On my last trip to Nevada, I stayed with my father in Pahrump. My father and I took a day trip out towards Scotty’s Junction, and collected close to 25 pounds of Apache tears alongside the road. I boxed them up and mailed them back to my wife. My wife is working on polishing some of those. On her first attempt she used one barrel of our dual barrel Lortone rock tumbler. Things were looking very good up to the final polishing stage. She put the Apache tears in the final polishing stage, left them in for a week. They looked worse after the final polishing stage than they did going in. We are not sure what went wrong. We’re thinking that the polishing medium was not correct. I am not positive as to what exactly the polishing medium was, as it came in a bag and was not marked as to what exactly it was. My wife got it off of eBay a year ago. I contacted the eBay seller who my wife thinks she ordered the polish from. He said the polish is diatomaceous earth. I searched, and found diatomaceous earth is a good polish for metals. So if the polish we used was in fact diatomaceous earth, it’s apparently not good for polishing obsidian. We have ordered some new polishing medium. We ordered a couple different kinds, both recommended for obsidian. One of the mediums is red rouge, and the other is cerium oxide. The red rouge is cheaper, so I hope it does a good job.
After the first batch didn’t work out as well as we hoped, my wife started a new batch. This time she used our large 15 pound Lortone tumbler. She started off a whole new batch of rocks. She figured that after those have gotten polished down, she would combine in previous batch into the second or third stage. We just pulled out the rocks on Sunday, and most of the rocks look excellent. However the large Apache tears, say the size of a golf ball or larger, didn’t seem as well polished as the smaller Apache tears. Our plan is to pull out the larger stones and set them aside for now. When the new polishing medium comes, we will take some of the smaller stones and put them in for the final polishing stage into one or two barrels of the dual barrel Lortone rock tumbler. Maybe we can try one polishing medium in one barrel and the other polishing medium in the other barrel. Then we can compare the results.
I was out in Nevada visiting my dad who lives in Pahrump, which is about an hour west of Las Vegas.
I had bought a few books about rockhunting in Nevada before the trip. I searched to see what was close to Pahrump that would have stones that my wife could use for making jewelry. Since I was travelling, I really didn’t have any equiptment either. So the stones need to be easily accessable. The closest place seemed to be a place near Scotty’s Junction which had quantites of Apache Tears. Apache Tears are small stones of black obsidion. They ae black, but are translucent.
The weather was cold and rainy on many days while I was in Nevada. I picked a day with a decent weather forecast. I was planning to go out by myself, but my dad said he would come. The spot where the apache tears are located along the road (highway 95) about 8-9 miles south of Scotty’s Junction. So it was about a 100 mile drive with my complaining about my music.
I parked the car on the side of the road, and we got out. I brought a couple 5 gallon buckets. We walked around looking at the ground. The best way is to keep the sun at your back. I did best by walking near the fence. I even crawled under the fence. We just walked around loking for the small black rocks and picking them up. It was very easy. After collecting a bunch of them, we packed up, and drove back to Pahrump. I weighed them when we got back. We had collected about 25 pounds of them. I boxed them up in a Flat Rate box from the post office, and shipped them home to New York.
My wife is going to polish them. I am thinking we can drill small holes in them, and string them like a necklace.
If she needs more, I can always get more on my next trip.
My wife and I were down in Ligonier, PA this last weekend for a wedding. We took a leisurely drive down Friday, and arrive in the evening. The wedding wasn’t until 4:30pm Saturday evening. So we had a bunch of time to go off and do something Saturday morning/afternoon.
In my book Earth Treasures Volume 1-The Northeastern Quadrant by Allan W. Eckert, it lists a few places to hunt rocks in the area. A bunch of the places are quarries. But I was hesitant to try any of the places listed as a quarry, since they might have limited access.
There were a couple that I found that looked interesting. According to the book, there is a railroad cut about 2 miles north of Etna on SR-8. Supposedly there is Barite, Calcite, Pyrite, and Wurzite here. I looked this up, and it seemed like it would be about an hour and a half drive.
Another place I found listed was the Mount Pleasant area (Westmoreland county) which supposedly has amethyst in the fields. My wife loves amethyst! But this was still about about an hour drive away. This one wasn’t as bad since we were planning to go the Greensburg to check out a couple used book stores. And Mt Pleasant is only about 20 minutes south of there. But the book doesn’t say which fields. And since we don’t knwo the area.
But thus far, we have explored a few places in the book, and haven’t found any of the rocks that were supposed to be in those locations. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Just that we haven’t found them. But our trust of the book is kind of shakey. So we were hesitant to drive very far with our limited time to go look for rocks that may or may not have been there. But then it would have been cool to have found some nice pieces of amethyst.
Maybe next time we get down to Pennsylvania.
