An Offer to Visit a Chrysoprase Mine

It happened that my friend Randy Polk, a top jewelry artist, was at a show looking for gem material with “gumdrop colors.” He found a dealer selling fine chrysoprase stone. The dealer also owned the chrysoprase mine and was looking for someone to help with publicity.

Randy told him about the articles I was doing for Rock and Gem. The owner, Ellie Christianos, got in touch with me and offered to bring Carol and me to Australia to visit the mine and write about it.

It took me a few seconds to say “Yes!”

Two months later we were at the mine.

Australian Chrysoprase

It may have been used by the ancients but the first productive deposit was opened in the Middle Ages in what is now Poland. This is the world’s largest deposit of chrysoprase which occurred in the ultramafic rocks which were the source of the nickel that gives chrysoprase its lovely green color.

The chrysoprase you see today is mainly from Queensland. That’s because the better chrysoprase deposits are in Australia in Queensland in the east and Kookynie near Kalgoorlie in the west.

The deposit near Kookynie was working full bore when I was there but the last I heard it is involved in legal matters and not producing. The mine is in the far Outback about 100 kilometers east of Perth.

Arriving in Australia

Carol and I were met at the Perth airport by Ellie’s lawyer who checked us into an elegant hotel before he took us to Ellie’s penthouse overlooking the Swan River.

After a day in Perth, we were flown to Kalgoorlie, a big gold camp with gorgeous Victorian-style buildings. The gold mine, an open pit and underground workings, was still operating. There our guide rented a car for the two-hour drive out to the mine, dodging kangaroos and emus on the way!

The road was dirt and crossed the outback desert. Many vehicles in the outback have what is called a “roo bar,” a heavy large steel fence-like bumper on the front to protect it from impact with kangaroos or cattle.

Chrysoprase, which is chalcedony with an assortment of nickel salts in it to give it a green color, formed in the thick veins of rock that make up the entire hill. Most of the rock is iron oxide goethite that’s not hard, so mining was relatively simple. They did not use explosives only a D-8 Caterpillar bulldozer with a huge ripping hook or finger on the back.

The ‘cat’ would traverse the hill up one side and down the other ripping up rocks veined with green chalcedony chrysoprase.

Following the ‘Cat’

The rocks were loaded with veins of green chalcedony that were broken into chunks by the dozer. The miners just followed behind the dozer with a hammer and buckets to gather the loose chunks of the green gem. In this way, they had mined tons of chrysoprase and the hill showed no signs of running out of gem material.

To collect, Carol and I followed the ‘cat’ picking and choosing the better dark green specimens and chipping off chunks of the better gem specimens. The only problem I had was choosing which pieces to pick up keeping in mind we were flying back to the U.S.

Once collected by miners, the gem-filled buckets of material were hauled off to another area of the camp and spread out for ease of sorting according to color and quality. The very best gem pieces were set aside for later pricing. The pieces of only good to average color were left in the open and priced lower.

I was told that area held no less than 10 tons of rough waiting for sorting and sale.

Choosing Specimens

When Carol and I had filled our collecting buckets, we took them back to camp and washed the specimens so we could sort through them. I set aside only the better pieces and returned the rest to the company stash. Later I returned to the hill and did more collecting in the untouched areas to get a better idea of the deposit and the material.

Ellie had already told us we could help ourselves. When I finally had what I thought was a fair amount of the best gem rough, I thanked Ellie. He expressed surprise at the small amount of gem chrysoprase I had.

When I mentioned my luggage problem, he offered to ship everything to me in Arizona so we added a bit more and he shipped it all.

I did spend some time walking around the area and noted several prospect holes where earlier prospectors had checked the deposit. It was pretty obvious the area was rich in potential as there were veins of chrysoprase exposed.

Visiting an Australian Pub

One evening, the miners asked if we wanted to go to a local pub. They piled us into a big 4×4 with a roobar and off we went at breakneck speed across the desert.

If there was a road I could not see it. We pulled up in front of a shack with a rusty corrugated metal roof and a single gas pump in front. This shack was the pub.

