Idaho--August, 2017

[Nimravis]

Wow- those are some really cools leaves, I am going to have to plan a visit there someday in the near future.

[digit]

Back in internet range again (after 3 days at the cabin in Cascade with no conveniently accessible wifi). We're now down in Boise staying with my cousin Tracy for the next few days and we'll use this as a home base to plan day trips for some more rockhounding before we return to Florida.

 

When I was last able to update this topic we had just finished up digging up lots of Miocene leaves from the Clarkia Fossil Bowl. We returned again to near Clarkia to go to the Emerald Creek Garnet Area to try our luck at finding star (asterated) garnets. We got a little bit of a late start packing up the car with all of our gear (and finding room among the hoard of Miocene leaf fossils that now occupied a significant portion of the interior of our car). We arrived at the parking area for the garnet area at about 9:30am (only 30 minutes late), parked and walked the trail from the parking area up to the digging area. It was a pleasant walk in the cool of the morning and as Tammy realized it would be a downhill walk back to the car at the end of the day.

       

 

When we reached the digging area we paid our $10 per person permit fee and we were given an explanation of the process and shown an example of the type of garnets we'd be looking for (and hopefully finding).

 

 

     

 

[digit]

We only had till around 4:00pm to hunt for garnets at this site so I was working as quickly and efficiently as I could. Unfortunately, when I'm pressed for time I usually forget to stop often enough to take lots of photos--but I did take a few to document the process for others who might like to give this a try. From previous reports online that I've seen of people digging at this site I thought the garnets would be a bit more plentiful than they were. They give you instructions to try to avoid the clay areas at the dig site but the dig site is pretty much mostly marbled with a light gray clay interspersed with more sandy material. The clay gums up the sifting screens that are used to drop out the finer material (they had 1/4" and 1/8" screens) and leftover chunks of clay make a mess when trying to clean the remaining material at the sluice. Later in the day I asked how we were supposed to avoid this ubiquitous clay and one of the park rangers said that by moving a few of the larger rocks that people had dug up over time and piled up in the dig site should uncover areas that are more gravelly. I tried this for the last hour or so and had a bit better luck with less annoying clay chunks.

 

The process is simple--you start by finding a free shovel in the digging area and filling one of a pair of buckets with material from the dig site. Here is where good selection of material can have an effect on you success in finding garnets. I tried many different areas (mostly with very limited success). When we got there we met another guy who had started just a bit before us and he showed us a nice complete garnet crystal about the diameter of a nickel that he discovered in his second bucket of material. While this initially got our hopes up for a bounteous harvest, they were soon tempered by lots of hard work for little return. Despite not getting fabulously rich with gem quality garnets from a single day of effort, we still had fun exploring a new hunting experience.

 

       

 

Once one of our buckets was filled we took the pair of buckets to the sifting station and found a free sifting screen that was used to drop out the finer loose material. The idea is to sift one bucket in small amounts and drop the material that was caught by the sifting screen into the second bucket. This worked well unless the section that the material came from was a little damp which caused the screen to clog repeatedly. Big chunks of clay were also an issue. I saw many people spend a lot of time breaking up the larger clods to minimize the amount of material taken down to the sluice area. I decided this was probably inefficient and that I'd let the water in the sluice do its job rather than spending all my time making small clods our of larger ones. Some people managed to spot garnets while sifting before heading to the sluice and later in the day I too managed to spot one before hitting the water.

 

 

       

 

The final process was to find an open space at the two sluices which provided just enough water to wash away the rest of the sandy material (and dissolve the clay clods) revealing cleaned rock material--and, if lucky, a small garnet. Toward the middle part of the day we reached a saturated capacity of diggers with short waits for shovels, sifting screens and time at the sluice. This ebbed a little after lunch as the people with young kids didn't have the persistence to hunt for very long. We washed lots of screens full of material and then dumped what was not garnet it the free bucket to be discarded in a specified area to dump the rock tailing. We found mostly broken pieces (we'd been warned that this is most of what comes out of this area) but did find a few tiny (pea size) complete crystals and some larger broken pieces with the crystal facets still visible. Below is a photo from my very last screen of the day which let us leave on a high note and a desire to spend a couple days here again sometime in the future to try our luck again.

