Ive Rediscovered Rock Hounding

G

Gamall Maor

New Member
I've rediscovered a hobby that I pursued as a kid. Walk the Shores of the great lakes looking at/for unusual and cool rocks Like Petoskey Upperlites and Unakite.
Gets me outside and I'm making a walking stick with the rocks inserted.
Anyone else rock hound?
 

My father in law was very much a rock hound. Some of my favorite jewelry was made by him. Very simple polished stone earrings.
He was in a club and they went to different places to hunt rocks and gems.
 

I loved rocks as a kid and for most of my life. I loved banging out mica. I started a nice collection for my grands when they were small, but it was stolen!

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I was given a palm-sized almost perfectly round smooth rock some years ago but I lost it!
 
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I had a neighbor who was really into it. It can be more absorbing than people might think, and some will go overboard buying tools. Saws, grinders, rock tumblers, and on and on.

For a while I was collecting sand if you can imagine that. Different clean sands look amazing under a low powered microscope. Nearly every Great Lakes beach tells a different story under the 'scope. I also got samples when I traveled.
 
I wouldn't say it's a hobby for me but every time I go to visit my mother in Saint John New Brunswick, I try and make time to go to St. Martins, a summer resort town of sorts on the Bay Of Fundy. The tides there are dramatic - between 20-30 ft. depending in a number of factors.

This tide action causes all the rocks on the extensive beach there to become rounded and smooth as a baby's bottom. The other unique feature of the rock found there are rounded markings on the rocks, caused I believe by them constantly banging against each other over years and years of tide actions.

I've never seen these markings on any other rocks anywhere I've been in the world. I have a number of them as accent rocks around my gardens.
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Pic of a section of St. Martins beach at low tide where these rocks are found. This was taken when I was about half way down the beach from the road so it's huge!
St Martins Beach.jpg
 
Gamall Maor said:
I've rediscovered a hobby that I pursued as a kid. Walk the Shores of the great lakes looking at/for unusual and cool rocks Like Petoskey Upperlites and Unakite.
Gets me outside and I'm making a walking stick with the rocks inserted.
Anyone else rock hound?
Click to expand...
Embedding your walking stick with nice rocks you find is a great idea.

Do you cut and/or polish any of them? Or tumble them?

I watch a couple rock-hound Youtubers. It's amazing how stunning some of their finds are when they open them up.
 
You'd love the appropriately-named Rockhound State Park in New Mexico. You never know what you'll find.

South Dakota is a great place for rockhounding, too. You're allowed to collect a bucket a day of quartz in the parks and that's where most of my quartz was collected.

The first time I climbed over the gate from the RV park where we were staying, I didn't have a bucket or bag with me, so I had to fill my pockets. Climbing back over the gate, my shorts were so heavy, they fell down.....of course in front of observers.... Thank goodness I wasn't going commando...

I never come home from a vacation without at least one rock, which has made for some interesting TSA interactions at the airport.
 
dilettante said:
For a while I was collecting sand if you can imagine that. Different clean sands look amazing under a low powered microscope. Nearly every Great Lakes beach tells a different story under the 'scope. I also got samples when I traveled.
Click to expand...
Prior to a family vacation during the '90s, my youngest son's school teacher asked him to bring back a small sample of beach sand from New Zealand. While we were there, he filled two 60 ml glass vials (about 4 ounces) at a "singing sands" beach and put them into his backpack.

The next stop on our trip was in Australia. When we got to the airport in Cairns, for some reason the Australian customs people got terribly agitated about the sand. They confiscated it and told us that he could reclaim it on his way out of Australia. You'd have thought this 13 year old kid was trying to import nuclear material or something! o_O:LOL::ROFLMAO:
 
Murrmurr said:
Embedding your walking stick with nice rocks you find is a great idea.
Click to expand...

Interesting.

I have a staff or cudgel that's about 5 feet plus a few inches long. No idea what wood it is, I just found it by a fence and cut the stump off the bottom and tip off the top. It was well seasoned but without rot, surprising for something just left out in nature standing. There was little bark left and some deep shrinkage cracks.

I cleaned the bark off and it felt fairly strong yet with an interesting marbled light and dark coloring. Over a period of time I'd soak the crevices in mineral oil and then rub more oil in with a cloth. When "idle" I'd leave it upright in a small cup of oil. Over time that sucker took up close to two quarts of mineral oil, and it has never leaked or stained or felt greasy. That sure added some weight to it too.

I used sisal twine to wrap about 6 inches as a "grip" not far from the big end (the root-stump end is now the top, tapering down to what originally was the tip). This probably should be redone using paracord or leather lace or something.

I'd like to find a brass ferrule for the tip/bottom end to hinder splitting with use, then a sacrificial rubber tip for grip. But I have no idea how one would embed stones into the wood so they'd stay put.

As it is it's a very basic staff, but somebody offered me $100 for it a couple of years ago.
 
About forty years ago I tried making an intarsia with some rock slabs that I bought at a lapidary show. Unfortunately, I ran out of the right colored stone and had to finish the intarsia with the wrong colored two squares in the upper right. If I had not been pressed for time and space back then I would have simply waited until I located the right stones and then finished to the intarsia. The opening of the bottle is also wrong. Aside from that, I once made a mosaic out of sea shells that I had collected in the Balearic Islands. Unfortunately, shortly after the mosaic was done the color faded from the shells and they all turned white. 005.jpg
 
dilettante said:
I had a neighbor who was really into it. It can be more absorbing than people might think, and some will go overboard buying tools. Saws, grinders, rock tumblers, and on and on.

For a while I was collecting sand if you can imagine that. Different clean sands look amazing under a low powered microscope. Nearly every Great Lakes beach tells a different story under the 'scope. I also got samples when I traveled.
Click to expand...

I saw a video on Youtube by a guy with a tumbler (it polishes the stones). It's interesting to feed into someone else's obsession, isn't it? I saw another channel with a woman who is really into doing jigsaws. It's amazing to hear her talk about them, the companies that produced them, the box art, the origin or the image, and different puzzle piece types..... who knew....
 

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