PLS member Janie Duncan is featured speaker for the April 16th Program Meeting; 7:00 pm
Every stone has a story. Maybe it is how it was formed or why it has a specific shape or color. Sometimes a rock tells a story that is sentimental. Do you remember the day you found a rock or perhaps someone gave one to you as a gift? Some stones have ancient fables or myths passed down for hundreds of years attached to them. Almost everyone owns a few rocks that are special to them in some way. PLS member Janie Duncan will be our featured presenter as she discusses stones and the stories they tell.
This program meeting takes place on Tuesday, April 16, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. in the Fellowship Hall of The Santa Anita Church, 226 W. Colorado Blvd., Arcadia, CA 91007. Admission is free; open to the public. Enjoy refreshments while checking out the display table. Bring a rock specimen you’d like identified – or maybe you have a special memory attached to one that you can share while you’re at the meeting. Hope to see you there!
Pasadena Lapidary Society’s March 19, 2024 Program Meeting will feature Dr. Nicholas Gessler who will present his Meteorite program. In 2002 Dr. Gessler was honored by the designation of Mainbelt Asteroid “113355 Gessler.” 15 years later, at Duke’s Kunshan, China campus, he hosted ‘Meteorites China’, the first international conference and exhibition of meteoritics in that country. That was emulated in 2018 by a similar conference in Jilin, China. He has discovered 13 named meteorites in California and Nevada and recovered over 1,400 fragments. Dr. Gessler continues to build a comprehensive private teaching collection, and has recently been involved in documenting the newly discovered ninth largest meteorite on Earth, named EL ALI, from Somalia. It weighs in at 15.15 tonnes and is characterized as a “IA iron.” Most likely no other meteorite has been so intimately connected with the life and fate of so many people as ‘EL ALI.” Although the meteorite is now for sale in China, with the help of colleagues at Almaas University of Mogadishu, 16 videos of it are being analyzed and there is a plan to do exploratory archaeology of its impact site near the Ethiopian border. https://people..duke.edu/”ng46/EL-Ali
PLS member Chris Kyte will provide this month’s Rock of the Month talk about Elestial, also known as Window Quartz, with a specific pattern of terminations that flow throughout the face and body of the crystal.
PLS member Nancy Robb will continue her talk on PLS’ history, this being our 75th Anniversary year. The program meeting takes place at 7:00 p.m. in the Fellowship Hall of The Santa Anita Church, 226 W. Colorado Blvd., Arcadia, CA 91007, on Tuesday, March 19, 2024. Come join us! Doors open at 6:30, admission is free; open to the public. Enjoy refreshments while checking out the display table; bring a rock specimen you’d like identified. Buy a raffle ticket for a few bucks and try your luck at winning a cool rock specimen, slab, or otherwise. We hope to see you there!
The largest commercial deposits of amethyst in North America occur near the Canadian border in Southern Ontario. Unlike the more common Brazilian amethyst, this material is unique due to inclusions of red hematite in the outermost layers of the crystals. Our guest speaker for October, Dick Weber, first visited these deposits in the 1970s while studying for his graduate degree in Geology at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
Geologists Dick and Mary Pat Weber have returned to these deposits several times over the years and on two recent visits were given special access to the workings of the deposit by the mine owners. As part of this presentation they will display some of this highly prized amethyst from their personal collections.
This program meeting takes place at 7:00 p.m. in the Fellowship Hall of The Santa Anita Church, 226 W. Colorado Blvd., Arcadia, CA 91007, on Tuesday, October 17, 2023.
Come join us! Doors open at 6:30, admission is free; open to the public. Enjoy refreshments while checking out the display table; bring a rock specimen you’d like identified. Buy a raffle ticket for a few bucks and try your luck at winning a cool rock specimen, slab, or otherwise. We hope to see you there!
Future Rockhounding in the vicinity of the Mojave Trails National Monument (MTNM) is being threatened. For those who’ve enjoyed collecting at Lavic Siding, the Cady Mountains, Afton Canyon and surrounding areas, upcoming legislation could impact our beloved hobby. If you want your voice heard and your opinion counted, please register for and participate in these upcoming Bureau of Land Management (BLM) meetings. The first one will be virtual and the other three will be held in person.
Virtual Meeting is one week from today.
Sign up now at the link below. Rockhounds please share this to get the info out. It is important we get involved!!!
Members of Pasadena Lapidary Society, along with most serious rockhounds, wait anxiously all year to make the 3-1/2 hour trek to Quartzsite, AZ in January. Some stay there into February, camping nearby in order to go rockhounding at their leisure, and others check in to the few motels in town or travel the 22 miles back/forth to Blythe, CA for lodging.
