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Month: September 2014

More Central Oregon Green Wood

More Central Oregon Green Wood

So, with a toe that’s  either jammed or broken, I wandered back out to the green wood area I found (on last post here) to do more exploring.

It’s a pretty fun area and had my foot been not so mashed up I would have gotten a little further, but I did find areas that the wood is higher quality than others.  A lot of it is highly agatized.   Anyway, since I’ve got some people lined up to go out with me next time, I thought I’d show a few more pics of what they’ll be looking at when we get there.

Here’s a shot of the varied colors and shades of green of the wood.  Some goes toward turquoise and other to dark green.  Of course, you get some brownish wood, too, but a lot of that has streaks of green in it.

Central Oregon Green Petrified Wood

I’ve found that the turquoise is beautiful, but doesn’t seem to be as hard as the darker greens – it’s still just outrageous looking and will make great display specimens.

I got a shot here of a few pieces at an angle that shows the limbcast nature of some of the wood.  Very woody on the outside – agate on the inside.

View 1 green wood

Here’s a few shots of a fairly large chunk I found that I’m just really excited about getting cut pretty soon.  It’s one of my favorites from the area so far.

This piece is about 9″ long and almost 6″ wide at the widest point.  The bark is mostly brown but does have a few spots of green in it – the inside is the prize on this one though.

The bark side:

Bark side view

The side parallel to the bark:

along the wood grain

Here’s a shot of the end as if you were looking down on a stump.   I might have to take a slice off this end, too.  It looks interesting, but not as pretty as the wood grain side. That can change fast with a cut slab, though.  What to do, what to do.

End view

The colors of the agate in  a lot of these specimens are spectacular.   Some of them are seemingly random spots of color and some have the wood banding:

The ones with pink seem to be more randomly colored.  I had one of these type specimens posted in my last article.  These with pink seem a bit rare, but I am hoping to find more underground.   My toe kept me from doing any digging last time out.  I more or less just hobbled around to find the size of the wood area and which spots had the best wood.  Hopefully, when I go back out my foot will be okay for a bit of digging – either that or I’ll have some reinforcements with me to help out.

The specimens with red and green seem to have a more wood band look in the agate:

More color. Wow.

This next one I found at the last place I explored so I didn’t get much time to really get into the area well.  The purple was a complete surprise to me though, and I’m looking forward to the possibility of finding more of this color combo.

And purple!

Next week I’ll be sending a box to Dean for cutting.  It includes a few specimens of very green wood that is a medium hardness to see how it cuts.   Some there is no question that it will – some no question that it won’t.  It will be good to find out where the line is on what I”m bringing home.

A Woody Weekend Rockhounding Central Oregon

A Woody Weekend Rockhounding Central Oregon

Labor Day weekend gave me an extra day of weekend to go out hunting.   I decided to go for wood.  A member of RHS1 posted that he was taking his son out for his 13th birthday into the area and named a few spots they were going to go.  I had recently been to both and was sad that the areas were so severely hunted out, so I offered to take them where they would be sure to find something.   We met Saturday morning and they followed me in on a journey down a road that makes me wonder how some things get called roads.  It’s one of the roughest 4WD paths I’ve been on in a long time.  It’s absolutely annoying after a few miles, but I guess that’s what keeps the rockhounding good.

Here’s some of what I took home.

hampton wood

The wood in that area is highly agatized.  Some is still pretty woody (top and side view):

Some pieces leave few hints, if any that they are actually wood.  This one took some cleaning up to see the banding that gave it away:

highly agatized wood

There’s a lot of yellow jasper out there, and yellow/clear or white jaspagate that I always suspected was wood from the patterns in it – this piece really cleared that up for me (top and side view):

This is my favorite piece from that day out.  The side view is a little bit blurry, but you can still see that the wood contour is still in tact (top and side view).

Favorite wood from Hampton

The next spot I visited was new to me.

Tyler’s crew and I split up the next day after we left the butte.  He wanted to go check out a popular area for green wood that I had no real desire to go back to.  My last time out it had been hunted so heavily it was disgusting.  I couldn’t decide where I did want to go to for a bit, but finally chose to check out a road I’d seen but never had been down before.  That’s when the real fun started for me.

Green wood, new spot

I drove the road for awhile and got out here and there to look around.  It was a beautiful day to just enjoy the sun and scenery, too.  I hadn’t found anything but some low grade green jasper after some time, so I decided to turn around and head out to an area I’d been to before.   That’s when I saw the piece of white rock on the side of the “road” that I hadn’t seen going in.  I stopped and examined it.  It wasn’t a keeper but it told me there was mineralization in the area so I grabbed my crowbar and pack and started to walk.   Very soon I was overwhelmed with excitement and ran back to the rig to grab the phone and find a spot to call Tyler and see if he was still around to get out there with me.  Unfortunately, he was already on the way back home for his son’s birthday dinner party.    So I dove back in on my own.

Some of the wood is very woody looking like these pretty little chunks:

Green wood, central oregon

small chunk of green wood

green chunk

Some is so highly agatized that you can barely tell it’s wood.  Without some pieces with hints of wood  some of it is impossible to identify as wood at all.  Here’s some with hints included:

agatized green wood

This is the top view of the one above.

green agatized wood 2

green agate wood 3

Some of this stuff is pretty colorful:

wood coloful

Some is hard to say if it’s actually wood derivative or not.  Sure is nice agate, at any rate, whether wood or not:

agate

Guess there’s not much surprise in saying that I’ll be back there this weekend.  There’s one heck of a lot more ground to cover than I got a chance to play on, and I’m looking forward to getting more of this gorgeous stuff.

All in all a great weekend.

Life’s short – rock hard.

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