We had done all the "dry" and comfortable stuff. All of us had sat amongst the cow pies with our little agate collecting buckets and forked sticks, poking around in the dust for treasure. We had slithered under the "bobwire" fences and gotten a seat full of stickers. All of us were tired from trudging up the mountainsides for the rainbow agate (major joke played on readers of an unmentionable set of "Rockhounding in Arizona" booklets) some whiley writer had used to sell a book.
We had gazed at the form of Locomotive Peak trying to figure out what they were thinking when naming it. We needed something to get that a seeker had to really go a long ways for and something a little more exotic. We picked Luna Agate as a target material.
Out came the maps and we took time to study them while we ground away at our little troves of Amydules, those little drips of white agate that sometimes show up imbedded in basalt. We wanted something with a little color in it. Luna Blue sped to the top of the desirables list.
Luna Blue is incredible stuff. It's really blue, and blue is one of the most rare colors of agate. We had to try for this, and it was only about 300 miles away. Imagine the fire in our brains!
Here's a link to what it looks like, and believe me, you want it when you see it. And this field trip was held in June, a full four months after the one we ventured out to the snows in.
.California Federation of Mineral Societies
I came back and patched this broken link. Now the Luna Blue trip is in the archives at the CFMS site. All you need to do is click on the "Field Trips" Button just under the wording for CFMS, at the top of the Header. Then look for the "Archive of Field Trip Photos 2000 to 2005". And there you will find the Luna Blue trip. The pictures aren't as clear, but it shows pretty well what that material looks like.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I’m going through some stuff but I will peek in now and then and will be back when it’s over..