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[ToTheSummit]

Life has been absolutely crazy lately.  12+ hour workdays, death of a friend, wife had surgery...you know how it goes.  Anyway, I finally got some time this week to cut up some of the materials I brought home from Utah last month.  Here is the fist of them to make it off the wheels.

This is my October cab contest entry but I figured I'd post it here also.  Snowflake obsidian.  I call it "The Witches Heart".


Yellow feather jasper.  I'll be cutting a lot of this.  Great stuff!



The next two are courtesy of Jay (Sandsave)  He gave me a lot of great materials.

Variscite


A two-sided red horn coral.  This stuff is spectacular!  Can't wait to cut some beads from it!

[Orrum]

Nice,NICE, did I I say NICE!!#!

[irockhound]

Sweet cabs!  I went to one of the Horn Coral locations last year and wow what a hike, 1200 ft vertical and I think final elevation was 7500 ft or so.  Material was in solid Limestone and what a chore to collect it and haul it down the mountain.  Sure makes pretty cabs though.  I could imagine a couple marble makers out there having a field day with material like you have cut.  I mentioned in the monthly contest how pretty that snowflake heart is but I will say it again, great job.

[Greg Hiller]

Steve, I thought the horn coral location was covered up.  When I was in Utah not too long ago someone (in a rock shop I believe) said the state no longer wanted people collecting there and so filled the collection site in. 

[irockhound]

I know there are more knowledgeable people on the forum to answer the question as to the sites as there is more than one.  The site I went to is Rileys Canyon, East of Woodland, Utah.  The elevation is quite high and there was an original site that was under claim (not sure of current status) and it was an area of the deposit that was decomposed so the picking of the horns from the limestone was easy.  Where I went is East and maybe a quarter mile south of the claim and the ridges are limestone with the horns embedded.  I found a couple of the horns that were weathered out and found one that was close to 7 or 8 inches long and 3 to 4 on the widest point but the replacement wasn't very good compared to the smaller pieces.  My friend and I found some boulders that had come down from the ledges into the meadow below and we worked these to free the horns but the Limestone is as hard as the coral so Break it enough and you get lots of tumbling material unless you want to throw the chunk into a bucket of pool acid and let it do the work.  I would love to find out if the decomposed area is back from claim or not or if there is an area with more accessible coral.  I am sure that if we had spent more time on the ridges we would have found a lot more free pieces but it was a long hike up and down each of the 2 days we were there and being the first time we spent most of it trying to locate the area.

There used to be a fire road that leads to the claim and also went thru the area we collected but I think the Forest Service has let this go as the old maps had it but on the ground we could barely make it out.

One nice thing about the acid method was some of the limestone had beautiful but very delicate clam shells that were replaced with Red Agate and these could be saved by the acid removal of the limestone.