Found at a beach near Seattle, WA. Ive heard of poppy jasper, but usually its red. Anyway the blue is very charming to me, jasper or not! And the other rock is just a funky little thing that happened to have have some iron deposit i suppose, just looks cool and thats what im looking for haha

Unpolished is from the bullrider Trent (RIP) and the 3 small polished in the center are from an Aguascalientes merchant in Tepatitlan.

There are lots of garnets to be found in my region, and I'd love to try grinding and polishing some of them!

I'm a complete beginner and have no experience with lapidary work yet. I'm looking for a suitable wet grinding and polishing machine for gemstones. I don't need a cutting machine, as I only want to grind and polish the garnets in their natural shapes.

Could anyone recommend a good machine for a beginner?

Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance! 😊

Sorry for the poor camera work, hopefully worth it :) This is highly silicified rhyolite that was altered multiple times by a hydrothermal system.

Best places to go hunting around Austin Texas? Recently got back into the hobby and looking for places close by.

My husband and I were able to spend 3.5hrs this morning at a spot on Guthrie Creek; it was so hard not to take everything I touched and even harder to leave! Literally more geodes than not. Crisp, still autumn morning air, boots in the water, and rocks in the buckets! I'm so blessed to have a husband (who isn't a rockhound at all) who was willing to make this pit stop for me on our drive back home to Michigan from our vacation in Florida, where I was able to get some shelling done for the first time! It's been a massively successful week satisfying my goblin urges! Until next time, Indiana 💕

Just going thru some of the unseived dark red tourmaline ore from my claim!

Not much to go through, and we are only finding (what look like dravite) but are actually magnesium rich dark red elbaite. If we keep digging and the peg continues to fractionate, they should start turning pink soon!!! But we can only hope!

Anyway thought I’d share part of the process! Which is taking dirt home and seiving thru it to find any other anything missed while actively digging the claim!

Went to North Carolina couple days ago & came back with loads gemstones.

I found this one yesterday in SE Missouri! 🤩

Cleaned this up a bit, compared to earlier post. The colors are definitely more vivid when wet

I like the color and shapes. I hope to find more interesting rocks next time I'm building Hügelkultur beds. Any tips on what I should look out for while I dig in pinon hills ca? I could spend all day looking at them.

Spent a few hours this weekend walking the shore with my wife. Total newbies. How’d we do?

Hi! I'm fairly new at this & new to this site. It was suggested I soak my rocks in vinegar, then iron out, then baking soda. The rocks now look covered with heavy white stuff that could be lime, alkaline, or something. Does anyone know how I can resolve this? Some of them were really good finds.Thanks so much

Wanna find places I can take my daughter rockhounding within about 4 hours any way from me but that’s not on someone’s land. any help is very appreciated

Just wanted to post some pics of some of the more unique finds from Grain Marais this past weekend, along with an agate I found last year from Two Harbors, MN that I tumbled and polished up.

There’s a decent mix of porphyry, conglomerates, brecciated jasper, and what looks to be agates in a basalt matrix. Fun trip!

I have been waiting 2 years to make this post!  After seeing so many awesome posts from rockhounds that were faced with such a terrible burden of where to put all of their treasures because they ran out of space inside their house, I decided to build an exterior rock garden with my son.  But before we could build it we needed more beautiful rocks so it wasn’t some tiny thing.  Once I decided on its size and placement in the backyard, I realized I would need a large amount of ‘base’ rock to fill it with before the treasures could go in, but didn’t want to just fill it with gravel or pea stone.  Last year I had the good fortune to hit Nether’s Farm in central Ohio which is a self-serve flint locale.  The flint is super colorful and there is a practically inexhaustible supply located in soil, so very easy to get out.  I loaded up my Jeep with as many 5-gallon buckets I could fit, weighed and paid, and brought them home.  Sadly, they were not even close enough to form a base layer, so this summer I went back with my son and got a second round.  Then we cleared a spot in the backyard, put down metal edging that would eventually show a cool patina from the elements, and filled it with the flint.  Then we added all of our treasures from the past ten years of rockhounding adventures that we were not keeping inside, which included the following:

• Flint from Nether’s Farm, OH
• Rainbow hematite, pyrophyllite, quartz, and kyanite from Graves Mountain, GA
• Copper and some old mine artifacts from the Keweenaw Peninsula, MI
• Quartz from Fisher Mountain, AR
• Specular hematite from Champion Mine, Champion, MI
• Petrified wood from Arizona
• Chrysocolla and peridot from Arizona
• Root beer quartz (agatized and botryoidal) from Haunted Ridge, MO
• Amethyst from Thunder Bay, ON
• Obsidian from California
• Various tumbled rocks from everywhere and rock shops
• Calcite and iron ore from Groveland Mine, Iron Mountain, MI
• Various fossils (crinoids, horn corals, brachiopods) from Rockport Quarry, MI
• Wavellite from Jessieville, AR (to be added after cleaning is completed)
• More to come!

Wanted to share!  (Hope we never have to move…)