 

      

 

It was a lot of hard work but it was a novel experience for us and that more than the potential riches is what we were looking for from this outing. In the end we weighed out with just about 3 ounces of garnet material. If all of what we recovered had been gem quality material this would be approximately $8600 worth of booty. In reality, we probably didn't recoup our $20 fee and the fuel to arrive at the spot. The memory of this experience, though, was priceless and that was the true treasure.

 

More as this trip through Idaho progresses. Off to go try a little gold panning again today (maybe with some gold flakes among the black sands I've so far been able to recover).

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[digit]

Now that we're down in Boise (post eclipse) we're using my cousin Tracy's house as a home base to make day trips out of Boise. Today took us to the junction of Mores Creek and Grimes Creek near Idaho City (43.72611, -115.95299). The Boise Basin has produced over 2.3 million ounces of gold so far and we've just added 0.00001 ounces to that total.

 

A recurring theme of this trip is to spend hours each day not finding much to show for out efforts but having a great time nonetheless. This is the third creek that we've dipped our gold pan into on this trip and while the first one had copious pink garnet sand and no gold and the second had epic amounts of black sand with lots of olivine (and no gold), this time out we had scant black sand (with the usual tiny garnets and bits of opaline but finally we've broken the streak and found gold. When I say I've found gold I don't mean to say that I'm going to buy 6 months of supplies in the general store and a mule named Daisy to carry it while I retreat into the hills and grow my gray beard even longer than the coarse bristles that I'm currently sporting. My bits of flour gold and one tiny flake might just cover this letter O (if you closed one eye and looked it from arm's length).

 

While I'm not adding to my retirement reserves and certainly didn't cover the cost of the fuel to get here (much less the bag of ice to keep our drinks cold), the main reason for trying is to sharpen my skills at panning and spotting gold traps in the river and enjoying the day out in the wilderness taking my chances that I might see something gold and glittery in my pan other than flakes of mica.

 

Tomorrow we put the pan away for a while and try our luck SW of Boise searching the sagebrush desert surface hunting for agates, jasper and possibly a little opal if we are lucky (our luck is due for a turn). More soon.

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

      

 

       

 

 

   

 

[Monica]

I'm sure your luck will turn - you've been working so hard that you deserve a break!!!  But as you've said, enjoying these outdoor experiences is the main goal, and it looks as though you've achieved it, so congrats!

 

Best of luck for your next hunting expedition!!! 

 

Monica

[snolly50]

As always, your account has been an interesting and entertaining read.

[ynot]

Sounds like Y'all are having a good time - despite the meager finds (except leafs).

Hope the next site(s) do You better.

Tony

[digit]

On 8/23/2017 at 9:38 AM, ynot said:

Hope the next site(s) do You better.

Still not setting any records for the amount of stuff we are finding.

 

We got out to two sites southwest of Boise on Wednesday. The first site is called Opalene Gulch (43.41622, -116.77591) and, as expected, the prize here is opal. It was a nice drive to the location through a bunch of smaller towns till the paved road gave way to gravel road which ran into a makeshift gate out of barbed wire and fence posts that we had to open and close behind us to gain access to the site. It is located in a wild horse refuge and signs at the entry noted the need to close the gate after we passed through. The site was exactly on the GPS coordinates given and it was no trouble finding the locality.