The building had two rooms separated by a liquor bar between them that faced into both rooms. Each side of the bar had four stools occupied by the dirtiest-looking miners I’ve ever seen. They worked in the local gold mine where the dirt and rocks are a rich brick red color. Water was scarce so washing was a sometimes thing. They were great guys, very friendly. They couldn’t stop telling stories and tales. One of them had just married off his daughter so he had to tell us all about the parade and wedding which was interesting in such a desolate area. A couple of dart boards hung on the wall and one wall had a heavy black line painted on it which was the high water mark when they had a rare rain storm. We had quite an evening there!

Chrysoprase Buyers

Another day a buyer from China showed up and spent a lot of time walking over the material in the sorting area. He was looking to make a big purchase. I learned they had two factories in China with about 7,000 women at lapidary machines carving objects of green chrysoprase, which I suspect was passed off as “jade.” I was amazed when he placed an order for 55 tons of the low-to-medium-grade chrysoprase.

When we left Western Australia we stayed in Sidney as Ellie’s guests. We checked out the zoo and the famous opera house then flew on to Hawaii for three days. When Carol and I got home, we immediately shared the chrysoprase with folks in our mineral club and gave the best pieces to Randy Polk who had gotten us the invitation. All in all, it was quite a rock hound trip!

This story about chrysoprase stone previously appeared in Rock & Gem magazine. Click here to subscribe. Story by Bob Jones.

The post Finding Chrysoprase Stone in Australia first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

Following Trends

While it may have just one rockhound symbol, North Dakota can take pride in knowing it was one of the early states to designate such a symbol. Rockhound author June Culp Zeitner, encouraged the practice starting in the early 1960s, with articles in bulletins of the American and Midwest Federations of Mineralogical Societies. Fanned by June’s efforts, five states designated a state mineral, rock, or fossil in 1965.

Two more states followed suit in 1966, then eight more — including North Dakota—jumped on the bandwagon in 1967. Now, nearly every state in the union has at least one rockhound symbol.

Teredo Petrified Wood

Teredo petrified wood gives fossil collectors a twofer. It is both a fossil and a trace fossil. What we commonly call a fossil is basically a body fossil. It’s a fossilized body part such as a tooth, skull, bone or shell. A trace fossil is just what the name implies, it’s a trace of a creature that lived long ago, for example, footprints, scat or burrows. Teredo petrified wood is a fossil of varied wood species (ginkgo, metasequoia, bald cypress, etc.).

During the Paleocene Epoch, 60 million years ago, logs of such trees became driftwood, floating in an inland ocean called the Cannonball Sea. Such logs served as a home base for small, worm-like Teredo clams that bored into them with rasping shells that left long tunnels or trace fossils. These subsequently filled with sediments of what has been named the Cannonball formation.

This formation represents the last inland sea to cover North Dakota. Its sediments may be found in the areas immediately around and southwest of the cities of Bismarck and Mandan.

Revealing Sea Life

When petrified Teredo wood is cut and slabbed, you often can see outlines of the clamshells as tiny white crescents within the elongated in-filled tubes they carved. Similar petrified wood from Australia is commonly referred to as peanut wood.

Throughout history, sailors have cursed such so-called shipworms for the damage they did to wooden sailing vessels. Today, fossil collectors appreciate the intricate designs they left in petrified wood.

This story about Teredo petrified wood previously appeared in Rock & Gem magazine. Click here to subscribe! Story by Jim Brace-Thompson.

The post What is Teredo Petrified Wood? first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

Exactly when humans first arrived in places like the Americas and Australia is the subject of vigorous debate. Some believe humans made their way to the isolate+d island continent of Australia as far back as 65,000 years ago, but concrete evidence confirming a date-of-arrival has been frustratingly elusive. Now one group of researchers writing in the journal Geology believes they’ve found evidence of human habitation written in stone.

Argon-Argon Dating And Oral Histories

Aboriginal peoples of Australia have an oral tradition of passing down stories across generations. These stories could be some of the oldest in the world. One such story, told by the Gunditmjara people living near the Budj Bim Volcanic Complex in the southeastern Australian state of Victoria, seems to refer to volcanic eruptions. Yet, the Budj Bim Volcanic Complex has long been dormant.

