THE PETRIFIED DIGEST. GINKGO MEETING PLACE AND TIME FRIDAY April 20, 2018, 7 pm Douglas County Fire District #2 377 Eastmont Ave.

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1 THE PETRIFIED DIGEST GINKGO MEETING PLACE AND TIME FRIDAY April 20, 2018, 7 pm Douglas County Fire District #2 377 Eastmont Ave., East Wenatchee, The Petrified Digest PO Box 303 Wenatchee, WA Send your article ideas, trip notes or Photos to ginkgonews@yahoo.com

2 The Petrified Digest Published monthly by the Ginkgo Mineral Society, Inc. PO Box 303 Wenatchee, Washington MEETINGS 3RD FRIDAY of the month, 7 pm Douglas County Fire District #2 377 Eastmont Avenue, East Wenatchee, WA OFFICERS President Carol Smith Vice President Kirk Holman Secretary Bob Spurrier Treasurer David J. Earhart COORDINATORS Field Trips Open Shop & Equipment Kirk Holman Program/Education Carol Smith Social Marge Porterfield Chelan Co. Fair Booth Kirk Holman Museum Richard Congdon Newsletter Marcia Summers Newsletter address: finkgonews@yahoo.com Web Site Valorie Hampton The Ginkgo Mineral Society was formed to promote the education of mineralogy and geology; to Encourage the collecting of rocks and minerals; to provide field excursions to mineral collecting areas; and to promote interest in lapidary work. Dues: Individual $20.00 Senior $15.00 Family $30.00 Lifetime (20+ years) - Free April May June 20 Club Meeting 18 Club Meeting 15 Club Meeting Please call Carol Smith if you are planning to visit the rock shop to make sure someone will be there to open it. The shop is located at Christy Prices home: 4325 Squilchuck Rd., Wenatchee and is usually open on Saturdays. Directions: from the intersection of Mission & Crawford Streets at Lincoln Park in Wenatchee, it is 4 miles up Squilchuck Rd. Turn left on Cranmer Road and take an immediate left onto Christy s long driveway.

3 President s Message April 2018 Field trip season is not too far off for lower elevation traveling and hiking. Last month we had a group head for Saddle Mt. with beautiful weather & no wind. Our lapidary shop now has a small frig & a microwave which was donated to us by Gordon DeWitt & Mike Morrison. Thanks guys, hot soup in the winter & cold drinks in the summer! A Thank You to Richard & Charlene for a donation of several boxes of cool rocks for our auction boxes. Richard has some show & tell rocks to show us from their last rock trip to Utah at our April meeting. The program will be by Tom Prang showing some purchases from the big show in Arizona, & some rough pieces will be for sale at the meeting. The gold show at the Cashmere Fairgrounds is April 14 & 15. Several of our members will have booths there, so come on up & support them & the gold show. Don t forget the Yakima Rock & Gem Show April 27, 28, 29 th. If you are interested in a blue forest trip to Wyoming.. Larry & Wanda Shaw will be at the State Park, 38 miles from Kemmerer, Wyo. On June 26 th to lead you 8 miles to the collecting site. For more info. Contact Happy tulips & daffodils, Carol Smith, President

4 GINKGO MINUTES MARCH 2018 The meeting was called to order at 7:05pm. Richard Prevett gave a program on his Owyhee Mtn. Trip. Carol Smith, James Engley, Marcia summers, and David Higley showed rocks from various places. The door prize was won by Esther Morasch and the raffle was won by Mary Jo Spencer. The minutes were read and approved and the Treasurer s Report was given. We ve had some rock donations and there will be a time set to go to the shop and wash them in preparation for the Chelan County Fair. There was talk about rock hunting trips to the Blue Forest and Hampton Butte. There may be trip to the Vantage Rock Shop and Wanapum Heritage Center. The Yakima Rock Show will be a large one this year, April 27, 28 & 29. Tom Prang is going to do the program next meeting on the huge Tucson, AZ rock and mineral show. The meeting was adjourned at 8:49pm. Bob Spurrier, Secretary Ginkgo Treasurer s Report for April, 2018 Savings Account Interest Received in March, $1.41 Ending Balance $ 12, Checking Account: Beginning Balance 3/1 $ deposits; memberships, raffle, etc checks; shop rent, newsletter, genie wheel Ending Balance 3/31 $ Note: Ginkgo 2018 Memberships are due ASAP. Note: Our Ginkgo Rock Club has a booth at the NCWP Gold Show in Cashmere on April 14 & 15. Any of you Ginkgo members who have things to show or sell are welcome to display them in our club booth. Please bring them Friday afternoon or by 9 am Saturday. After 9 am you will pay an admission fee of $5 which puts you into the hourly drawing for prizes all day long. (you must be present to win) REFRESHMENTS April: Kim Fulkerson and? (open) May: Sue Pederson and Vicki McGregor If you can help Kim please call Marge at