 

Finding opal, however, was to be a bit more tricky. The book said that more solid opal would be found in seams in the matrix. The harder rock was overlain by some softer eroded matrix which was then topped by some really soft loose muddy overburden. It looks like some people had spent time digging in the softer overburden but I didn't really see the point. After a time we could spot small white glassy deposits of the white common opal (called 'potch' in Australia as we learned back in October). The matrix was incredibly hard (concrete was like softened cream cheese compared to this impenetrable matrix. It appeared that some previous diggers had employed heavy hand tools and even gas powered concrete saws with diamond blades to extricate their prizes. Tammy managed to find a large spike chisel that someone had left behind. This came in handy as I realized I should have brought some sort of chisel to accompany the rock hammer but even with this addition I felt like I had brought a knife to a gun fight.

 

The book mentioned that most of the opal here would be the white common opal (relatively worthless for jewelry purposes but of interest to dedicated mineral collectors). In some areas the opal seems to have infilled some geode-like bubbles in the matrix. There was evidence that some diggers before us had made attempts to extricate some of these opal bubbles. If the opal was other than white I'd likely have made some effort as well. I found a few tiny seams in some of the more degraded matrix material which released some small pieces of potch that I collected but don't really know what I'll do with as I have much better material from Australia. No gemmy opal with any signs of color were to be found at this site and after a little over an hour of exploration at the site we decided to move on.

 

   

 

       

 

 

 

[digit]

After leaving Opalene Gulch we turned our sights a bit further west to the border with Oregon. We intended to check out the site known as Graveyard Point to hunt for 'plume agate'. We arrived at (actually, near) the GPS coordinates for the first of a cluster of points. This was supposed to have a monument marker to Graveyard Point but it now seems that that location is at the end of a road that is now posted as a private drive. We chose to respect the sign despite what the coordinates in our 7 year old book indicated. We moved on instead to a cluster of GPS points located over the border on the Oregon side.

 

As we are now getting used to while arriving at the locations in my Rockhounding Idaho book, the paved roads gave way to gravel which in turn gave way to something that was once a road and is now really only passable with an ATV. A washout in the track that looked too dodgy to take even our all wheel drive Jeep across forced us to ditch the car early and proceed on foot. The road wasn't as bad after this point and I soon spotted the back end of an alternate path that previous vehicles had made to bypass the ugly unpassable section. I walked back to the car and found that the detour would allow us to proceed at a quicker (and air conditioned) pace to the cluster of additional points. We ended up at the coordinates (43.54380, -117.05500) where there was a pit that had previously seen some action but not at all recently. The face of the pit that the previous diggers had left was surfaced with very weathered rock that looks like it had seen several winters since it was last excavated. I spent a few minutes knocking down the crumbling deteriorated rock till I got back to more solid matrix behind it. I couldn't see any seams with agate infilling (though there were several seams to be seen). I gave up this pointless activity (though it was kinda fun to see the weathered material fall away so effortlessly--in stark contrast to the extremely hard material at the site earlier in the morning).

 

I walked up to the top of one of the hills and had a look around. There were several outcrops of bedrock material popping up from the grass covered plains but none showed any signs at all of agate (plume or otherwise) and so I continued to explore the area wondering if this was going to be yet another fruitless search. On the way back down to the car I spotted a small patch of white on the brown grown among the straw colored dried grass. It turned out to be a small chip of agate and a tiny bit of black plume intrusion could be seen along one edge. This got me thinking that surface hunting might be the best way to approach the site as node of the in situ formations seemed to contain any visible agate. Tammy and I wondered around some of the gulches and a few other chips of whitish chert-like agate were recovered, but none showing any of the sought after plume patterning. The most interesting finds were a lizard sunning itself on a lichen covered rock and a spider with an enormous body (actually these turned out to be quite common once we had the search image). The spiders (and possibly the lizard) seemed to be making good use of the thousands of grasshoppers we encountered while walking around. Before long we called it a day and headed back home for a dinner involving an authentic prize wrested from the Idaho soils--a baked potato.

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

 

   

 

   

 

 

[digit]

We were back at it again today--undaunted by previous failures (I'm kinda slow that way).

