Rockhounding in central Idaho

With the recent rains and a weatherman’s promise of a cool day, early last Saturday I decided to go hunting rocks for the first time in over a month. The hot weather in July had chased me out of the high desert hills of Central Idaho, but a scheduled field trip by the Idaho Falls Gem and Mineral Society made it exciting for me to spend the day.

Being an early morning person, I decided to not wait for the 9 a.m. meeting spot at Howe to head for the designated hunting area in the Little Lost River Valley. By 6:30 a.m., I had parked carefully on a bare spot, carefully making sure there was no grass or other vegetation that could ignite from my vehicle.

Grabbing my pack, pick, two bottles of water, snacks and a bucket, I headed for the low hills, but had only gone about a hundred yards when I flushed a common nighthawk from its nest of three chicks. The ground around the nest was littered with small nodules of milky colored agate along with small shards of colorful jasper.

I resisted the temptation to pick them up; my goal was to hike the higher ridges of Red Hills for new rocks that I had not found in previous years. This trip was the first in three years after Mike Bruton and I had basically mapped the lower ridges of the area.

I watched my GPS as I climbed over the lower ridges and located pockets of agate intermingled with pockets of multi-colored jasper. In one ravine, I found an outcropping of jasper/agate mix that I had never seen before in over 20 visits to the area. I GPS’ed it for future examination and moved up the ridge.

The recent rains had created enough moisture that caused new flowers, a pink version of sago lilies, to bloom in the swales. As I climbed higher, the semi-precious stones became fewer and fewer as the flowers became more abundant. The flowers seemed to have attracted moths and butterflies as I found a new one for me, the beautiful Hera Buck Moth.

The coveted rocks became almost non-existent, so I headed for some rock outcroppings about halfway to the bottom of the hills. As I entered a scree slide, I started finding agate nodules up to six inches in diameter – a coveted rock for rockhounds. As I loaded my backpack with them, I saw eight vehicles join my truck; it was almost 11 o’clock and the club members had finally made it. With about 40 pounds of rocks in my backpack and bucket, I started the up-and-down hills about a mile and a half back to the truck.

It seemed like every ridge and swale had a different kind of agate or jasper, so I high-graded what I had collected to make room for a piece of moss agate and a nice rock including both agate and jasper mixed through it. I even found an elk antler, but left it behind because I had no room for it and the cloud cover had cleared, allowing the sun to warm the hill sides.

The hour trek back to the truck was broken up by watching horned toads scurrying across the warm rocks to hide under the short sagebrush and turning rocks over to decide if they were a “leaverite” or a keeper. Occasionally, I would find a small rock that just could not be left behind that would fit between some of the larger ones in my bucket. By the time I got back to the vehicles, about half of the club members had found enough agate and jasper and had headed home.

With sweat running down my back and streaking my face, a friend helped me get the heavy pack off my back and I was happy to be at my truck. Lunch and visiting with friends were enjoyed; it had been an outing long waited for during the hot July. Even the Charlie-horses that attack my legs on the way home were worth a trip across the hills of Central Idaho. I am eagerly waiting several more trips during the upcoming cooler months of September, October and hopefully November.

Six days after I got home, I was washing out the rocks and found one of the nodules was a geode that was lined on the inside with amethyst crystals. “It is better to be lucky than to be good,” a friend of mine tells me all the time.

Have a great week and look for the beauty in life!