I read about Amargosa Borax Works in both Gem Trails Of Southern California and Rockhounding California. The location is off of 127 about 0.9 miles south of Furnace Creek Road. (GPS coordinates are 35°53.13984′, -116°15.43878′) Across the road are the ruins of the Old Zabriskie Station which are not much more than a small column of bricks which might have been the corner of a building. We drove the rental car back into the borax works on a dirt “road” that is really just some tire tracks. About 0.2 miles back, we parked with hills on either side of us. The path is not that bad and we were able to drive it fine in my small rental car. It might be treacherous after a rain though.
I read that there was precious opal here. The books said to look for previous diggings and start there. I could see where people had dug on the sides of the hills. The books also mentioned small tubes of opal, some of it precious, but most of it common. I had a small brick hammer that I bought at Lowes, and started digging. But I was not sure what I was looking for. After a while of not finding anything, I decided to go up on tops of the hills. I read there was agate up there. So I wandered around looking on the ground and found lots of pieces of agate and chalcedony.
After my first trip here, I visited a small jewelry store in Pahrump. The owner showed me a small piece of opal she had found here. So now I knew what I was looking for. I managed to make a second trip to Amargosa Borax Works. Now I knew what the opal looked like. Again, I dug in the holes, and still found nothing here. Again I walked along the hill tops and collected lots of agate and chalcedony. Somewhere here I did find a handful rocks that I later decided might be common opal. After looked at these under a shortwave UV light, and couple glowed bright green. I believe these are common opal. Much of the agate and chalcedony fluoresces under shortwave UV light.
After spending a bunch of time at Crescent Beach, we decided to explore one of the other beaches listed in Gem Trails. We moved on to the Harrison Beach Campground. They charged $5 for a day pass. We just filled out an envelope, put in $5, and dropped it into a box, and parked in one of the cam sites. It was a short walk down to the beach. The beach is covered with smooth rounded rocks. We walked around the beach picking up jasper and agate. There is tons of them here. My feet got soaked from the waves that repeated snuck up on me. The tide was slowly coming in covering many of the best rocky areas. But we left with plenty of agates and pieces of jasper. Harrison Beach Campground is located at 299 Harrison Beach Road, Port AngelesWA98363.
Interestingly, the TomTom GPS that I had in my car could not seem to get a satellite lock while in this area. I am not sure why. Maybe it was just an aberration. Or maybe there was something in the area jamming my GPS. I don’t know.
My wife and I were in Washington state visiting family. I bought a copy of Gem Trails Of Washington. We were staying in Kingston, so I looked for nearby places to find some good rocks. The nearest places were some of the beaches along the Strait of Juan De Fuca. The first beach we visited was Crescent Beach.
We parked in a parking area at GPS coordinates 48°09.66948′, -123°42.20334′. There is another smaller parking area nearby that is even closer to the beach. There was a small restroom here which was convenient.
This place is beautiful, with cliffs and a small island out in the water. The tide was out, so we just walked along the beach looking for and picking up small agates lying in the wet sand. I also found a couple small pieces of petrified wood. All the stones were smooth and rounded from the ocean. Tumbling them was a snap since most of the work was already done.
My in-laws live in Kingston, WA in a house that overlooks a beach on the Puget Sound. They don’t have direct access to the beach since there is a cliff there. But it is a short walk down the road to where I could walk down to the beach. The beach there is restricted to residents and guests. Since this place was so close, I spent quite a bit of time wandering along the beach looking for agates and jasper. There was plenty of both here. On previous trips, my wife and I sifted the sand looking for Sea Glass. There is some of that here too. I even found a really nice chunk of carnelian agate the size of a baseball. I kept that and gave it to a friend. I am hoping she will cut it in half.
It was very relaxing wandering along the rocky beach, listening to my mp3 player and looking for rocks. I am looking forward to coming back here next year.
Even though this beach is private, I am sure there are plenty of other beaches along the Puget Sound that are public and have agates and jasper, and who knows what else.
We have 24 pounds of apaches tears that I collected in Nevada. We have been working at polishing them, but having lots of problems. The early tumbling stages went fine. My wife used a combo pack of polishing media that she bought on eBay. This is what we believe we used:
Course grit (70 Grit Aluminum Oxide)
Fine grit (220 Grit Aluminum Oxide)
Pre polish (500/600 Grit Silicon Carbide)
Polish (diatomaceous earth)
The polish was unlabelled, but we found out after the fact that the polish was diatomaceous earth.
Everything seemed to go fine up to the polish stage. The apache tears/obsidian came out looking worse than they went in. The diatomaceous earth worked awful on the apache tears/obsidan.
My wife put them back in for the pre-polish stage, and they came out looking better. So we tried to polish them again. This time we used cerium oxide. Again, the apache tears/obsidian came out looking worse than they went in. Not nearly as bad as what the diatomaceous earth did though.
Here is a picture of what the rocks looked like before (left) and after (right) the cerium oxide polish stage.
So we are going to try again. We have read that we probably want to use some sort of filler to buffer the rocks and slow down the polishing. This time we are polishing them with cerium oxide & plastic beads.