5 Into The Desert: 2018 We pull out of our driveway at 6:30 AM. Finally, we re on the road, heading for some of our favorite rocking sites. It s Monday morning, March the fifth. We have nearly 600 miles to cover before reaching Jackpot, Nevada. We ll spend our first evening there. This road trip south has become an annual event for Charleen and I. We generally start talking about our next trip shortly after we get home from the previous one. We study the weather channels and by watching what s happening in the cities we ll be passing through, we have a real good idea of what to expect. So far, we've been extremely lucky with the weather conditions on our trips. It was 17 degrees in East Wenatchee that morning and it was 33 degrees when we got into Jackpot at 5 PM that afternoon. I mention this because the next morning we pull out of Jackpot at about 4:30 AM and somewhere between Jackpot and Wells, Nevada, I look down at the thermometer on the dash and it s reading 14 degrees below 0. Our breath was freezing on the inside of the windows. Each year we head south, down into the desert and sandstone country of Arizona and Utah. This year, our first stop (just a short one) was going to be at St. George, Utah. We spent our second night there. The next morning, we were up so early we had trouble finding the place we were looking for in the dark. When it finally got light enough to see real well, we could see we needed to be farther down the road a ways. It was cold out and we were anxious to get on the road to Holbrook. So, a hot breakfast and we are on the road. Holbrook, Arizona lies about 100 miles east of Flagstaff, on I-40. It s about 30 miles southwest of the Petrified Forest National Park. Now that fact should give you some idea what Char and I were doing there. This was the fourth year in a row we had come to Holbrook. We had reasoned there might be places outside the park we could find pieces of the beautiful petrified wood Arizona is known for. There are a number of rock shops in Holbrook and all of them have redwood by the dump truck loads, and all of them tell us that there is no place we can go pick up wood. Nope, it s all on private land. Nope. The first year we found a few crumbs. Mostly in road fill. The second year, we found more crumbs but we got a tip from a passerby and at the very end of our last day, we started finding better and better stuff. The third year, we went straight to the good stuff. This was the second year that we have taken our dog into the desert. Archie is a Shih Tzu mix. He s built close to the ground and only has about three inches of clearance in the front. This makes for some pretty arduous going over rough and rocky terrain. But the little guy is a real trooper and insists on being as near me as possible. Archie is a double rescue and he s been living with us for about ten hears. I've always been a dog person. I ve had dogs ever since I was a little boy. But if someone had told me I would become this attached to a small dot like Archie, I would have told them they were crazy. I used to sneer at old men driving down the road with their fuzzy little dogs hanging out the window. Now look at me, I m the old man driving down the road with his fuzzy little dog hanging out the window. Life is as it should be. When Charleen and I look for rocks, we end up doing a lot of walking. In the mornings it s nice and cool but as the sun moves higher in the sky, the heat starts to bear down. Even this time of year, the mid-day sun can get quite warm too hot for Archie. It would be a sin to let him try to keep up with me in that heat. And he would keep going until he dropped. Since the first time we took Archie down south I ve been trying to come up with some sort of a contraption I could use to haul him around in. Before long I spotted a golf bag cart in the thrift store. It was well made, collapsible, and ling, perfect so far. I paid three bucks for it. There was no bag on it so it was pretty simple attaching a plastic tub to the frame-work and off we go. We took it for a couple of test runs up and down the driveway. Using chicken jerky bits as incentive, I was able to get him to get into and out the tub, and to not jump out while we were moving. The desert trials went well. There will be some modifications of course. That s what shakedown cruises are all about. But Archie has his part down pat; he just sits there taking in the scenery as we trundle out across the desert. Char calls it Archie s chariot. After two days in Holbrook, it s time to head north to Green River, Utah. A day s drive takes us up through the Navaho Reservation and into the land of red sandstone around Moab. To me, that landscape is absolutely stunning. Monument Valley, Goblin Valley and Arches National Park are all within just a few miles of each

