And then there was Minnesota...

To paraphrase my usual favorite Chappelle Show quote:

"There's nothing I can say about Minnesota that hasn't already been said about Afghanistan."

Yeah, I know:  OUCH!

  But honestly, it's neither a rock hounder's nor fossil hunter's paradise.

I think it had its time in the sun but the usual human foibles of litigation and property destruction have reduced its appeal to nil.

If you want to hunt the famous, well-advertised Minnesota agates, here's what you'll see:

I researched my options on line before my trip

and was taken in by what I'll lightly call

!!!The Moose Lake Agate Scam!!!

It's hard to Google "Minnesota agate" and not be assailed by references to Moose Lake's amazing agates and the Agate Days festival.  I couldn't make the festival but for $3, I was given an agate hunting permit which gave me access to 3 gravel pits.  No worries about the three T's of Trespassing, Ticketing, and Towing, and no wonder.  Two of the "gravel pits" were sandy ATV pits where it would be very unsafe to wander around (lots of blind hills with ATV's potentially flying over the top) and very unproductive since there wasn't much in the way of viable rock.  The third pit was the...best...and that's not saying much since it's been picked over to within an inch of its existence. 

Here's a selfie of me in cold, blustery rain, accepting the fact that I was going to have to hunt for micro-agates.

The absolute best agate of the trip:

Fabulous, the size of a Texas pea, and hard-put to justify all the effort.

Here's a few other fragments I found that reminded me of a handful of molars:

Moose Lake, if you can't at least offer tourists a fresh pile of gravel every so often, 

it might be time to switch up your advertising.

I was glad to trade Moose for Beaver

(take that however you will)

and headed up the North Shore region of Lake Superior to Beaver Bay.

A helpful member of a Minnesota mineral club had referred me to the Beaver Bay Agate Shop and she did not lead me astray.  I chatted with the owner, Keith Bartel, and his son, Jeremiah, and these guys are the real deal: friendly, helpful, and lovers of the hobby.  They directed me to a beautiful rock beach almost across from their shop where I blissfully sifted through stones for a few hours.

I was able to load up on micro agates.

Can't wait for a cozy winter eve to get out my scanning electron microscope

 and enjoy my collection.

My favorite find was a piece of trash:

This is just a blob of aluminum, churned by Lake Superior into a funky little treasure.

The North Shore had a better feel for me overall.  

Minnesota is not known for fossils.

There are some hunting areas in Minneapolis and one of the state parks offers a fossil hunting tour every Saturday but that didn't fit into my schedule and the potential fossils listed were small shark teeth and clam shells.  I was interested in stromatolites, fossilized blue-green algae, but couldn't come across any specific sites.

Out of all my pre-trip letter writing, I only had one helpful reply. The same person that sent me to the Beaver Bay Agate Shop also suggested I dig for staurolite crystals in Royalton, MN.

 Just below a small dam on the Mississippi River is one of the only places in the United States where it's possible to find staurolite crystals that have weathered out of schist.

While the ground is littered with single crystals, the goal is crystals that have twinned into a 90º angle.  Another newbie who had found one perfect example of the cross-shaped crystal told me to dig in the grey clay and sift if as if I were panning for gold.  Two hours later, I resorted to surface hunting and found some decent little examples.  Well worth the excursion...

...but not the whole trip.

On to greener, or rather, rockier pastures!