I live in the Rochester area of New York state, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot gemstones to hunt around here. Apparently there is some fluorite that can be gotten at some local dolomite quarries. But I think access is limited, but they let the local rock club go in there sometimes.
One of my books (Earth Treasures: The Northeastern Quadrant) mentioned that agate could be found along the eastern bank of the Genesee River near Norton St and Avenue E. It is supposed to be in the limestone, and on the shoreline. The book also lists that labradorite could be found down by Canadice lake.
I would really like to pick up some pieces of labradorite, but we didn’t have time to get down there yet. But the place on the Genesee River was very close. I even knew the spot where they were talking about. So Sunday morning, my wife and I took a quick trip to the Genesee river. We parked on Seth Green Drive, and walked down Indian Trail to the rivers edge. We looked around, but mostly just found dull grey boring rocks. I found some gray rocks with a different smoother gray running through them. I also found what appear to be some sort of fossils. One rock I found what a little different. It was a little shade, kind of a whitish gray. I looked around on the web, and I believe it is actually silicified coral, or fossilized coral. Unless the agate is a ugly dull grey agate, we didn’t find any agate. We plan to go back. There is another area to search by taking the fishing access trail down towards Seth Green Island. We will also take a crack hammer to break a few rocks open.
Meanwhile, I am going to try get down to the Canadice Lake area to see if we can find some labradorite.
I stumbled on your post because I was looking through my Audubon field guide for minerals to hunt next year and It has a picture of chalcedony that was taken from the Genesee River gorge. I’d love not to have to travel boocoo hours to go rockhounding, and some agates would be nice to add to the collection. I was planning a trip to the gorge myself. I don’t have the book you’re referring to, but was going to try the same area in my search. You mention gray rocks in your post, and the picture in the book is a collection of bluish gray nodules. Nothing extravagant, but would look nice sliced and polished if it had some slight color variance in it. I was going to try to go shortly after the spring thaw and the water has washed some fresh material through. Let me know if you’re going to go another time and I’ll help expand the search.
Comment by Jeremy — March 1, 2009 @ 11:34 pm