 

Tammy and I decided to head back to the southwest of Boise to check out a remote site called Cow Creek (not the most original name for a waterway in this state). True to its name there were cows there. It took us a couple hours to drive there and even longer to find the actual site (I'm still not sure we actually found the site). Tammy has decided that at the end of this trip that we should have a book burning and sacrifice our Rockhounding Idaho book to the Gods of Wasted Time.

 

The first of the two GPS points for this site (43.03075, -116.89942) is described as a "major creek crossing (dry by midsummer)" and we were to "walk the dry gulches". When we arrived at the point we nearly missed the creek. If we found the intended site (we were at the proper GPS coordinates) the creek at this point is approximately 3 feet wide and crosses the road as a slight indentation with a few rounded cobbles. The "gulches" were not evident as the area is pretty flat here. We assumed that we had somehow arrived at the wrong location though we were at the GPS coordinates. I decided that we should return to the town of Jordan Valley and instead follow the written directions in the "Finding the site" section of this entry. Though it looks to be clear and well written, the words on the page to not seem to match the current reality of roads. Following odometer distances the turnoffs did not appear where indicated and though we tried all permutations of ways to read and interpret the written directions we decided that this would not help to provide a viable route to our intended destination.

 

We retraced our steps back to the Site A coordinates and then put in the coordinates for Site B which was a few miles further down the road that we were on. At this location we were still running parallel to a tiny dry creek so we decided to stop the car and go investigate. Though this location did not seem to match-up with the written description in the book, we did soon spot a large chunk of petrified wood which was one of the types of material (along with jasper and agate) that was supposed to be here so we continued to walk the creek bed. The cobbles in the middle of this dry creek were covered with the blackened remains of the lush (once green) algae that seemed to be quite prolific in the creek--likely due to the nutrient load provided  by the many cows that wander this area leaving fertilized presents quite copiously.

 

Regardless of whether this truly was the spot we were searching for, we decided to make due and start looking for some agates and pet wood to fill our bags. The cobble and rock material at the edges of the creek bank (or further to each side where the creek had once ran--or does run in a flood stage) seemed to have cleaner material that wasn't coated with a shaggy black layer of dried algae and so we tried to focus our hunting on the cleaner rocks which were easier to spot interesting colors or patterns. We picked up what looked like broken pieces of agatized petrified wood and some stripey material that may be formerly have been wood or possibly are thinly stratified gneiss. Will have to look closer when I get back home.

 

The site is more hilly than other areas with lots of juniper to see (and smell).

 

   

 

The tiny creek is dwarfed by the landscape but it did contain cobbles among which were a few small prizes to be found. The old gravel bards beside the river were productive as well (and less black).

       

 

   

 

A few of the prizes including a piece with an interesting violet coloration (hopefully, will look as cool once tumbled) and more spiders guarding interesting agates (better than scorpions).

 

   

 

       

 

       

 

   

 

We spent more time looking FOR the site than looking AT the site but we still brought home about 25 pounds of material that will keep my rock tumbler busy for several months. I've got this packed up already in a flat-rate box that will be dropped (with a thud!) at the post office tomorrow morning. Once last chance to get out and do some rockhounding tomorrow before we leave early Saturday morning for home. Inexplicably, we are once again going to rely on this book and see what that nets us. This time we are going to go east to a place called Clover Creek (though I fully expect to see more cows there than clovers). More from this final outing later.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

 

[Monica]

Hi Ken!

 

You and Tammy are very determined - I'm sure that this final leg of your trip will be the most productive of all!!! ()

 

Happy hunting!

 

Monica

[digit]

Well Monica, even all your best wishes couldn't turn our luck. We were skunked again today at Clover Creek (43.03272, -114.94786) which turn out to be a bust.

