Rockhounding in the desert

This year for a kickoff to summer, we we went down to Delta Utah and set up a base camp for a couple days of staying out in the desert among the rocks and searching for treasure.  We weren't looking for gold or silver, but fossilized anthropods (AKA: Trilobites). Along with a stop at Topaz Mountain, Obsideon Hill, and Sunstone knooll. 

Day 1:  The day started off with a very long trip on a dirt road to a place called U-Digg Fossils.  This place was a private Quarry that you had to pay to use, but was well worth it.  We found plenty of trilobites, and it was very easy to split the shale rock and expose the layers where the Trilobites were.  In addition to finding lots of trilobites, we brought back a lot of large pieces of rock that can still be split open and searched.

One example of a trilobite about the size of a penny.

Some trilobites were extremely small, this one actually came out
of the  rock in one piece and as you can see it is real tiny.

This one has about 10 trilobites in it.

After digging up trilobites, we went back to the Hotel and settled in for the night.  Of course there was a pool and the kids wanted to spend as much time as possible in the water.  It was nice to cool down in a pool after spending the afternoon in the hot sun breaking rocks apart.

Day 2:  We had a lot in store for the second day, and planned on visiting 3 different sites.  The first was Topaz Mountain.  It was about a 45 minute drive along a paved road (with a lot of small birds trying to play chicken with our car), and then we turned on to a dirt road for the remaining 5 miles to the dig site.  It started out real easy, but before long we needed to start driving very careful and turn on the 4 wheel drive.  We passed a few campers and kept going up the mountain to try and find a good spot.  We found a turnoff that led up to a small flat area that looked just large enough to park the car.  It was a little bumpy, and we bottomed out a couple times, but we made it.

We took all the tools and set out on finding our treasure.  At first, the only thing we could see were several rocks that had very small topaz in them.  They were glittering in the sunlight and the kids were very excited, but we couldn't really get much out of them.  We decided to try and break off some larger portions of rock and see if we could find some area that wasn't already picked over.  I started chipping away at a crack in a large rock, not sure if it would do much, but maybe I could find something in the crack. 

After working on the crack for a little bit, I got the entire rock to shift and the crack widened.  It then became my sole mission to get this rock out of place and see what we could find under it.

After about 30 minutes of prying with a large prybar and having Amanda cheer me on, I finally got the rock to break free so that I could get up on top and slide it out of it's resting place.

A couple large heaves and the 1000 pound rock slid out of place and landed upside down, exposing the bottom side of the rock and leaving the ledge that it was on also exposed.

As soon as this was done, we all went to work.  Amanda found some amber colored topaz on the rock  and started chipping away at it.  Olivia was without a doubt the best at spotting what we might have looked over.  She kept pointing out little clusters of topaz, and even a few large ones that were sticking out of the newly exposed surface.  We ended up with quite a bit of good amber colored topaz, and lots of rocks that sparkle.
 

These are some of the cleaned up topaz.  The large one on the right is the biggest one that Olivia found.

After leaving Topaz mountain, we drove about 7 miles to an area that was rich in Apache Tears. 

Most of the rocks were laying on the ground.

Some of them were embedded in the mountain.

We ended up with about 200 of these Apache Tears (Obsidian) about the size of large grapes.

After this, we went back to town and had lunch.  We went to one last place after lunch called Sunstone Knoll, but didn't have much luck here.  There were supposed to be a lot of shiny crystals littered around the ground but we only found small ones that were stuck in rocks.  We brought some of them back so we can break them apart and see what they have to hide.

We left the next morning and headed home, tired, a little sunburned, but every one of us had a lot of fun.