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.

Posted by Rob in Rockhounding on April 14th, 2008 |