 

He headed east this time from Boise along Highway 84 which sped us to our location over a hundred miles away in good time (speed limit is 80 mph). We left the highway at Hagerman and headed north to the GPS coordinates from the book. Once again we were in sagebrush desert with some high buttes off in the distance capped in rocky outcrops above the smooth talus slopes. It is starkly beautiful country that is vastly different from what we experience in South Florida.

 

We arrived at the bridge over Clover Creek wondering if it would be a seasonally dry creek or had enough flow to be running at this time of the year--it was the former. The book said that we could find agate, jasper and larger pieces of opalized petrified wood here. Most all we found here was fine gravel among the lava boulders. The book indicated a lava tube we could explore a little ways away but we decided to skip that as we've walked lava tubes in Hawaii, Galapagos and Easter Island. Instead, we scrambled down to the dry creek bed and walked upstream for about 20 minutes. It looks like this was a highly nutrified creek when it was running as there were mats of dried algae all over the place. The gravel was mostly made up of smaller rounded cobbles of lava and a few other minerals mixed in. There was certainly no larger chunks (or ANY chunks for that matter) of petrified wood and just a few meager pieces of what appeared to be reddish jasper which were hardly worth collecting. We decided that this was a fitting end to this rockhounding trip and it exemplifies the principle that it is always more effective to go out with a local (especially a TFF member) who knows the area well than to rely on a book with dubious information. I'm sure there are some sites that are as described in the book but the sites I picked mostly failed to live up to my perceived expectations. This won't stop me planning grandiose collecting trips but I'll probably rely more on my own internet research and meeting up with local guides rather than relying on possibly out-of-date books with dodgy information. We still had a good time on this trip and everything beyond a total solar eclipse was really just gravy for this trip. Could have been more productive on the collecting end but we enjoyed being out in an environment that is unfamiliar to us.

 

Here are a few images from Clover Creek--a spectacular place to go if you are collecting large chunks of lava.

 

       

 

   

 

 

[digit]

While we were in the area we decided to visit the Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument. This tiny town lays claim to an impressive Lagerstätte containing over 200 species of plants and animals dating from around 3.5 mya. Many of the species are familiar to some of the Pliocene sites in Florida and the 200 horse skulls and 20 complete horse skeletons already recovered from the fossil beds reminded me of Thomas Farm near Gainesville with its ubiquitous horse fossils (though those are some 12 million years older). It was a nice display area adjoining the park service office in town. We enjoyed looking around and geeked out on some familiar fossils before heading back to Boise a bit early to get things sorted out and packed up for our departure back to Florida early tomorrow morning.

 

There was a "fossil dig" out front for the kiddies (but we're all kiddies at heart so we couldn't resist playing there for a minute).

 

       

 

The Hagerman Horse (Equus simplicidens) is also known as the Hagerman Zebra (though not with quite the alliterative quality as the former). Apparently, the skull is more zebra-like in its shape and so they call it a zebra-like horse. It is considerably smaller than a modern day horse but otherwise much like the modern species.

 

       

 

   

 

There were many other fossils on display including some Camelops bones, some Bone-crushing Dog (Borophagus) specimens, and even some proboscidean (mammoth) bits.

 

       

 

 

[digit]

We spent a little time in downtown Boise checking out the river front and some nice parks including a really lovely rose garden. Along the way we spotted a few specimens of the "living fossil" known as the Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) which is a tree native to the Yangtze River area of China but apparently doing well in cultivation in Boise, ID. This species was of interest to us as we collected a few leaf fossils from Clarkia for this species (or at least the same genus). It was nice to see the tree with its distinctive leaves.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasequoia

 

 

Those fragile leaf fossils will make the trip home packed into a carry on suitcase (weighing in at just about 50 pounds). In addition to all of the clothes and gear that we schlepped out here and are now cramming into suitcases, we dropped off two (heavy) flat-rate packages to ourselves containing much of the tumbler material that we collected from several streams during this trip. I'll post photos when these rocks finish their time in my tumbler trying to shine them up to pretty baubles.