6 just a few miles of each other. Walking through Goblin Valley s surreal landscape, it s easy to imagine you're on a deserted planet in some far away galaxy. This year we decided to take a little side trip to Hanksville on our way to Green River. Last year, just south of Hanksville, we pulled off onto a gravel road and drove for about a quarter mile and stopped. Looking around, we started finding pieces of red and yellow jasper/agate. Well, we wanted to stop there this year and take a closer look. So, we drive out a short ways and park. So, I open up the car door and am sitting on the edge of the seat putting on my boots. There s something odd about the road surface. It s gravel, but the packed surface is made up of little whitish circles the size of nickels. As I m trying to make sense of what I m seeing, Char is already out of the car and suddenly I hear My toenails are in the dirt. What, why are your toenails in the dirt? No, I said the devil s toenails are in the dirt. Why are his toenails in the dirt? Devil s toenails in the local name for a small petrified sea shell found in such abundance they are quarried for road grave. What I was seeing were the tops of the shells embedded in the road that had been scraped off by the road grader. Over on the side of the road, where Charleen was, individual shells were laying loose in the dirt. Of course, we had to pick up a pocket full of those things. We also found some nice fist sized pieces of red plume agate and yellow and red jasper. Another bag of rocks. Using our Gem Trails of Utah, we wanted to explore some of the sites located in the Henry Mountains, just south of Hanksville. After driving for nearly an hour and a half over some very rough gravel roads, we came out on the highway to Green River. I think we missed a turn and we think we know where. But we had already been driving for nearly ten hours and relaxing in our motel room sounded so good. There s always next year. Char and I have been returning to Green River, Utah for at least five years. Just south of there is an area called Yellow Cat Flats. Every time we go out there, we find something new. Hundreds of square miles of desert with roads going in every which direction, left there by the miners who came here looking for uranium years ago. The uranium ran out but the roads stayed behind and most of them are maintained to a certain extent. A few knarley washes to cross are to be expected, but the material that s to be found out there makes it worthwhile getting past a few rough spots. Just about anything a rock hound would want to pick u is somewhere out on Yellow Cat Flats. Agate, jasper, petrified wood, petrified bone, coprolite and lots of unusual stuff like barite nodules and selenite crystals. But the most abundant material is coprolite. We found a place where the ground is littered with it. So we spent the next two days picking up ancient poop. At first, the material we found near the road is almost jet black on the outside, but on the broken surfaces, colors can be seen, mostly browns and dark reds. On the second day, Char was working her way up a ridge line and I was still down on the flats with Archie, perhaps a quarter mile away. Suddenly I hear Char, she s up on the ridge and she s waving her arms and shouting. I can t understand a thing she s saying, but I don t need a translator to know what s going on. Waving your arms and shouting is the international rock hounds signal for I ve found the glory hole. I load Archie into his chariot and off we go. We follow the dry wash until we get to the base of the ridge where Char is at. The first thing I notice is the dirt and rocks are light brown, not black. Coprolite still litters the ground, but here, in the light- colored soil, all the beautiful colors coprolite is known for can be seen in the broken pieces. Blues, reds, greens, purples, all these colors, in a thousand different shades and hues are strewn about the hillside. We even find it eroding out of what looked like the original dirt. Down below, there was nothing bigger than a tennis ball. Up the ridge, we re finding things the size of grapefruits. I come across a pile of the black stuff that Char has discarded, making room in her pack for the pretty stuff. It s everywhere, one beautiful piece after the other. Before long my inner rock hound begins to sob as he realizes that there is no way he is going to be able to pack it all out. We were finally able to settle on a couple bags full of the prettiest stuff, reluctantly leaving behind a whole hillside of it. It s about this time we start talking about next year s trip. I recently overheard a conversation between two guys talking about getting bored on their vacation. Just sitting around, doing nothing, waiting for time to go home. When Char and I hit the road, we ll be going hard for the next ten or so days. We can cover five hundred miles in a day easy enough, modern cars, modern roads,

7 cars, modern roads, no problem. Almost always, we re up and on the road before daylight, either heading for the next town or the next collecting site. As a rule, we do most of our sightseeing on the way out. Because, by the time we finish at our last collecting site, we re pretty well exhausted. Looking for the quickest, most direct route home it becomes the final sprint. This last trip, we left Green River around 4:30 in the morning and pulled into the Motel 6 in Pendleton, Oregon just before dark. That was a lot of driving for one day but like I said, modern cars, modern roads, no problem. With freeway speeds of 80mph and secondary hi-ways at 70mph, we can cover a lot of country. A gentle rain had started falling during the night and was still coming down as we pulled out of Pendleton the next morning. Another four hours and we ll be home. ---Richard Prevett

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