One of the biggest draws in Quartzsite is the QIA POWWOW, always held the third week in January. This year the POWWOW runs from January 18-22. If you’ve never been, the POWWOW is like a huge swap meet focused on gems, minerals, rocks and everything related. Admission is free and so is parking.
Self-professed as “The Rock Capital of the World”, Quartzsite is a town in La Paz County of +/- 2,000 inhabitants that swells to a couple of million in January and February each year. Situated 125 miles west of Phoenix at the junction of Interstate 10 and U.S. Highway 95, it enjoys a close association with the Colorado River, just 18 miles to the west.
Pictures provided by PLS member Christian Schulze.
Baxter Wash: 5AM November 25, 2022
Fieldtrip Report and Pictures by PLS member Rex Nishimura
The nighttime rumble of the slow moving Union Pacific freight train awakened me from my post-Thanksgiving slumber. It was a big concern as we had parked next to some desolate tracks in Afton Canyon, deep in the Mojave Desert. How far away was the train? Where was it going? After a moment of confusion, I zeroed in on its location, several miles away, but the reverberation of 6 diesel tractors and the wail of its horn gave me a sense of urgency. Like the train, it was time for us to get moving on our next adventure, rockhunting in Baxter Wash.
Baxter Wash is only about 2 miles from Afton Canyon, but it has changed significantly since last year. Heavy monsoonal rains washed away roads, replacing them with ravines of rock and sand. The campsite was a mess of boulders and rocks in the wrong places. We would have our work cut out for us to make camp before our old, new, and future rockhound friends would arrive.
There’s little cell service out there, so after we set up the camp, we climbed a nearby hill searching for a signal. Here, 200 feet above camp, we got enough signal to send and receive texts and watch our friend drive into camp from several miles away. It’s a testament to the skill of our drivers, that no one got lost driving 5 miles on dirt roads to the hidden base camp. People came and went during the weekend, but we averaged about 17 campers over the 3 days. A potpourri of vehicles made it to camp too, from full size pickups to a tiny SUV Subaru Outback. Some were trail ready, but less capable vehicles were left behind.
Though there are many trail ready and highly capable vehicles in this world, getting to productive gem fields requires extra effort. Knowledgeable, skilled, and diligent drivers are needed to negotiate the rocky canyons and sandy washes. Our first stop was the crystal agate seams about 10 miles away, in a narrow canyon pitted with sheer walls, boulders, and rocks. One of our awesome junior members volunteered to be the rock spotter. Her job was to keep the vehicles from getting high centered or scraping on sharp rocks.
The crystal agate seam required hiking up a sandy hill for beautiful light blue, 2” seam agate with a clear quartz crystal center. It’s beautiful material, but since it took 40 minutes to drive here, we only had about 30 minutes to collect before heading to our next location, the miner’s cave and the nearby yellow fluorite mine.
Years ago, some poor miner hewed a cave out of volcanic ash, stocking it with everything needed for a prospector’s life. All that’s left now is a rusty bed frame, a Coleman stove, shelves stocked with cans of food, a small library of books (including a Bible), and a few dollars sitting under a rock. I’m not sure I would eat from the old cans of food, but I could find a use for the bed frame, books, and Bible! Money is kind of useless out there too. I thought about adding a few dollars of my own, but I didn’t want the camp to be plundered by offroad pirates. Maybe someday, I’ll camp in the cave and see what prospecting was really like.
The yellow fluorite mine is peculiar only because of the color. White, purple, and green are common colors, but yellow is rare in the Cady Mountains. We picked up some yellow to add to our collections.
Back at camp that night, we had a slight problem with the potluck. Forks. Even though we were short on forks, rockhounds are a resourceful people.
In no time, we had split our mahogany firewood into strips and whittled them into mahogany chopsticks. No splinters either! We enjoyed a wonderful meal of spaghetti and meatballs with lots of pie and whipped cream! After supper, we discovered that one of our members’ car wouldn’t start. We’re not sure what the problem was, but by pooling our resources, we found someone with a battery charger and 3 hours later, his car was working like normal. A family of motorcycle enthusiasts even dropped by our campsite to inquire about purchasing some fuel from us. We sold it to them at cost, even though at that particular moment, the motorcyclist’s needs made the gas worth much more. Scarcity and value is key to any item’s worth.