 

 

I'll extend this topic if I have more interesting images to add once I'm back home but this concludes our collecting trip to western Idaho as part of our total eclipse watching. We had good fun and enjoyed ourselves in new surroundings and it is probably just as well that we didn't score lots of material at all of the sites we visited as my suitcases are already bulging at the seams and even flat-rate boxes get expensive after a while.

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Beth929]

Thanks for sharing. Nice photos, well written and cool details. Makes me want to go to Idaho someday too.

[Wrangellian]

Nice trip report, Ken. I was interested to see you found one of those Precambrian sites in Northern ID. I'm jealous.. I had to buy a couple pieces from a nearby spot in NW Montana, one of which is nearly identical to your finely layered piece and was identified as a piece of stromatolite. If I had known you were going there I would have suggested you look out for pieces that look like the other piece I bought, which looks for all the world like a wormy trace fossil in ripple marks but should not be, given the age (1.4by)

See:

If you can tell which of those stars on the map is your site, maybe we can narrow down the age/formation, or do you already know it?

 

The leaves curling off the rock is a little disturbing - one reason I like fossils is they are generally fairly durable and not going anywhere, assuming you don't abuse them and leave them out in the weather. Those are a different kettle of fish! so to speak. Are the leaves reasonably stable once they have been dried slowly, or do you have to keep them out of humidity, etc?

 

The Metasequoia is not that hard to find now outside of its native range in China, I think... we had one in our yard at the old place we lived at, and so did our grandparents down the road.

 

[Monica]

Hi again, Ken!

 

I'm sorry to hear that you didn't collect as much material as you were hoping to, but the fossil leaves you found are gorgeous, you were able to see the eclipse, and you seemed to have really nice weather for your entire trip, so there were definitely some successes - congratulations!

 

Thanks for taking us along for the ride, and have a safe trip home,

Monica

 

[digit]

6 hours ago, Beth929 said:

Makes me want to go to Idaho someday too.

That's why I share my trips on this forum--I like to encourage and instigate others to get out in the field and hunt for treasures (hopefully, more successfully that we did).

 

4 hours ago, Wrangellian said:

If you can tell which of those stars on the map is your site, maybe we can narrow down the age/formation, or do you already know it?

 

The leaves curling off the rock is a little disturbing - one reason I like fossils is they are generally fairly durable and not going anywhere, assuming you don't abuse them and leave them out in the weather. Those are a different kettle of fish! so to speak. Are the leaves reasonably stable once they have been dried slowly, or do you have to keep them out of humidity, etc?

 

The Metasequoia is not that hard to find now outside of its native range in China, I think... we had one in our yard at the old place we lived at, and so did our grandparents down the road.

I don't know that I can link to the site directly from the Google Maps that someone made from the book but it is one of two sites in the Clark Fork area. One is in Lightning Creek and the other is off Mosquito Creek Rd. The roadcut site is the one that was supposed to have relatively abundant fossilized stromatolite specimens available along the slippery talus slope. Maybe your investigation can figure out the formation and an alternative location where these may be found.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1yS2FsEzCIFPU2_G1Pr5SH3oN9DY&hl=en_US&ll=48.16170182672706%2C-116.1954257666016&z=11

 

https://goo.gl/maps/Xezf5ATNKYp

 

 

Yes, "fossil" leaves that curl from the substrate are a bit disturbing. This is kind of like Kemmerer fish fossils with scales and bones that can flake off the substrate if one is not careful during preparation (only much much worse). I've got the pieces wrapped in several layers of newspaper. The proper method would have been to enclose these in partially sealed zip top bags to slow the drying process. I had too many specimens to do this properly and instead packed them together into reusable shopping bags that we picked up from a Target store along the way. I sorted through the specimens with a more discerning eye when I chose which ones would be packed tightly into a roll-on suitcase (weighed in at 50 pounds ). While sorting I could see that most of the specimens had survived well but some on thinner pieces of the mudstone (clay) had flaked off--sometimes because the matrix had curled when drying. Some had breaks when we collected them and the breaks continued to crumble so those too were left behind. I should have a nice selection to continue drying slowly at which point I'll probably try sealing in some manner to protect the delicate paper-thin fossils. I have more than I'll need to remember this trip so many will be distributed to family, friends (and friend's kids). Some will likely show up in a future TFF auction.

