Rocks

OK, I have a thing for rocks generally.  All kinds.  And this one:  

beautiful boulder!
i have a rather large collection of rocks
there is a funny cartoon if you search for rock hoarder
i can relate

Ohhhhhhhhh….Rock Porn! I am all about that!

This will make a prospector's ole heart skip a beat! I would like to find the vein where this chunk of quartz came from...

From one of my snake habitats

Posted this rock from my place in this thread
The geology of our place is such that there are no rocks on the land naturally, only what was brought in by wagon to build the house and barn foundations. This rock we believe was quarried close by near the river.

Travis, I have a similar problem here - loads of quartz, and no doubt gold hereabouts somewhere. The trick is finding it. But, gold, schmold, aiming for gertitude anyway, what would I do with gold - can’t eat it, makes a lousy pillow, and attracts villains.  

Yes, I too admit I have a serious thing for rocks.  In a very unpermaculture fashion I have worked to augment the lack of rocks on my little homestead with literally truck loads of rocks brought in for me to play with.  Here are some of my rocks.

Artie Scott wrote:Travis, I have a similar problem here - loads of quartz, and no doubt gold hereabouts somewhere. The trick is finding it. But, gold, schmold, aiming for gertitude anyway, what would I do with gold - can’t eat it, makes a lousy pillow, and attracts villains.  

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh always type out AU, that way you keep the knowledgeable ones in the know, and the ones who are villain's off your land. (LOL)

This was an interesting rock. The area was cleared from forest into trees in 1838 according to farm documents, but the rock was too big to move by oxen. (work horses did not take over here until about 1890). So they drilled a blast hole in the rock, but never dynamited it. In 2014 I cleared the forest that had grown back, and finally pushed the rock to the edge of the field. Of course I used 185 horses, and a big bulldozer to do it.

David, awesome rock work!  I would probably have to truck in rocks myself if I wasn’t so lucky as to have a creek that coughs up an endless supply of them.

One of the tricks I use in finding veins of quartz is to walk the edges of fields. Here in New England the fields always have rockwalls on the edge of them. Generally the rocks that make up the wall were not taken very far from where they were found, so....

It ends up being triangulation.

I will walk, say a North side rock wall, and look for a large number of quartz in a given part of the rock wall, and then mark the trees in that area with flagging tape.

Then I walk the West side rock wall until I find a large number of quartz rocks, and then mark the trees with flagging tape there.

A line between the two spots across the field generally indicates the vein of quartz. I check it with a compass because here the quartz veins run parallel with the nearby Seismic Faultline, so that will tell me if I am close or not, then I can dig down and see what the quartz vein holds for promise. I look for how big of a vein it is, and some other indicators, but really it is about observing what a rock wall has for rocks in it. It is like a real life...Where is Waldo...or in this case, where is the quartz? Keep in mind, I only do my prospecting in the winter, so it can be a challenge under snow.

Here is a rock wall that shows promise. Can you see the quartz in the rock wall? From this I triangulated a sizeable vein of quartz with another rock wall.

Hint: If you are having trouble finding the quartz in the above picture, it is located in the exact center of the picture.

Nice Travis!  Very clever. Wish I had your knowledge of geology - this is a very interesting area in that sense, with everything from slate to gold to kyanite mines nearby. A geologists dream!

Artie Scott wrote:Nice Travis!  Very clever. Wish I had your knowledge of geology - this is a very interesting area in that sense, with everything from slate to gold to kyanite mines nearby. A geologists dream!

Slate was how my interest in geology started.

I was clearing forest into field out back of my house and kept hitting massive boulders of slate, so after awhile I started pushing them aside for later use. Then I was on a website that had over 1000 mines in Maine, and did a search for my town, and there it was, a slate mine just a few miles from my house. That was a slippery slope that included more mines in the area of that were of far more interest, which gave me the conclusion if others had found it, then I would have it on my farm. It took me 5 years to find it, but there it was. The palladium was just a complete shocker. I never expected to find that.

I had a lot more testing I wanted to do this summer, but just never got to it. I wanted to trench a 1/2 mile across one of my fields to see what the veins of quartz look like. How often they occurred, their width, etc. I also wanted to try some phytomining, but never did that either.

This Saturday hunting season will be over, so I can head back into the woods and check some more streams and outcrops of rocks. I actually prefer lode deposits just because with placer deposits, its where it was left, but lode means it is in the rock itself. And with winter searches, I can get to the lode outcrops, whereas the streams are often frozen.