According to the book Earth Treasures Volume 1-The Northeasten Quadrant, there is supposed to be labradorite at Canadice Lake in New York. The book says from the east side of Canadice Lake to 2 miles west of Honeoye Lake. The keys say that it can be found On the surface and/or in the soil; in washes, ravines, gullies, draws, ditches; loose on shoreline.
So my wife and I have been wanting to get down there and explore. We have planned to do it a couple times before, but there weather has turned out bad. But today I was determined to do it. And what do you know, the weather was pretty bad. We had periodic storms passing through.
On the way down, it alternated between kind of sunny, to torrential downpours. Fortunatly when we got to the lake, it wasn’t raining. You need a permit to access Canadice Lake, but you can get them online. They are free. I parked along the side of the road, and walked down to the lake’s edge. I explored in the water, and along the shore, but didn’t see anything that resembled the pictures I had seen of labradorite. There was also a little stream going into the lake, and I looked here as well. Nothing.
We got back into the car, and head farther south along the lake. There was a small stream feeding into the lake. So we stopped there. I walked up the stream bed hunting for labradorite. Again, I didn’t see any rocks that had anything like the green/blue colors of labradorite.
Next we headed to the boat launch area, and explored the shoreline of the lake. Still nothing.
All together, we spent about an hour and a half looking at rocks and found nothing remotely promising as being labradorite. It is possible there is labadorite there, and we were just looking in the wrong spots. Maybe labradorite is here, but in very small quanities. Or maybe we were actually seeing labradorite, but didn’t know what were looking at. Maybe labradorite is plain looking on the outside. Though I saw pictures of it on the web, and even the plainer looking uncut specimens had a subtle blue/green hue to them. Or maybe the labradorite from this area is a plainer variation, and doesn’t have the blue/green colors? Or maybe the book is in error, and there is no labradorite here at all?
Maybe next time we got the lapidary society club meeting thing that we joined, I will ask them if they know anything about labradorite. I’ll have to see if I can find an email address for the author of the book to see where he got his information.
On our outing to Penfield Quarry on Saturday we found some pieces of fluorite. A few of the people there said it would glow under a black light. Cool! I used to have black lights when I was a kid, along with the various fuzzy black light posters. I might even have a black light bulb still packed away somewhere, but if I do, I don’t know where it would be.
So I headed out yesterday to buy a black light bulb. I stopped in a Home Depot. They had a 24″ black light bulb, and an 18 inch black light bulb. They were not cheap either. I think the 18 inch bulb was like $12 maybe. Not sure. I looked for a portable fixture that could be plugged into a wall, but didn’t find one, and I didn’t have a lot of time. I looked around some more, and found a 75 watt incadescent black light bulb. And it was only $4. So I bought it and headed out.
When I got home last night, I screwed it into a lamp, and turned it on. I held the fluorite and other rocks under the dim light, and they didn’t seem to noticibly glow at all. We turned off the lights, and still nothing. It was still somewhat light, so we waited till after dark. Again, no glow. Hmmmm…
We thought the light might be too dim, or maybe the incadescent light has the frequency or something.
Today at lunch, I stopped at Lowes. I found the 24 and 18 inch black light bulbs. The 18 bulb was only $9 here. I went in search of a fixture and found them. I found some fluorescent fixtures the plug into the wall. I found one that would fit the 18 inch bulb for $17. But then my buddy whow as with me found a fixture that already came with a black light bulb! We could find the price. But when I took it to the check out, it was only $20. Nice! I bought it.
When I go back to work I searched for information about black lights and rocks. I was surprised to learn there are different black lights. Long wave (UV-A), medium wave (UV-B), and short wave (UV-C). It seems that the black light I bought is likely to be a long wave. And that what I need to make the rocks glow is a short wave black light. A mid wave black light is what they use on CSI to make bodily fluids glow. Hmmm. I did a search of short wave black lights and found they are expensive. Ouch! I will try the light I bought, and if it doesn’t do much, maybe I will return it. Or maybe I will keep it. Maybe long wave black light will work on different rocks. I will have to do more research.
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Added-
I tried the black light when I got home. Unfortunatly the fluorite didn’t glow. It had a slight pruple color to it, but then everything had a slight purple color to it under the light. I think we will need to get a short wave, or medium wave black light. I will comtinue to do reasearch and see if I can find one of these for a reasonable price. I just can’t justify spending hundreds of dollars on a light just to see the rocks glow. There is always the possibility that what we have is not fluorite and the geology students that identified it as fluorite were wrong.
We did get some reaction with the black light from some other rocks. A couple rocks that had a bunch of dolomite on them, had some spots of a dim yellow glow. When we turned the lights on, we didn’t see anything different in those spots.