 

 

I hadn't heard about Metasequioa before this trip and now I know more about this interesting plant. I like that fossil hunting expands the envelope of my knowledge just a bit and in some unusual ways.

 

Up early this morning and off to the airport.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Wrangellian]

This is the best map of the area I have found so far - probably as good as we're going to get:

https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1999/0144/

I wish they would show roads, but I guess they want to avoid cluttering up the geo info in these maps. If you were in Yms, that's Mt Shield Fm which is the same as what I have (from not far away to the NE in MT). I think you were in Yms, in fact. What do you think? Belt Supergroup, in any case - Mid Proterozoic. According to other info I found, the Mt Shields Fm is about 1.4byo.

[Fossil-Hound]

@digit wow those are some really nice leaves. Glad you had a good trip. I'll have to join you next time!

[digit]

5 hours ago, Wrangellian said:

This is the best map of the area I have found so far - probably as good as we're going to get:

https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1999/0144/

I wish they would show roads, but I guess they want to avoid cluttering up the geo info in these maps. If you were in Yms, that's Mt Shield Fm which is the same as what I have (from not far away to the NE in MT). I think you were in Yms, in fact. What do you think? Belt Supergroup, in any case - Mid Proterozoic. According to other info I found, the Mt Shields Fm is about 1.4byo.

Yup. I'd say Yms (Mount Shields Formation). There were supposed to be fossil stromatolites there but I found no evidence of any at the site--just the textured shoreline frozen in stone as pictured at the beginning of this topic. I've seen the remnant population of this once important life form both in Lee Stocking Island in the Exumas (Bahamas) and on our recent pilgrimage to Hamelin Pool, Shark Bay, Australia. I thought it would be nice to have a fossilized specimen from when this was the dominant life form but there are other places where fossil stromatolites are found and I'm sure I'll have the chance to collect a sample some day.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Wrangellian]

So you don't think that thinly-layered specimen you were holding in that pic was a piece of stromatolite? If it's not, then the nearly identical one (from the same Fm) that I was sold is not either.

[DE&i]

@digit I'f your road trip came as a paper back publication, it would certainly be a worth while read for anyone travelling in that direction

 

Great Report.

[digit]

7 hours ago, Wrangellian said:

So you don't think that thinly-layered specimen you were holding in that pic was a piece of stromatolite? If it's not, then the nearly identical one (from the same Fm) that I was sold is not either.

I'm not sure what I was holding in that photo above (shown again here).

 

 

I took that photo as it was the only thinly-layered piece at this locality and made me wonder as I know stromatolites are layered by their very nature. If it was a cross-section of a chunk of stromatolite I wanted to at least have a photo (I didn't care to keep this ambiguous piece for my collection). I've just scanned the appropriate text on pages 38-39 of the Rockhounding Idaho book (emphasis mine):

 

Finding the site: From Clark Fork on ID 200, head northeast on Main Street

for 0.4 mile. Swing right with the road as it becomes NFD 276/Mosquito
Creek Road. Avoid the turn for NFD 419/Lightning Creek Road, which
swings to the left about 0.6 mile from the highway. About 0.5 mile farther up
NFD 276, or about 1.1 miles from the highway, you should see a large road cut
on the left. This is Site A, with rusty fossil stromatolites easy to find.

Rockhounding

Roadside Geology of Idaho (see bibliography) suggests there are fossil stroma-
tolites in the road cuts along the road to Cabinet, but we only found a little
calcite and some interesting psilomelane, a manganese mineral noted for its
fractal dendrites, which look like little fossil branches. Plus, most of the road
cuts were dangerous to stop at. We kept Dougie, our intrepid nine-year-old,
firmly belted in the backseat for those stops. On a whim, however, we tried a
back road, and that's where we found Site A.

