Post by Jugglerguy on Apr 22, 2013 16:03:07 GMT -5
My son Bryan and I headed back to Lake Michigan for more Petoskey stones on Sunday. We left the house at 5:45 and arrived in Petoskey at 7:45. I was hoping there would be no wind when we arrived. There was a light breeze and the temperature was in the low twenties. It was pretty chilly, but we were dressed warm. Unfortunately, my waders leak bad, so they acted more like a wet suit. I had wet feet for ten hours.
Here's our first stop in Petoskey. There was a thin layer of ice that had formed over night that you can see in the first picture near shore.
The rock scoopers worked great.
Here's a shot from another beach we went to south of Charlevoix. We didn't get many rocks here, but it was a nice view.
This is at the same location as the last picture. We have a book that lists some good locations to search for Petoskey stones, and the author suggested taking this seasonal road for about 2.5 miles along the lake to a stream. He said he got some nice rocks out of the stream. Almost all the snow is melted in the area, except for a few snow banks in parking lots. I was really surprised to see this as I drove down the trail:
This place was somewhat remote, so I almost turned around because I was not sure I could get through without getting stuck and I didn't have a shovel with me. I wimped out and didn't go through the three foot drift. The snow was actually very hard because it had melted somewhat and refrozen a number of times. My only worry was bottoming out when driving through the ruts. I only scraped bottom once though.
Here's where the stream emptied into the lake. We only found one rock here, but had a fun ride to it.
Here are our Petoskeys for the day:
Here's a couple pudding stones and some other fossils. We saw some fossils like this polished up at a rock shop in the area when we were here two weeks ago, so we thought we'd give it a try. The lady in the shop said that the black matrix contains oil and that they smell like oil when you grind them.
Another beach didn't have many Petoskeys, but there was a lot of banded chert on the beach, so we grabbed enough for a tumbler full.
Here are a few small, but nice Petoskey stones. Most of what we got is covered in algae and looks terrible before polishing it.
At the end of the day, we decided that the first place we went was way better than any other, so we headed back there for another hour or two of hunting. This is the image that was so burned into my brain that it's all I could see when I crawled in bed and closed my eyes last night.
Here's our first stop in Petoskey. There was a thin layer of ice that had formed over night that you can see in the first picture near shore.
The rock scoopers worked great.
Here's a shot from another beach we went to south of Charlevoix. We didn't get many rocks here, but it was a nice view.
This is at the same location as the last picture. We have a book that lists some good locations to search for Petoskey stones, and the author suggested taking this seasonal road for about 2.5 miles along the lake to a stream. He said he got some nice rocks out of the stream. Almost all the snow is melted in the area, except for a few snow banks in parking lots. I was really surprised to see this as I drove down the trail:
This place was somewhat remote, so I almost turned around because I was not sure I could get through without getting stuck and I didn't have a shovel with me. I wimped out and didn't go through the three foot drift. The snow was actually very hard because it had melted somewhat and refrozen a number of times. My only worry was bottoming out when driving through the ruts. I only scraped bottom once though.
Here's where the stream emptied into the lake. We only found one rock here, but had a fun ride to it.
Here are our Petoskeys for the day:
Here's a couple pudding stones and some other fossils. We saw some fossils like this polished up at a rock shop in the area when we were here two weeks ago, so we thought we'd give it a try. The lady in the shop said that the black matrix contains oil and that they smell like oil when you grind them.
Another beach didn't have many Petoskeys, but there was a lot of banded chert on the beach, so we grabbed enough for a tumbler full.
Here are a few small, but nice Petoskey stones. Most of what we got is covered in algae and looks terrible before polishing it.
At the end of the day, we decided that the first place we went was way better than any other, so we headed back there for another hour or two of hunting. This is the image that was so burned into my brain that it's all I could see when I crawled in bed and closed my eyes last night.