A team of researchers, including Erin Matchan (University of Melbourne), examined samples of some of the oldest volcanic rocks from Budj Bim using sophisticated argon-argon dating methods and arrived at a date of 37,000 years old. In the course of their research, her team also ran across a reference to a stone ax that had been found 76 years ago beneath a layer of volcanic ash in yet another area known as the Tower Hill Volcanic Complex. Dating volcanic rocks from that area also delivered the date of 37,000 years. Thus, with oral traditions that seem to describe erupting volcanoes and a human artifact, these scientists believe they have found concrete geochronological evidence in the rocks confirming human habitation in Australia for tens of thousands of years.

Some, however, are saying the evidence is merely “suggestive without being conclusive.” If indeed eruptions had been witnessed by ancient peoples at Budj Bim, they could have occurred much more recently.

Although the first eruptions here took place 37,000 years ago, the last eruptions before the volcanoes went dormant have date back 8,000 years. Previous estimates of the age of that stone ax at Tower Hill also put it at a much younger age of between 4,000 and 6,000 years. And so the debate continues!

The post Earth Science In the News: Volcano Indicator of Early Society? first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

Deep in the Southwestern Australia outback is the Beta Hunt nickel mine. It is located in the Kambolda district, and is owned and operated by RNC Minerals. For years the mine has produced significant quantities of nickel-metal ore and gold as a second ore.

The mine is about 400 miles (630 km) from Perth in what is known as the Kalgoorlie Goldfields, which since the late 1800s has yielded millions of dollars in gold. When I visited Kalgoorlie, I was impressed by its lovely Victorian-style buildings.

Discovery of the Deposit

The Beta Hunt nickel deposit was discovered in 1966 in the Norseman-Wiluna greenstone belt rich in many metal deposits. The host rocks at the Beta Hunt mine consist of ultramafic rocks with talc-carbonate and serpentine formations. The ores occur in more or less parallel veins rich in nickel with minor amounts of recoverable gold.

Nickel, number 28 on the Periodic Table of Elements, is important in steelmaking and has many uses beyond stainless steel and armor plate production. It is a minor component in some foods and important in the electrical industry for making batteries and household items like toasters and ovens.

Little did the miners at the Beta Hunt deposit realize while mining nickel ore in 2018 they would suddenly be converted from being nickel miners to gold miners. It started on Father’s Day 2018 when a quartz vein rich in gold was encountered during mining. Examples of gold suitable as specimens were recovered. But that find only proved to be a preview of what was to become in September of that year. Working the same vein at the 1600-foot level, a real golden treasure, some call it a miracle, was revealed.

The miracle discovery happened when miner Henry Dole, was doing his job of drilling and blasting the vein when the blast he set off exposed an amazing sight once the dust and gases cleared. Instead of just another pile of fractured and broken nickel ore, he saw a huge pile of broken white quartz with bright yellow crystalline gold sticking out! He had exposed a white quartz vein loaded with native gold, a true miracle.

Bringing the Lode to the Surface

As one would expect, the miners set about bringing the rich gold lode to the surface. Huge chunks of gold shot through white quartz were carried away and hoisted out. Some pieces were two and three feet across, and it took two or three men to carry and prepare them for hoisting. The largest piece weighed in at nearly 200 pounds with gold aplenty, while another big chunk weighed in at 132 pounds. It took four days to clean out the quartz vein. The miners estimated the gold-rich area they had mined measured about 10 by 10 feet.

The find caused an immense stir in the camp as officials tried to figure out how much gold they had and what to do with it. Should the gold ore go to the crusher or be saved as specimen gold? The Beta Hunt RNC officials showed great foresight. Rather than destroying these glittering treasures, they chose to preserve them as specimens. This meant the specimens had to be prepared for the museum and specimen market so folks could enjoy them for centuries to come. Preparation meant that as much quartz as possible had to be removed to expose as much gold as possible.

As for values, it was possible to determine the gold content of the quartz gold, but this was complicated by the sheer size of some of the quartz pieces. One commonly used method is to x-ray the specimen since the metallic gold would show up as a black image in a gray rock background. But mines don’t make a practice of having x-rays machines on the premises. The next best method is to use specific gravity testing to get a close estimate of gold content. This technique could be done right in the mine. Each specimen was checked by specific gravity testing and estimates of the gold content were made.

