digging for rocks and just spending money...

This past weekend was a holiday so I decided to unchain myself from the bench and go have some fun... and the chance to do some rock hunting with a fellow Creative Metal Arts Guild member was just too hard to resist.

Saturday was spent driving over the mountain (Mt Hood) and into the high desert of central Oregon to a small open pit mine just outside of Madras, the Polkadot mine. And of course we were looking to score some nice polkadot jasper...

This is the mine site. It was 93 degrees that day. I don't know what the temperature was in the shade. There was no shade...

But the view was pretty gorgeous. I think that's Mt Adams on the right in the distance...

When we got there, we pulled out our chisels and hammers. I spent maybe 2 minutes trying to chip rock out of the earth and decided it would be a whole lot easier to just pick it up off the ground. Fewer chips flying around...

There are several small caves around the mine area. Hundreds of years ago, Native Americans came to this site to mine the jasper for tools. They dug these caves, and would build a fire close to the rock and when it got really hot, the rock would crack and pieces split off. The extreme heat would cause the jasper to turn pink. I found a few small pieces of pink. Carbon dating was done on the remains of a fire in one of the caves which dated it back 1200 years. So I consider my little pinks as artifacts...

Richardson Ranch was right on the way home. A rock shop with the biggest collection of rock piles I've ever seen. I bought these 2 chunks of birds eye rhyolite.

It was a long, hot day, and I was glad to get into the shower at the end of it. And to make the weekend just close to perfect, there was a gem and mineral show going on all weekend at the Canby Fairgrounds, about 10 miles from my house. Wow, I had no idea I needed more rock, I mean, I don't even have any lapidary equipment, but apparently that wasn't enough to stop me, I was there first thing the next morning...

Tiger's eye, couldn't resist. I'll cut this and leave it matte like these earrings.

On the left is holley blue agate, native to Oregon. The middle rock is gorgeous, I just can't remember what it is, and the rock on the right is Larimar, which is only found in the Dominican Republic

I bought an interesting looking end cut of bumblebee jasper because I liked the rough top. The other piece is Morrisonite, "the king of jaspers", another Oregon rock.

And brooch#26 in my etsy store  features a piece of Atlantisite. After I shot this picture, I broke this slab into 3 pieces, without meaning to...

All weekend I kept poking through my newly acquired rock collection admiring and arranging things the same way I did as a kid with my halloween candy.