Well we left Livermore yesterday and drove all day to get to Barstow,CA so we could get to a new agate bed. We hope to find some good agate but also looked in our Gem Trails of Southern CA and found a couple of other spots that have jasper, petrified palm (that would be a cool find), and onyx. We shall see after leaving our KOA campground for the night. We pulled into Barstow so late we didn’t want to search for our campground in the dark so we decided to do laundry and recharge Gypsy’s batts. so we will have a full charge once we get into boondocking campground.
We are about 15-18 miles outside of Barstow deep in the Mohave Desert looking for agate. We parked right at the site of Paul Bunyan Agate feilds and the trail up to the dig site is about a 45degree slope. Standing at Gypsy and looking up is daunting!
Gypsy at foot of Paul Bunyan Agate site
In the background you can see the trail going up to the dig site. It doesn’t look like much from down here but going up to the site was quite challenging. The quad road quits about half way up and the primitive trail began. It is rocky and soft so sliding is easy. We dug for a day and a half finding some Paul Bunyan agate
A large piece of agate protruding from Rhyolite
Jerry dug for quite awhile on that large piece of agate just sticking out there for someone to get. It is attached to the hardest Ryolite and wouldn’t even budge. We could just admire it and go on hoping to find a piece small enough to take home.
We did manage to collect a rather large amount of agate; some kind of chippy but most of it is solid and can probably be worked; I guess we’ll really find out when we get home.
On the way south we stopped to visit friends outside of Palm Springs and to visit the tamale festival in Indio. What a treat-homemade authentic tamales! You could even get them with fruit inside the lard! Despite being full of lard we all loaded up on frozen ones for our freezers and of course had a tamale feast when we got home!
He was dressed so spiffy & so proud-we asked him to pose for us!