Saturday called for the first rockhound field trip in 2010 for the Idaho Rock and Gem club.
The club met in Nampa at 7:30, but my boys and I decided to go at the last minute (7:45 Saturday). We ended up finding the club out in the field at the Queenstone claim - a jasper site just off highway 95 south. A lot of people showed up.
It was a beautiful day in Boise, but an icy wind was blowing at the site. A little bit of a tough start - not too bad though.
The first thing we did was march right on up past all the rock hunters and checked out the nearest, largest rock formation. There were veins of jasper throughout the old rock stacks, but most were thin and not worth the effort of picking out. Much of the jasper at this spot was brownish in color - sometimes green. Most of the good stuff must have been stuck in rock that had long since eroded away and deposited on (or under) the ground - but where?
We climbed back down, which was a bit harrowing at times, and then meandered about the hills checking out the rocks on the ground. We kind of swept back and forth across the small hills, looking for clues. The place had been picked over really good, but I ended up developing a theory that panned out pretty good for us.
I ended up finding a line pattern of the little stuff, the stuff people would leave on the ground. Jordan and I followed this pattern over the hill and hit a pretty darn good trail, once we got away from the crowd. We found blue, green, and auburn colored jasper, some of it mixed together. Very pretty stuff. Jordan found a small piece on the ground that will make an amazing cabochon - it has two strands of gold flowing through a blue medium. Most of the good stuff we found was seriously embedded in rock - a softer volcanic matrix, but still far more tougher than bare hands. We had not come prepared. We still managed to retrieve some of the nicer jasper by smashing the rocks with larger rocks - neanderthal-style!
After a few hours, the party packed up and went down the road a ways to one of very few fire opal claim called Wang Doodle. This opal was teany tiny stuff coming out of the bubbles in red volcanic rock - you know... the really rough rock that has lots of larger air bubbles in it. Well, sometimes these bubbles are not filled with air or gas, they are filled with chalcedony - usually agate, sometimes opal, and much more rarely - fire opal. Again, we were not prepared. We had shovels and a rake and turned up more than a few rocks, but we did not have a pick to break the opals out of the rock. Still, we had some fun and even found a few small opals that had some really nice fire to them!
eventually, we picked up and headed for home. Here is the rather small pile of jasper in the rough. Most of it is the brownish-green stuff that we pick up from the ground. But if you look close you can see some of the good stuff in there too.
When Sunday rolled around, I couldn't help myself, I just had to see what it would like polished. I took one of the smaller shard of the blue stuff that had broken off from my caveman smashes and turned out this rather nice teardrop...
If my sister is reading this, I'm still waiting to get at my Christmas rocks - I need to buy a new saw blade for the rock saw - about $175.
Also, just so everyone out there doesn't think that I'm a total slacker, I did install a new storm door. It wasn't all fun and games over the weekend ;)
It was cold. Really cold. A strong, icy wind was blowing hard and the outside temperature was a frigid 27 degrees.