People often ask me how I know where to look for the gemstones. Well, I don’t actually search for gemstones as they are too hard to find. I search for adventure which is ubiquitous. The next day we were in for an adventure. A grueling 3 mile hike for red and blue jasper agate. After scrambling up a hillside of loose gravel, we hiked along the ridge for jasper agate, plus red and white calcite crystals, agate nodules, and some pre-sagenite clusters. The sagenite was a bit of a stretch, but we found needle-like crystalline agate in a splayed pattern. I heard one of our new members declare that the hike was an adventure, which describes perfectly how I feel about prospecting for our club.
Sunday’s trip was to the Green Hills. Here the roads were in bad shape and we struggled to find and remain on previously marked paths. No one had visited this area for a long time, and there was plenty of high quality agate almost everywhere. Most of it was banded white or clear, but we also found green moss agate and a hillside of marble sized amygdules. The kids had fun playing knuckles down with the agate balls, but the amygdules were too numerous to bother collecting.
The rock collecting part of the trip was now over; all that remained was to break camp. I must give a shout out to all the drivers who graciously offered seats to rockhounds without vehicles. This was a tough drive and your generosity is much appreciated! I also must thank everyone for working together to make this trip possible. It’s great to be on the same team and, of course, bringing home the gemstones makes it even better.
December’s educational field trip will be at 8AM on Saturday, December 18th to Shoemaker Canyon Road above Azusa. We’ll be visiting the Tunnels to Nowhere, which were hewn out of solid granite in 1969. These tunnels were built to provide an escape route out of LA in case of nuclear attack. Now they sit vacant; a lone sentinel to times forgotten.
This trip is suitable for any passenger car and is 31 miles from Pasadena. The walk to tunnel is 2 miles with an elevation gain of 700 feet. We’ll be on the lookout for various ores and minerals, but this is more an educational/nature walk rather than a collecting trip. For more details, please contact Rex at rexch8@yahoo.com
Pasadena Lapidary Society’s very own future geologist/geophysicist, Paolo Sanchez, will present “Traces of Extinction: The Search for Rocks and Minerals at Chixculub” for our November program meeting. For those wondering what the heck ‘Chixculub Impact Event’ is, think meteor meets dinosaurs. Paolo will present his current ongoing research examining tektites derived from Chixculub and what their respective chemistries tell us about the minerals and lithologies associated with the impact event, with the potential of understanding the lithology of the meteor itself.
Earlier this year, Paolo was awarded the California Federation of Mineralogical Societies’ (CFMS) Robert O. Deidrich Memorial Fund Scholarship for school year 2020-21. He’s been studying geosciences at UC Berkeley, working his way up to a PhD and possibly obtaining a career as a professional researcher.
There will be no Rock of the Month discussion for this meeting.
The Tuesday, Nov. 16 program meeting starts at 7:00 p.m. via Zoom. To join us, send an email to (new email address!)… marcia.pls.emails[at]gmail.com in advance, using ‘PROGRAM MEETING’ in subject line, and request the Zoom meeting link. We’re looking forward to seeing Paolo – and hope to see you virtually as well!
Boy, is it hot outside! Nothing beats summertime rock collecting at the beach!
CHANGE IN DEPARTURE TIME! Our next trip will be at 10AM to Palos Verdes on Saturday, September 18th, 2021 to collect striped root beer agates, yellow agates, and bluish green glaucophane. For more information, please contact Sue D at: apple_pis@yahoo.com
Pics above of striped root beer agate, yellow green agate, and glaucophane were provided by PLS member Rex N.
Miles from Pasadena, about a third of the way between Barstow and Needles, is the sleepy town of Ludlow, CA. Most of the time, people never even notice it’s there, unaware that a well known jasper collecting area beckons in the blistering desert heat. Such is Ludlow most of the year.
Ludlow in the dead of winter is totally different. The ground is stripped of vegetation, blown away as tumbleweeds, or consumed by moisture-loving denizens of shifting desert sands. The barren landscape causes the jasper to magically appear on the desert floor waiting for us to pick it up. February’s trip will be on Saturday the 13th, to the renowned Lavic Railroad Siding jasper location near Ludlow, CA. Our meetup spot is 148 miles from Pasadena. We’ll meet there at 9 AM. Late arrivals will miss the fieldtrip. Read on for further information.
Since this is a semi-local trip, it will be for one day only. We’ll explore the traditional Lavic Jasper collecting areas and the brindle jasper location in the foothills north of Ludlow.
A high clearance vehicle is required for this trip, but 4wd is always better. Attendees will need to sign a waiver of liability. RSVP is required. Please email rexch8[at]yahoo.com for directions, inserting LAVIC FIELDTRIP in the subject field of your email.