The totals were breathtaking as the gold retrieved from that 10 by 10-foot area pocket was estimated to contain something around 9,000 ounces of the yellow metal. Even at a conservative estimate, that’s not bad for four days’ work. Just using the spot price of gold as a guide they estimated they had something like $15 million in gold on their hands (see the accompanying chart). Security at the mine was immediately increased. This answered the question of smelter or specimen market. The latter was an obvious choice.

Greek Gravity History

If you are not familiar with the specific gravity test, it was the brainchild of the Greek Archimedes who was born in Syracuse, Sicily, in 287 BCE. As a brilliant mathematician, he worked on many problems, one of which resulted in his discovery of specific gravity testing.

Archimedes was asked to determine if a gold crown made for King Hebron was pure gold or if the maker substituted silver for some of the gold and made a cheaper gold-silver alloy crown. The problem stumped Archimedes, but legend has it, one day while taking a bath, he realized the amount of water his body displaced might be the solution.

According to legend, he leaped out of the bath and ran naked down the street shouting “Eureka, I found it!” That seems unlikely, but what he did discover was by submerging an object in water, the amount of water displaced sets up a ratio between the actual weight of the object in the air and the weight of the water displaced.

The purity of the gold caused minor variations in the results, but this is still an easy way to check what we call the specific gravity of an object.

When the folks at Beta Hunt started checking the quartz-gold specimens, they were, to say the least, pleased! The nearly 200-pound piece, which required three or four men to lift and carry, was checked and estimated to hold about 2,300 ounces of gold. Now, I’m no mathematician, but by multiplying that number by the current spot price of gold, which has been fluctuating between $1,200 and $1,500 an ounce, I get an amazing result. The Beta Hunt staff also calculated the 132-pound quartz piece to hold 1,600 ounces of gold.

Single Super-Size or A Bunch of Chunks

But now that they knew the value of the gold, a second problem arose. Was the gold all one piece or just a bunch of small chunks scattered throughout the quartz? The larger the gold piece is in the quartz, the rarer and more valuable a display specimen it would be. Did they only have a lot of small specimens, or was the gold in each specimen connected? By removing the quartz was the gold going to fall out in pieces, or could it be exposed as a single spectacular array of the yellow metal?

Did the bigger specimens contain a few big museum-size pieces? One could send the specimens to the crusher and retrieve the thousands of ounces of gold and melt it into bars. Doing that would be easy, but would make every mineral collector and museum curator, including this writer, cringe and holler, NO!

Fortunately, cool heads at Beta Hunt-RNC prevailed and as it was realized that by submitting each specimen to a preparation laboratory, much of the quartz could be removed exposing as much of the gold as possible, which would make each specimen more saleable and valuable while creating something to behold when on display! But that raised another problem.

One can’t see inside the quartz to find where the gold is or if all the gold is connected as one huge piece or is many disconnected small gold fragments. This is vital information so when one starts removing the quartz, the gold would stay together or would simply fall apart into smaller specimens as the quartz was removed. Ideally, the gold should be preserved as one spectacular piece.

To be sure, one of the larger specimens was finally shipped out to be x-rayed. Surprise, X-raying didn’t work. Instead of getting an x-ray picture showing the quartz as gray and gold as black images, the resulting picture was virtually all black. Eureka! Gold was everywhere! Now, what does one do? Not to worry.

There is another far less definitive method to determine if the gold is all connected, or a bunch of random fragments locked in and sticking out of the quartz. It is called an electrical conductivity test. When I worked as a car mechanic, we used two battery-powered electrical probes to find breaks in the wiring. That also works on hidden gold.

By touching gold sticking out of quartz, in two different exposed places, it’s possible to determine if they are connected. From that, you gradually draw a rough map of the interior of the quartz, which will help guide the expert in specimen preparation to start chipping, grinding or sandblasting away the quartz. This is all very time consuming but is a useful last resort in such instances.

Marketing the Gold

Once the decision was made to sell the gold as specimens, rather than smashing it into smelter feed, the company had a final problem of shipping the gold to the specimen lab in Denver for preparation by experts. As of this writing, the preparation work has finally begun, and we will report as things progress.