 

 

The fossil stromatolites, which I believe are part of the Paleozoic Libby For-
mation, are wavy, rusty folds in the rock. Don't be fooled-they may be ugly,
but they represent the biggest jump in life on Earth since single-cell blue-green
algae developed. Stromatolites are colonies of algae that have learned to live
together, and they were the most advanced life on the planet for some time.

 

This was the first site out of the book that we visited on this trip and upon finding the roadcut precisely where the GPS coordinates indicated the author's Site A was we put the book down and searched around only recalling the book to consult the "wavy banding" image above as a search image reference. Rereading this text now I see that we might possibly have been successful had we considered his text rather than being seduced by the phrase "with rusty stromatolites easy to find". Rusty angular chunks of rock were certainly abundant at the site bit there were none showing the "distinctive wavy banding" to be found and the thinly-layered piece shown in my photo was the only one of its kind that we could spot after a reasonably thorough search.

 

I now see that the author's source text (Roadside Geology of Idaho) indicated stromatolites could be found along the roadcuts "along the road to Cabinet" and even his photo above indicates the specimen pictured was found on a "road cut near Cabinet" and not at his Site A. Cabinet is an even smaller (apparently now abandoned town) just to the east of Clark Fork on ID-200. I just looked on Google Maps and it seems there are some rock outcrops along the road but from local imagery it seems that these sites are being quarried for rock material. There are Street View images showing trucks in the area and palettes of stacked rock material so I'm guessing that if this area was the source of his stromatolite sample that the area may now be an off-limits commercial quarry site.

 

https://goo.gl/maps/foKrUyXcMrM2

 

The Clark Fork site for stromatolites was a bit of an artifact of my scheduling. We were arriving on a Tuesday and the Emerald Creek Garnet Area is closed on Wednesday and Thursday requiring us to show up there on Friday (before a long drive down to Cascade to get to our cabin for the eclipse). The only other thing I had on my schedule was the Clarkia fossil beds which we then reserved for Thursday. This left Wednesday open and so I searched the book for something unique to do between Spokane, WA (our arrival point) and the Clarkia area. The most interesting and unique one appeared to be stromatolites near Clark Fork and that is how it ended up on the schedule. I'm sure there will be other localities in our travels where we can pick up a specimen or two of stromatolite for our collection. I've seen some beautiful polished pieces of wavy banded stromatolite online and perhaps we'll make one of those source locations of these a target of a future hunting trip.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=stromatolite+polished&tbm=isch

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

P.S.: You'll note from the author's text above that he believes these stromatolites originate in the Libby Formation of the Belt Supergroup (for what that's worth).
 

 

 

 

 

[digit]

5 hours ago, DE&i said:

@digit I'f your road trip came as a paper back publication, it would certainly be a worth while read for anyone travelling in that direction

 

Great Report.

 

Thanks. I've always been a natural story teller and responses to asking me a question on a subject in my wheelhouse usually result in something that has been described as "taking a drink from a fire hose". I'm remarkably silent on topics like sports of which I know less than nothing but I'm always eager to share my knowledge and experiences on something that I'm passionate about (and that includes a wide diversity of arcane topics--fossils being just one of them). I've learned a lot from the trip reports from others on TFF and they have padded my fossil bucket list with a great assortment of potential future locations for a good hunt and so I feel obligated to return the favor and urge others to follow in my footsteps through enticing trip reports (though this one was more bust than boom).

 

We did collect some varied tumbler material that should keep my rock tumbler satiated through the end of the year and I'll post photos of anything pretty and polished that emerges when the time comes. I'll also follow-up with some better photos of the fossil leaves (and maybe the garnets) when I have some time.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken