Changed to Rocks and Minerals

[SwampDonkey]

Often times while cruising some sites you'll come across bouldary terrain in the Queen Charlottes. This is usually at lower  slopes of a mountain where mass wasting or land slides have occured leaving unsorted material. Sometimes on fans, or more often, further midslope. We used to come across crystal formations imbedded in the rock, mostly shattered and partly broken. Some people have been lucky to find them whole. They are usually white but sometimes pinkish quartz. The outside surface of these would be smooth and milk white, while the interior were crystaline, sharp and hexagonal. Yes the crystals grew inward. If you could get your hands an a whole one, unbroken and with a pinkish hue it was worth some money. Upwards of $3500 a sample depending on size. Here are some chared pieces from what was called Quartz Dragon Eggs.




We used to pick up quite a few chared pieces behind the road crew.

Here is a site which markets them

http://www.tosots.com

happy hunting

[SwampDonkey]

Here are some pics of a garnet-mica schist found on the shoreline of Prince Rupert, BC. Minerals in this rock include mica, garnet, quartz, limestone, hornblende.


Notice the garnet nodules


Profile of a fractured piece



Surface of the schist where it fractured along a single layer, metallic lustre to it in the light.

[Danny_S]

Very Interesting!   :P

[SwampDonkey]

Magnesium sulfate


Granite

[iain]

Wiuld that magnesium that a polish in a tumbler?
and the granite looks like balmoral red
nice showing




     iain

[SwampDonkey]

HI Iain,

The magesium sulfate would polish well with a metallic lustre. The yellow bits are the sulphate precipitating from the mineral. I found the specimen in the field beside the house and there are only a couple of mines that they extract it from in Canada.

The granite is interesting in itself. Some places I go and it's more of a cream color or white with quartz and hornblend in it. Some is hard and in some places it's very brittle. This specimen is quite hard.

cheers

[Tom]

Rocks interest me.  We don't have rocks.  All of our "rocks" are sedimentary and have been grown, for the most part, thing like Limestone and Cochina.

I've seen those cannonball looking things with the crystals inside before.  they are imported by local rockhounds that travel far to bring home crystaline and ignious rocks.

Neat stuff.

[Murf]

We have a very special kind of rock around my cottage.

Gravity doesn't effect it the same as other rocks, although only for brief periods at a time, sometimes they jump up so hard they stick right into the trees.



It only seems to happen right after I set off a couple pounds of ANFO in little holes the ground, wierd huh?   :

It also usually coincides with a funny sort of boom sound, and little (sometimes pretty big ones too) splashes in the lake. 

[iain]

Saw much of your wood? :D :D


    iain

[SwampDonkey]

Slickensides basalt. The opposite surface of this rock was in contact with glaciation while the facing surface was the rub zone of a fault line which shows a metalic lustre. The sample was taken from the Fredericton Fault Line in New Brunswick. In Geology class we had a draw a map of the geological formations of the area. It was quite interesting how the rocks told the history and the map was as well.


Another sample of granite with a slight pinkish hue.


Shale taken from a rock crushing operation near Fredericton, NB.

cheers

[JJackson]

Swamp Donkey for some reasons I could not help it but in my mind I was in the basement of the Forestry and Geology Building in a lab.  I wish we would have had more interesting geolgy class then you guys had.   thanks for the memories..

[Quartlow]

We have a field that produces lots of rocks every year, ya'll can come and take all you want!!  :D

[SwampDonkey]

They gold Quartload? I'll bring a freight train. :D

[SwampDonkey]

Fossilized limestone collected from the River Don in northern New Brunswick. The site was scarified with a power disc trencher for tree planting.

[SwampDonkey]

Another mineral I found in my collection.

[metalspinner]

SD,
Those are all neat pics.  I'll show my boy in a little bit.  He is growing from a pebble puppy to a rock hound.  Those fossilized shell impressions are really neat.

[SwampDonkey]

Dolomite with manganese

[Chuck White]

Rocks interest me. I've seen those cannonball looking things with the crystals inside before.  they are imported by local rockhounds that travel far to bring home crystaline and ignious rocks.
Neat stuff.

Tom; I'm not positive, but I think they're called GEODES.
We used to find them around some of the prairie dog towns when I was stationed in South Dakota.  Apparently the prairie dogs would roll the geodes out when they were "cleaning house".

I found a place up in the Black Hills of SD where we found fossilized plants, sea-shells and fish.  Used to have a lot of that stuff, but over the years, most of it has found new homes.

[tyb525]

Those are geodes. Whole ones can fetch a huge price on ebay. The best lapidary artists cut them in half with a saw, then polish the cut edge. The insides of them can be beautiful.

[SwampDonkey]

Here's another chunk of quartz that grew inward on the wall of one of them egg like rocks. Geode I guess as Chuck and Tyb pointed out. These things are relatively smooth on the exterior (kind of like frosted glass), the crystals grow inward.



That area of the country has a few thermal vents and hot springs. Prince Rupert-Queen Charlottes and nearby islands