Land of Rock and Honey

Have I mentioned how much I love Arizona?

Where else can a Florida rock hound hop out of the vehicle to pose with a mound of snow

and find an awesome deposit of marine fossils and geodes right across the road?

The spring months mean it’s time for me to head back to the deserts of the American southwest to meet up with my partners in crime, Vickie and Jim, for another fun rockhounding trip.  

It’s “fun” if you don’t mind driving several hours to get to your target area and it’s fun if you like digging for hours at a time. Thankfully, that is our exact definition of fun.

The main destination of this year’s trip was the Mongollon Rim of Arizona (NOT the Mongolian Rim) which is a geologic feature about 200 miles long, starting in Yavapai County and running eastward, ending near the border of New Mexico and forming the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau in Arizona.

 The “rim” is composed of limestone and sandstone deposited during the Carboniferous and Permian periods, as well as extensive lava flows. Our hunting focus was the small stretch near Kohl’s Ranch.

Once we got started, there was no stopping us.

Jim has a method for dealing with our rock obsession: he turns off the truck and falls asleep at the wheel.

Normally this would be a very effective way for him to stave off boredom when he's with us but on this occasion, he opted to park fairly close to the center of the road, mistakenly believing that a gravel road this far off the beaten path would be infrequently traveled.

Wrong!

By the time the 6th concerned motorist stopped to ask him if he was ok, 

he told us to wrap it up.

Fair enough.

We had a good haul of interesting rocks.

There was a lot of this material which I would love to label, in a knee-jerk fashion, as branch coral, but I honestly have no idea. 

There were large shell fossils so I believe I can correctly say it was a marine fossil exposure.

The most interesting part of it was the plethora of small geodes,

some still attached to the matrix,

and nearly all of them filled with little druzy crystals when broken open:

My camera is not good enough to catch the sparkle so you'll have to take my word for it.

I want to cut these open with my slab saw but they are so small, it will be like slicing a plum with a chain saw: it'll work but you won't have much left when you're done.

More Arizona to come...