous earth pits, mines, but they are now gone and replaced with apple orchards on dirt that has been hauled in. That is adjacent to upper Frenchman's coulee. Then we visited the silica pits , which are also diatomaceous earth pits on Silica Road just across from Vantage. The one I used to collect had been reclaimed but not covered. Active mining was occurring across the road. We found about ten pounds of what we came after, small nodules of opal that are similar in shape to Oregon snakeskin agates. The color of the opal is different, more green than the translucent yellow ones that I used to get. But we still got ten pounds in very difficult dank lighting conditions.

[lithicbeads]

After leaving the snake river we drove up onto the plateau in an area known as the Palouse. The Palouse is a couple thousand square miles of topsoil dunes blown there by the prevailing wind. The soil can be as deep as 800 feet and the side hills of the dunes are very steep. Half the area is planted each year and the other half left fallow. The primary crops are wheat, of the winter variety and various dried peas and lentils. It was striking that out of the hundreds of farms we saw we never saw a single farmyard/ household garden. I found that very strange.

[lithicbeads]

We did some birding in upper Frenchman's coulee, adjacent to Dodson Road north of Royal City. There is excellent fishing, with very difficult access and the birding can be worldclass. When I stopped counting how many species of birds I had seen in the US I was over 400. That was a lot of years ago. Packlithic is at about 425 and got at least one life bird on the trip so I think shes probably surpassed the old man, but she cheats because she can hear the damn birds and I have always worked in noisy places and my hearing has always been a problem. What are you going to do with kids. YHBL also know to the rest of the world as Yellow-headed Blackbird seen at Birder's Corner.

[lithicbeads]

The area we collected is 30 miles downstream from the Yellow-headed Blackbird. The are is entirely different than years ago in the sense that many of the areas are mined out and filled back in. In the good old days there was a 40 foot high headwall of opal and agate adjacent to Dodson Rd. The rough there could be absolutely extraordinary., but it was a very dangerous place to collect because when you hit the wall to try to break a piece free a massive amount of opal would fly out of the wall in very sharp shards.  Guaranteed to be cut. the opal is unbelievably brittle, but just as wildly colored. There is no precious opal in this area.  The picture of the coulee includes the collecting area. The collecting area is on the plateau at the top. We found only a few pieces of solid opal that may be bead worthy and huge amounts of the garbage green opal which turns to dust when dried out. We found most of the nodules in the very lightest colored grounds but they are not easy to see. I will be tumbling some tomorrow to get the diatomaceous earth off.

[wampidy]

Looks like a great trip but did you find her a place to live?
Jim

[hummingbirdstones]

Looks like you had a nice trip.  Thanks for the pictures.  I love seeing parts of the country that I've not made it to yet.  Also love that yellow headed blackbird.  Beautiful bird - and also one I haven't seen in person.

[ToTheSummit]

Can't wait to see some of that opal cut.  And thats a great picture you got of the blackbird also.  Thanks for taking us along on another adventure.

[lithicbeads]

We made an offer on a trailer. We have a bit of time so we will see. Precious opal is coming out of the area but I am sure it will take a number of attempts to find the area. Quite a bit of precious opal came out of wells in the area back in the days the wells were dug by hand through the basalt.

[wampidy]

That is about the last job I would want. By hand, well and basalt looks mind numbing and body killing in the same sentence.
Jim

[lithicbeads]

Old time well diggers /miners were tough peopleno matter the type of ground but the basalt folks must have been a breed apart. North of us are some islands that are nothing but mountains of steep pure rock. You blast the roads and house sites out of hard rock. The wells are drilled but there are no sand or gravel layers to stop at for recharge. With basalt  there is a layer of broken crap rock , the entablature, between each flow maybe two hundred feet apart. Water in basalt terrain moves primarily in the entablature so you have a natural reservoir to stop a wells descent. In solid rock  the well is drilled and a large explosive charge is detonated at the bottom. This collects water seeping through the mostly solid rock. Wells can last as little as ten years before gunking up. The flow can be well under a gallon a minute so wells are often set to pump constantly at a very low rate to fill an above ground tank. Most well pumps wear out from too many starts so if you can find the sweet spot  running the pump constantly seems to be better.On this island of glacial outwash the ground water rises and drops with the tide. Many old farms had wells that necessitated dropping everything when the tide was in and bail the well as it would have no standing water at low tide. I read once that this 50 mile long island has about 60 billion tons of pressure put on the tide lands from low to high tide and that squeezes the whole island tremendously.

[gemfeller]

We made an offer on a trailer. We have a bit of time so we will see. Precious opal is coming out of the area but I am sure it will take a number of attempts to find the area. Quite a bit of precious opal came out of wells in the area back in the days the wells were dug by hand through the basalt.

I don't know anything about current precious opal production in that area but there's a very interesting (to me, at least) little booklet about the original Pullman-area discoveries.  It's "The Moscow Opal Mines, 1890 to 1893" by Ron Brockett.  I picked a copy up in a rock shop years ago and it may possibly still be in print. 

It's quite an interesting saga of greedy human nature, claim-jumping and shady legal maneuvering over what many thought was an opal bonanza.  The "boom" fizzled out when miners faced the  reality that mining the precious opal economically was virtually impossible.  That's because it was deposited inside cavities made by gas bubbles in hard basalt. 

Years ago I dug in a similar deposit in the Owyhees.  It was under claim by the Boise Gem Club as the Whangdoodle Opal Mine and it appears to still be in operation from what I've read on line.  My opal mania was quickly extinguished by bloody knuckles and frustration.  I found it almost impossible to remove the opal from the much harder basalt surrounding it.  There's a similar deposit in Mexico that produces what's known as Black Leopard Opal.  It contains enough precious opal so it can be cut "in matrix," with the black basalt creating a nice background for the opal's play of color.   

[lithicbeads]

There was a great opal in basalt find in the Greenwater near Mt. Rainier years ago. It actually was down near the highway and a number of big very bright black opals came out . Off limits after a few years through no fault of the very careful people who collected there.

[GoodEarth]

I would like to see that pamphlet! Living a minute from Moscow ID, so any local history is interesting!

[gemfeller]

I would like to see that pamphlet! Living a minute from Moscow ID, so any local history is interesting!

Based on my quick search it appears to be out of print and not available except for a couple of used copies I found for sale at nearly $300 each -- a bit steep for 63-pages, roughly five bucks a page.  But I have a hunch you can find a copy at either the Washington State U. library or the U. of Idaho library. 

[LithicStrings]

Its available at the WSU library
At UW library it is in the special collections. I can't tell from the catalog whether the WSU copy is circulating or not, but its there