Another question to consider: once prepared for sale, how will these amazing

gold specimens be marketed? The mining company certainly was not equipped to get into the specimen sales market. So, RNC Beta Hunt decided to choose a couple of reputable mineral experts to do that for them. One well-known dealer company chosen to market the gold in quartz collector specimens is Unique Minerals. This group is highly regarded and regularly attend all of the major shows. Unique Minerals was also of great help in supplying information, data, and photos to this writer as I wrote this article. Maybe that’s because Unique Minerals is owned by Marc Miterman and my son Evan Jones, whom many readers know. A second dealer, Dr. Peter Megaw, was also chosen to represent the company.

Many people know Peter as the chairman of the Special Exhibit at the famous Tucson Gem and Mineral Show™. Be sure and look for any of these fellows as you attend the major shows in 2020, and enjoy the opportunity to view specimens from the amazing Father’s Day miracle of 2018.

We concluded this three-part series on gold in the March 2020 issue, as we describe the wonderful collection of crystallized gold from the Breckenridge area of Colorado in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. You’ll learn about “Tom’s Baby” and the story of Colorado’s most unusual gold specimen.

The post Famous Gold Part II: Thousands Of Ounces of Gold Come to Light ‘Down Under first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

No. I’m not suggesting you take a big old hole in the ground out for a round of drinks and romance. Rather, I’m talking about Yarrabubba crater in Western Australia and a recent calibration of its age.

The state of Western Australia is home to the so-called Yilgarn craton, considered one of the oldest intact pieces of Earth’s crust. Due to plate tectonics, water, and weathering, our crust is constantly being recycled and reshaped. While you may be able to see a billion-year-old crater on the surface of the Moon or Mercury, here on Earth such ancient structures are more likely than not to have been morphed, subducted, or erased long ago and eroded beyond recognition.

Exploring an Ancient Crater

But there are certain areas of continents called cratons that are older than old and fairly stable. Such is Yilgarn. Within the Yilgarn craton, northeast of the city of Perth is Yarrabubba meteor crater with a width of nearly 45 miles.

As if that isn’t impressive enough, in the January 2020 issue of the journal Nature Communications, researchers reported the crater also now is considered the oldest on Earth, clocking in at a whopping 2.229 billion years! They made the determination by dating rocks that recrystallized after impact. And the story gets even more interesting.

Given the size of the crater, as much as 200 trillion kilograms of water vapor and dust could have been shot into the atmosphere, warming our entire planet. It just so happens that the newly calibrated date of 2.2 billion years puts the impact right at the end of a global period of glaciation known as the Huron Ice Age. Did the bolide that carved out Yarrabubba also end an ancient Ice Age?

The post Earth Science In the News: Dating the Oldest Crater on Earth first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

My first experience of Lava Plains (North Queensland, Australia) was around 1985, when a local farmer allowed ‘friends of friends’ to wander around certain areas of his holdings, camp in a rough shelter used for putting out cattle lick in the summer, and randomly pick up bits of sapphire and anything else shiny wherever we saw it.

Hailing from Cairns (tropical locale considered the gateway to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef), our winter clothes consisted of tracksuits, jeans, and a spray jacket. We arrived at Lava Plains in July, full of enthusiasm for a weeks’ holiday spent alone in the bush with the promise of treasure to be found.

Venturing Into the Plains

The weather was clear, with bright, glorious sunshine and by nightfall, it was absolutely freezing. So much so we went to bed with the sun every night, wearing every garment we could fit on, under every blanket that we had bought, huddled together like a litter of puppies until the morning. The days were only marginally warmer and the only skin to see the light of day was on our hands; quite a shock to our tropical blood. It became one of those ‘remember the time’ family legends that we recall quite clearly some 30 years later, and not because of the gemstones which were scarce and poor quality. It is probably no surprise that it took us a long while to gather our courage to return for another go.

In 2016, with most of our party being new to fossicking (the Australian and New Zealand term for prospecting), we decided to try our luck with sapphires again and planned a long weekend trip to the Lava Plains fossicking area. We had done a lot of research into where to go and what to look for and felt we had a good chance of success this time around. What was unexpected on this particular weekend, was that working in a red soil area in the rain is a challenge in itself.

Not only was it cold and damp, but wet red soil becomes like glue on the bottom of everything — tyres (tires) shoes, buckets etc., and just builds up as you move, making you taller and your feet heavier with each step. After a couple of fruitless hours, we grudgingly admitted that Mother Nature had beaten us as the wash was impossible to dig or sieve. So we retreated, gemless, about 115km back to the Ravenshoe Highway to Innot Hot Springs to stay at the caravan park. It is fair to say that our second experience at Lava Plains wasn’t terribly encouraging either, and just as uncomfortable as the first, albeit for a different reason.

Focused Fossicking

However, not to pass up a weekend of fossicking, we headed to Mount Gibson, a few kilometers to the north of the caravan park, to look for topaz crystals on the hilltops of the old Patricia and Glittering Star mines. Mid-year in this area is really cold (by tropical standards), so the biggest drawcard of the Innot Hot Springs Caravan Park is the swimming pools that have heated water pumped from the local hot thermal spring. Being able to relax in the heated pools after a long day digging for topaz is just what the doctor ordered and it doesn’t get much better than that, sapphires or no sapphires.

Lava Plains is the general permission fossicking area on Lava Plains Station and the only known sapphire field in the district. Previously camping was permitted near the fossicking site, but the current landowner has disallowed camping for the usual reasons. Lava Plains is within the geological McBride Basalt Province. The area has a heavy covering of basalt rocks associated with the volcanic activity that formed the Undara Lava Tubes on Mt Surprise Station to the west. There has been considerable controversy over the geological formation of the sapphire-bearing areas in Australia, with theories that were proven in one field being soundly shot down on a neighboring field. The following excerpt from a lecture given in 2003 by Jim Elliott of Coolamon Pty Ltd, who extensively mined Aussie sapphire fields in Central and North Queensland, states:

“The conventional theory has it that the formation of the Central Queensland and the Lava Plains sapphire resources is the result of major extrusions or emissions from large volcanic sources and that the sapphire was subsequently transported by large river systems and deposited in the areas where it is currently mined today.

As a result of observations during some 20 years of mining on the Central Queensland Gemfields and five years on the Lava Plains field, I believe this theory to be totally incorrect.

I believe that the sapphire was produced from a large number of smaller vents which are located throughout the sapphire producing areas and that the sapphire never moves any significant distance from its point of origin at the surface.”

Understanding ‘Water-Worn’ Sapphire

He goes on to propose the ‘water-worn’ sapphire was actually created in that shape and appearance whilst being formed, rather than from the abrasive action on crystals traveling in streams or rivers for long periods of time. His theory makes a lot of logical sense. If you wish to research this matter further, consider: http://www.australiansapphire.com/sapphire_formation_theory.htm

The locality at the center of our research has been a prime cattle-raising area since

the mid-1800’s. The German explorer, Ludwig Leichardt, traveled through the region in 1846 and on reaching the top of the range to the east of the fossicking area, found a bountiful valley with abundant water and good grass. Leichardt named it Valley of Lagoons and today it is a cattle station of that name. He blazed a tree with his initials on the spot where he first saw the valley.

The author of a story in the Brisbane newspaper The Week wrote in 1908 “It (the tree) was burned down by a man who was not interested in the historical association.” Leichardt undertook this exploratory expedition from Brisbane, up the coast of Queensland, across Cape York and finally along the eastern coast of the Northern Territory ending at Port Essington, north of Darwin.

This remarkable trek, on foot and horseback, covered 4800 km of untouched wilderness and took 14 months. Government authorities had given up hope, believing the party to have perished on a route as the terrain is extreme, food in short supply along the way and the local Aboriginal people often hostile.

Locating the Lava Plains

Lava Plains is about 200 km southwest of Cairns via Atherton, on the Atherton Tablelands, then through Ravenshoe and Mt Garnet. After leaving Mt Garnet, travel 62 km on the Kennedy Developmental Road towards Hughenden where you will meet the Gulf Developmental Road turnoff heading west to Normanton and Karumba. There is an old gravel pit and a toilet block here where caravans often camp for a night or just stop for a cuppa. Continue on the Kennedy Developmental Road another 35 km to Lava Plains Station.

The fossicking area is on the left-hand side of the highway, marked only with a small sign in a clearing and I’m pretty sure we have overshot it on every visit. There is a parking area with a locked gate to stop vehicular access to the mine road, which is wide and well maintained (albeit very rocky and uneven to walk on), leading through the permitted fossicking area to a privately-owned mining lease. Entry to this lease is not permitted, especially after the lease owners lost most of their mining camp and equipment to serious theft.

