Last night I scored! A house threw out a ton of stuff, told my friend stop the truck and have a look see. A big recycle tub had over 50 pounds of rocks and fossils. I have a large hunk of quartz crystals, several with decent clusters of purple crystals (amythist?) A good 2 or 3 pound hunk of petrified wood in great condition, rock solid. A small stalactite and a huge (20 pound?) stalagmite. One is pointed and comes from the ceiling, stalactites are rounded and form on the floor. Also a geode the size of a grapefruit. Geodes are spherical rocks that contain hollow cavities lined with crystals. The name geode comes from the Greek word Geoides, which means "earthlike. I was going to attempt a nice clean cut with my angle grinder and cut off wheel but you really need a diamond blade. So I dropped it on the concrete until it broke into several chunks. It had a good void inside, all bearing small crystals, nothing spectacular though. The Giant quartz crystal, star of the show ^ 2 views of the petrified wood, not a great pic of the end but you can see the rings Small one is the stalactite, larger one is the stalagmite. Part of the geode. the purple ctystals. @Adfundum do you collect rocks or fossils?
Much like fossils, you can say it's worth X dollars but it's only worth what you can get, in the end. I suspect at a flea market you might get 30-50$ out of the large quartz. Maybe the same for the stalagmite and the petrified wood? I guess they were moving out, was like a ton of stuff to the curb. Many black bags with clipboards, old photos, VCR tapes etc. Instead of tearing them open and making a mess, my friend tossed like 5 bags in his truck. Said he would go thru them and toss the rest at his house. Told him if he finds a bunch of $ we have to split it. LOL. I was happy with the tub.
That stuff is awesome! I'm not really a collector, but I have a lot of quartz around the house. They cleared a lot for a house just up the hill from me, and the ground was full of quartz. We got some big chunks and used them for a path, I chiseled our house number into a larger one and put it out front Some of the others are used around the yard in planting beds. I even have some smaller ones right in front of me because I like how they look. My father used to have a lapidary set up and some different kinds of stones like opal, turquoise, and jade. I tried it a few times, but never got into it. I think my niece ended up taking the cut off wheels, grinders, and polishers. So, where was the petrified wood from?
There is a private field in our area that supposedly has a lot of petrified wood in it but I have never gone out to it. My high school biology teacher told me that was where he got most of his. Quartz is pretty common in our area.
That's pretty awesome. My father (was) is a farrier and equine dentist. I grew up, holding horses and tools on the weekend. Think i rebelled against it..... I went a different way. ============ Pointing out the origin of such minerals and gems is largely a guess (on my neophyte part)
Both very (somewhat) uncommon here but this is "bone valley" Fl. I have a couple chunks that I may have miss IDed that I found here Fossils a plenty, but gems and minerals are more rare
Not aware of any gemstone deposits in this area. A coworker used to go to some place I think either in NC or TN and dig them where you rent the tools and get to go out and fill your bucket up. I haven't seen any big quartz in awhile but I don't stomp around as much as I used to. Smaller ones seem to always be working their way up in my fields when I plow though. One spot in particular I have cleaned out every year and they are back again the following year. I just keep buckets nearby and toss them all in and use in the landscaping or as backfill when the need arises.
That's awesome! I used to treasure hunt at yard sales, to profit on Ebay. It's not nearly the same, but I get the concept. I made a few thousand doing that one year. Great find!
That's true. What you find and see as treasure may have no meaning to others, but as long as it means something to you, it's priceless. I take a big chunk of stone, find a place to put it, arrange it, arrange again, and rearrange it until I like the way it looks, and bingo...it means so much to me (even if the rest of the world only sees a big rock. My mother lives in AZ. and there are lots of gems and petrified wood out there. What's interesting about the petrified wood is that it was once a living thing and now is stone. It's timeless and amazing. I used to read a lot of Louis L'Amour's books, and remember a story about mining and a vein of rotten quartz laced with gold. I found out it was true about gold in quartz. The area around here is known for one of the earliest gold rushes in the country. A 12 yr. old kid found a 17 lb. chunk of gold, but because the family didn't know what gold looked like, they used it for a doorstop. Anyway, when it was found to be gold, the mining started, following the veins of quartz throughout the area. When the lot above me was cleared a few years back, I saw that it was one of the quartz veins and my first thought was that idea of rotten quartz I got from L'Amour's book. And no, nobody did any mining on the property. All they want is green grass. Nothing Gold Can Stay By Robert Frost Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
We went petrified wood hunting in AZ when I was a kid. It was SO much fun. In the early 70's, that stuff was everywhere. We found a dozen or more pieces just lying there, waiting for someone to notice them. I'll bet it is a bit harder, now.
In most of the touristy areas, I think it's hard to find anything. But I did notice that in those gift shops there was a lot of it. Hmmm...
My parents bought a couple acres of land in nowhere's ville on that trip, in the hopes that some developer would come along and pay big for the land. That's where we found ours. That was in 74(ish.) We sold those acres in 2012, after my dad passed. He held out hope for all those years. Our sale price was approximately the same as what they paid in the 70s. They got some petrified wood and almost 40 years of property taxes out of it. If they had been right, though?
Ha! Yeah, my grandparents were city folks who bought about 50 acres of farm land near where a damn was being built. It was bought under the impression that it would be future lake-front property, but the lake never quite got that big because the damn wasn't that big. I was there for about six months as a kid, and had a fantastic time. No fossils, but there was a barn, some horses and cows, two ponds, and lots of trees.
I have an extensive fossil collection, I live a mile from the Peace river, world famous for the fossils found there. I have spent thousands of hours digging and sifting.
