Trip Report: Southern California and Wiley's Well Area
Mar 9, 2023 0:49:56 GMT -5
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Post by choochoorocks on Mar 9, 2023 0:49:56 GMT -5
This trip report is a couple of months late.
From various rock hounding books, it seems like Southern California has way more collecting sites than Northern California. So for Christmas break, I managed to convince the wife that it would be a good idea to visit Southern California for warmer weather. And since we're down there, it would be a waste to not do some rockhounding haha. And so we went.
First we drove down Big Sur. I wanted to hunt Jade Cove, but having never been there, I wasn't sure how safe it would be to take the kids along. So I opted to go to Willow Creek just south of it. There were lots of rocks there. I spotted serpentine, but I didn't find anything that struck me as jade.
We were going to spend the night in Morro Bay. Along the way, I stopped at a beach south of San Simeon. It was getting dark, and I could hardly see, but at the mouth of a river, I found some nice jasper pebbles and dark rocks -- look like black agates?
The next several days was spent in San Diego visiting friends and going to various attractions like Legoland and the Safari Park. They were great fun too.
Leaving San Diego, we drove to Blythe. On the way, we stopped at Indian Pass Road. We found a few agates, mostly dark pieces, but hunting for dumortierite was great fun. They were challenging to spot. Strangely, they were easier in low light conditions, like in the shade or with the sun setting and getting dark. That was when their dark/bright blue would stand out. We found one specimen that was an amazingly brilliant blue (see picture). But now that we have a ziplock bag of these, I'm not sure what to do with them!
We stayed that night in Blythe. The next day, the plan was to try to find the Potato Patch to dig for geodes. I'd bought the Wiley's Well book by Delmer G. Ross, and had some coordinates. But when I got there, after trying several hills, we did not find anything. It was quite frustrating to say the least. We did find some nice agates near the Coon Hollow campground. I think a few of them have fire. Here are some of them:
The wife and kids had a great time collecting these as they were plentiful, and I found they had a much better eye for them than I did, easily outscoring me at least 5 to 1! Although we didn't find geodes at Wiley's Well, we had a great time. It was really beautiful there.
The next day, we checked out the Blythe Intaglios. They were really cool. We filmed them using a drone. You can't really see how cool they are without a drone.
I knew from research that the Wiley's Well geode beds may be hard to find, so I had a backup. I had read that apparently the Gold Basin geode beds are easy to find and easily accessible. And it was true. After the Intaglios, a short drive and a short hike later, we were at these geode beds with small geodes (1-2 inches) everywhere on the ground and signs of digging all over. Unfortunately, I took only videos there, so don't have pictures to post of this site. I tried digging for larger geodes but found that my flimsy little hand shovel wasn't quite up to the job. So we contented ourselves mostly to collecting the baby geodes on or near the surface. Daylight was short this time of year, and we got there late, so it was a short expedition, and we left with about a half bucket of small geodes. But it was fun and exciting to finally find a geode bed -- made me feel more like a kid than my kids!
Speaking of which, they were real troopers and indulged me most of the time the whole trip. My wife too. She always says she doesn't want to go rock hounding with me, but once we're there, she enjoys it as much as I do, and invariably has better finds that me.
On the last day, we left the area to go to Palm Springs. Our last stop on the way was Chuckwalla Springs. Once again, I took only videos, not pictures. But we managed to collect a lot of pretty little agate nodules, many with bands.
From Palm Springs, we visited Joshua Tree National Park. Loved the landscape there. This time I took pictures:
Loved the desert landscape of Southern California + rock hounding there. Thanks for reading!