The parking area has a turnstile that gives you enough room to squeeze yourself and a wheelbarrow through, and from there it is a 15-20 minute walk to the fossicking area of Wyandotte Creek.

Again, we decided to do a couple of days fossicking for sapphire at Lava Plains over the July long weekend in 2017. Being a good three-hour drive from home, we thought we would give Pinnarendi Station Stay and Cafe a go as our base camp. I contacted Nadine Atkinson on their Facebook page to book our sites, and as we had become a party of seven or eight vehicles who wanted to camp together, she was very obliging in giving us the larger sites so we could all fit comfortably.

Appealing Accommodations

The camping areas are so new that they were running cables for power and water infrastructure the day we arrived, with trenches and conduits having to be negotiated with care. There is a new amenities block that was yet not operational, but we all managed to share the one toilet/shower room with all the other campers/caravanners, which was a surprising number for a very new enterprise. The cafe offers coffee and morning tea/brunch, and a home-style hot meal every night if you book it in the morning. Saturday night is traditionally wood-fired sourdough pizzas, amazing gourmet varieties made while you watch, all you can eat for $20, and you can be sure some of the young men in our party got their money’s worth. Altogether, I would highly recommend Pinnarendi and we plan to stay there again.

But, let’s get back to sapphires. We made the 45-minute drive from Pinnarendi towards Greenvale to Lava Plains on the first and third days of our trip, with the middle day being a trip to O’Briens’ Creek for topaz.

I am an avid ‘specker’ myself and find that I pick up as much colour as the die-hard dig-and-sieve brigade, which makes me a bit unpopular at times. Specking is the Aussie term for walking around a likely digging site with your eyes glued to the ground, picking up stones that have been overlooked by others or that have been exposed by heavy rain.

Gems like topaz, sapphire, agate and opal are often found by this method because they are shiny or colourful, and some surprisingly impressive stones are found on a regular basis.

Fossicking Process

It did appear as though the creek where we were digging had been commercially mined in places at various times, which means that finding the original gem-bearing wash is almost impossible and the majority of the good stones are gone.

It has been said that the mining machinery was designed to catch only the bigger stones and in theory, there should be gem-quality smaller stones that escaped the process remaining to be found by fossickers. The ground is very rocky, and the soil hard-packed and difficult to extract from between the boulders. Once in the sieve, the dark wash contains a lot of clay clods which must be broken apart for inspection, so it is by no means an easy field to work.

Having a supply of water to wash the gravel would have made the process much easier, but the creeks are all dry in the winter months and the fossicking area too inaccessible to consider carting water with us. All of our party are keen bush-campers and we just really enjoyed being out in the fresh air, sunshine, and bushland, with the hard yakka being part of the appeal.

Overall, we had an enjoyable five or six hours each visit, with all of us acquiring a spoonful of green or blue chips and bigger flawed bits, a deep cobalt blue being the Lava Plains predominant shade. Only one stone, found by my son-in-law, was a possible gem-quality cutter.

It is amazing how the trip walking back to the cars in the afternoon, although mostly downhill, always seems much more tedious than the one going uphill in the morning.

I had collected my haul of gems in a small glass jar. On our last day, as I was heaving my weary bones into our Landcruiser to leave, the jar dropped from my hand, landed neatly on the rockslider bar, smashed to smithereens in the long grass and I lost the lot. So if you ever visit Lava Plains, remember to have a quick speck around the carpark and you might be lucky.

Memories Created, Valuable Lessons Learned

I have always felt that fossicking is a game of chance, and like gambling, becomes

addictive. Being enthusiastic gem-hunters, I know we will return to Lava Plains for years to come, as ‘you just never know what you might find’ despite our previous experiences. Good stones have and still do, come from this field.

In mid-2016, as our families traveled through Mt. Surprise topaz-hunting, we stopped at the Gem Den, one of the local rock shops, where Leigh’s son bought a lovely blue Lava Plains faceted sapphire for the centre stone of the engagement ring for his future wife (Jenni’s daughter), thus Lava Plains has a lot of memories and good associations for us.

The Gem Den has a large range of beautiful local and imported, cut and rough gems of all sorts and quality ready-made jewelry for sale, well worth a look if you are passing through and you could get yourself a little, quality piece of Australia as a souvenir to remember your visit.

