Zee
Full Member
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2013
- Messages
- 201
- Reaction score
- 145
- Golden Thread
- 0
- Detector(s) used
- Garrett AT Pro, Garrett AT Gold, Garrett Infinium, Garrett Pro Pointer(x2), 30" Bazooka Prospector, Scuba Gear
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
My Gramps and his buddy go to Arizona for a month every winter to the Quartzite rock show and pow wow and all that, and to look for gold and rocks. Well this year his buddy couldn't make it (luckily for me!) so when he asked me if I wanted to go I was like Ohhhh Yeah! He is an agate dealer dealing in Lake Superior Agates and he sometimes sets up a booth at the pow wow but he didn't this year. I got back from Afghanistan this last summer and had a few things going on but wasn't planning to go back out to the oilfields until next summer so it was good timing and it was great to get out of the cold up here in MN. We happened to be gone during the coldest time of winter and got back during a warm up so it was perfect.
Anyways! We found a lot of cool rocks, and him being there lots of times and me never being to Arizona I picked up a lot more rock than he did, most of them i would put on the tailgate and it would end up being him asking me "What ya got here! Ohhh? Leverites!" Which got annoying after awhile...but I settled down as I found better stuff and got slightly more picky.
I still haven't unpacked the buckets and ore bags out of my truck, I think I got 5 in there, but here are some I have out already, nothing has been cleaned well, mostly just rinsing.
This is what I think most people call a Desert Rose Agate, one of the better ones I found.
Here are a couple small well-formed pieces, one has a little fire in it. ( I still have a bag full of these in the truck I need to go through)
Here are 3 nice geodes I found in the area we found all the agate nodules. Can't wait to see what the insides look like! Hopefully good!
This is a quartz crystal I found, I wanted to find a nice one so bad! But this is the best one unfortunately. We met a guy when we were out on a GPAA claim that had a beauty! It was literally perfect.
Alright and here is the highlight of the trip, I picked up a few of these one day while we were out rock hunting and just thought they looked cool, like little eggs or marbles. I showed my gramps and he of course was not too impressed (He tells me all the time how he is too spoiled with Lakers to be impressed by much else) But the next day I decided to throw some water in the jar with them and thats when we seen all the little eyes and how you could hold them up to the sunlight and see all the little designs in them, similar to a moss agate from Montana. It was pretty cool! Needless to say we spent about 5 more days at that spot picking up those little things! I just couldn't get enough of them.He seems to think I made a new discovery since no one we talked to knew about them, and him, being an agate dealer has never heard of them. We were told of larger nodules on the Colorado River I think it is, but they are scarce I guess.
Here they are next to my baby lakers. Looks pretty cool.
Heres a close up of a few, these aren't even the best ones, just a couple I had left in the pan I hadn't put in bottles yet.
Some of them have very cool scenes on them with the dendrites, theres some with a crazy amount of eyes and some have banding, lots of different colors and most of them you can't get the full scope of whats inside them without looking through the light, its tough to see the good stuff on the camera. Then some of them you can see designs through them, but they will have a chip on the edge and that design is just completely different from what you can see. Strange. Sorry I wrote so much, I'm just excited about them, they sure are pretty even though they are so small.
Dang, I forgot to show what they come out of, well here it is: It looks to me like they were entombed in some sort of Basalt and due to erosion and whatnot they were freed. Also we looked at numerous other places for them and only found them in one spot, we did find similar shaped nodules in one other area, but none of them were agatized.
And I did find my very first piece of gold (That I didn't buy) ..unfortunately I had it in a small vial in my black sand bucket and it broke.. I just don't know if it is worth the effort to try to retrieve it. I have a bucket full of concentrate from drywashing too I need to get to. Thats what the cold days left this winter will be for I guess.
Thanks for looking, if anyone knows more about the nodules please let me know!
Edit: Also I know they look pretty dirty, this is only a rinse and into the bottle, eventually I will get around to doing something with them but they will look good onthe shelf for now.
Anyways! We found a lot of cool rocks, and him being there lots of times and me never being to Arizona I picked up a lot more rock than he did, most of them i would put on the tailgate and it would end up being him asking me "What ya got here! Ohhh? Leverites!" Which got annoying after awhile...but I settled down as I found better stuff and got slightly more picky.
I still haven't unpacked the buckets and ore bags out of my truck, I think I got 5 in there, but here are some I have out already, nothing has been cleaned well, mostly just rinsing.
This is what I think most people call a Desert Rose Agate, one of the better ones I found.
Here are a couple small well-formed pieces, one has a little fire in it. ( I still have a bag full of these in the truck I need to go through)
Here are 3 nice geodes I found in the area we found all the agate nodules. Can't wait to see what the insides look like! Hopefully good!
This is a quartz crystal I found, I wanted to find a nice one so bad! But this is the best one unfortunately. We met a guy when we were out on a GPAA claim that had a beauty! It was literally perfect.
Alright and here is the highlight of the trip, I picked up a few of these one day while we were out rock hunting and just thought they looked cool, like little eggs or marbles. I showed my gramps and he of course was not too impressed (He tells me all the time how he is too spoiled with Lakers to be impressed by much else) But the next day I decided to throw some water in the jar with them and thats when we seen all the little eyes and how you could hold them up to the sunlight and see all the little designs in them, similar to a moss agate from Montana. It was pretty cool! Needless to say we spent about 5 more days at that spot picking up those little things! I just couldn't get enough of them.He seems to think I made a new discovery since no one we talked to knew about them, and him, being an agate dealer has never heard of them. We were told of larger nodules on the Colorado River I think it is, but they are scarce I guess.
Here they are next to my baby lakers. Looks pretty cool.
Heres a close up of a few, these aren't even the best ones, just a couple I had left in the pan I hadn't put in bottles yet.
Some of them have very cool scenes on them with the dendrites, theres some with a crazy amount of eyes and some have banding, lots of different colors and most of them you can't get the full scope of whats inside them without looking through the light, its tough to see the good stuff on the camera. Then some of them you can see designs through them, but they will have a chip on the edge and that design is just completely different from what you can see. Strange. Sorry I wrote so much, I'm just excited about them, they sure are pretty even though they are so small.
Dang, I forgot to show what they come out of, well here it is: It looks to me like they were entombed in some sort of Basalt and due to erosion and whatnot they were freed. Also we looked at numerous other places for them and only found them in one spot, we did find similar shaped nodules in one other area, but none of them were agatized.
And I did find my very first piece of gold (That I didn't buy) ..unfortunately I had it in a small vial in my black sand bucket and it broke.. I just don't know if it is worth the effort to try to retrieve it. I have a bucket full of concentrate from drywashing too I need to get to. Thats what the cold days left this winter will be for I guess.
Thanks for looking, if anyone knows more about the nodules please let me know!
Edit: Also I know they look pretty dirty, this is only a rinse and into the bottle, eventually I will get around to doing something with them but they will look good onthe shelf for now.
Last edited:
You found mucho stuff
The pebble rocks in the jars look like jelly beans...pretty! Being in NM I'm pretty familiar with some of the things...obsidian & agate....and just love rocks! So.....Thanks for sharing it all with us. 
