Roads are dry and ATV is working great, so trotted up to the Old Military Thunderegg bed this afternoon! I haven't been up here on an ATV in ten years and haven't been up at all since I got the saw, so I went a little bananas.
This is my favorite thunder egg spot. The road is literally built out of immense conglomerate eggs, with more up and down the hill, forwards and back. Some enterprising soul terraced above the road (probably to keep those darn round rocks from rolling down on top of them) and exposed the bed in several places. Apparently they were not interested in eggs, because they left them all behind! I have found one mention of this place in old literature, but it wasn't distinct enough to have pinpointed the location from that alone.
The eggs are basically a match for the "Dutch Donnybrook" eggs, which come from the far side of the ridge a mile or so away. A guy at the Madras rock show had an enormous egg with the same green and red matrix and bulbous from and said it came from some secret place out by Warmsprings.
The lighting was terrible for a cell phone camera so my photos are a bit stark, sorry!
Section of the old road. Notice the juniper poles in the rock wall- they go through and under the road. This road is a section of the Dalles Military Highway, but I don't know if the rockery is original to them. Could be newer, could be older, with the number of folks who used the route from 1860s onward. The road collapsed there when someone tried to grade it a few years back. It's testament to the old road building that a 150+ year old track remained passable by heavy equipment until just recently.
Perlite boulder above the thunder egg layer (what is the relationship between lava, obsidian, tuff, mudflow and thunder eggs? Because they all seem to show up at once.)
View back down the valley.
Eggs!
Big conglomerate boulders of them too.
And weird things in broken eggs.
I do miss my dad's old double-wide milk crate I used to haul rocks around in. Will have to find my own one of those...
Cutting. The matrix is very nearly jasper-hard, so it takes a long... time... to... cut....
And the one that got cut!
Some of the eggs are too big for my saw, so I'll stop by Richardson's one of these days and have them cut there. In all a great trip! This place is a ten minute ATV ride from my house, so I'll be visiting it as often as the roads and hunting program allows. My boss took 6 of his 8 kids up there a week ago and they all got some great eggs. They are new to the rock scene but his kids, counting down from age 12, are just starting to get super excited about rocks. They all came over to see what I was cutting tonight so we did some show and tell with whatever was on the saw table. Good times!
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Topic: Old Military Thunder Egg Outing - image heavy (Read 3272 times)