The post Lava Plains first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

An intricate cluster of minerals from the mines of Nambia, an Imperial Topaz and a hefty 40-ounce gold nugget known as ‘Lightning Bolt,’ are among the 224 lots in the Nature & Science Signature Auction Heritage Auctions will present Aug. 18.

In addition to the variety of rocks, gems, and minerals on offer in this sale, I’m excited to see the sale is set for live stream presentation through Heritage Live! That means we can also tune to watch as the bidding battles unfold in real time. If you’ve never been to an estate auction or the like, and have a little time on Aug. 18, I would recommend tuning in to catch a glimpse of the rock and gemstone auction action.

With that, I selected six specimens from this upcoming auction that caught my attention, for various reasons. Remember, this is only half a dozen items, and they are some of the pieces that I find intriguing. I’d love to hear what you think about the specimens in the auction and your opinion of rock, gem, and mineral auctions in general. Post your comments below or email me directly at arahn@beckett.com.

After reading many accounts of significant discoveries and dig experiences within the Kelly Mine of New Mexico, it didn’t surprise me to learn this example of Smithsonite hails from that mine. The crystallization that appears across much of the face of the mineral has a honeycomb quality, as aptly described in the auction catalog. While it is a zinc carbonate mineral, it composition often includes other elements. The presence of other elements is what causes the vibrant variety of color present within examples of Smithsonite. According to www.minerals.net, this mineral was named after James Smithson, founder of the Smithsonian Institution.

Considerable in size (Nearly 12 inches by 9 ¼) this section of Argentinian Rhodochrosite is quite thin (less than 1 inch wide). However, as the auction catalog states, it has the ‘bonus of being polished on both sides.’ I like the appearance of a stalactite pattern, not to mention the interesting shade of pink. The slab also features a border boasting a combination of gold and gray coloring. Plus, an interesting element of this piece is the presence of ‘holes’ that appear throughout the specimen. Naturally occurring, they not only add dimension, but they also leave me wondering what may have nestled in those holes over time. This piece was discovered in the Capillitas Mine, located in the Andalgalá Department, within the Catamarca district of Argentina. This mining district is well known for having evidence of this manganese carbonate mineral commonly called ‘Inca Rose.’

This specimen caught my attention right away, although I couldn’t tell you what it was that drew me in. Then I read the lot description and the words ominous and eerie were used to describe the appearance of this slab of Petrified Palm Wood. I would agree both words are interesting and applicable word choices for this specimen and not words I would associate with most examples of rock, gem, and minerals. In addition to the description, I was fascinated to read that this slab comes from the Green River Formation – the Flaming Gorge Reservoir, in Sweetwater County, Wyoming.

While I realize this gold specimen is viewed as a nugget, it is among the most ‘non-nugget like’ example I’ve seen. However, the ‘Lightning Bolt’ moniker seems to be more than fitting, to describe this nugget that measures nearly 11 inches in length and nearly 40 ounces. Also adding to its aesthetic is the presence of small holes. Given the history of the place where this piece was found (Victoria, Australia) it’s not completely surprising to discover that this uniquely stunning nugget hails from that region of the world. As you may be well aware, Victoria, Australia lays claim to being the location where the world’s largest gold nugget was discovered. The ‘Welcome Stranger’ nugget was discovered in the later 1860s and topped the scales at 2,284 ounces.

Another featured lot with an Australian connection is this carved Tiger’s-Eye Bowl. This specimen is a golden chatoyant, with Hematite, black Magnetite and large sections of vibrant yellow Goethite present, according to the auction description. The density of this gemstone is well cited, and this example fits the bill, weighing in at 17 ½ pounds.

Last, but certainly not least, is this sample of Arsenopyrite, which is an iron arsenic sulfide. The host rock is a golden color and accented by a rainbow of hues. Not only is Arsenopyrite an iron arsenic sulfide mineral, but it is also the “primary ore of arsenic metal,” according to Geology.com. The mine in which it was discovered is located in the Estrela Mountains of central Portugal.

To view more specimens in this Aug. 18 Heritage Auctions’ Nature & Science Signature Auction, visit www.ha.com.

The post 6 Spectacular Specimens Coming to Auction first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.