Many years ago we took a weeklong camping trip to explore rockhounding sites in Oregon. This trip involved lots of dirt roads, a few flat tires and hours of digging holes in the ground.
It also turned us into full on rockhounds. Which means we’re not just picking up the occasional colored stone, we do that too … however, we also drive down remote dirt tracks specifically just to pick up rocks.
Oregon has an abundance of unique rocky sites many of which are just hours from our front door. This week’s adventure was a scouting trip of sorts to checkout some sites with Limb Casts, Petrified Wood, and Agates. BLM’s “Central Oregon Rockhounding Map” and Rockhounding Oregon by Lars Johnson are our guides through this mostly gravel and dirt road journey.
First stop is Fischer Canyon, a few miles south of our frequented Crooked River. You’re supposed to be able to find calcite, agate, quartz, jasper and petrified wood, with calcite being the most common. We found the place and a few small pieces of calcite like rock. Did not do a lot of heavy digging as this was only the first stop.
Next we headed to Bear Creek and here you are able to find petrified wood. It’s interesting to note that the rockhounding book often warns of road conditions with passages like “Road is impassable when wet. Don’t even try.” Often these roads are little more than a couple of ruts in the desert sand. JQ did locate a nice piece of petrfied wood in our short wander around Bear Creek … right next to the spot where we parked the car.
The final destination was Hampton Butte with limb casts of Jasper and Agate, as well as petrified wood. This is also a more productive site with lots of active “digs”. Here we broke out the shovel and managed to scrape up some small greenish rocks that we hope are Jasper. They will eventually make it into the tumbler and either polish or disolve. Hampton Butte’s road was much better than the guide book lead us to believe and there are plenty of shaded parking sites. Though on this day there were also a couple of RV rigs already set up.
There are more rock hunting adventures planned. We have only just begun to explore all the sites on BLM’s map. Plus, I acquired a gold pan for my birthday and there are some Umqua and Mckenzie River sites with promise of fine gold. As always we’ll keep you updated on our journeys.
Usually when we are on the Crooked River, we’re on the other side of the road, rod in tow and knee deep in the stream. However, today it was a scramble up one of the many dry gullies to the east for a look out over the Crooked River canyon south of Prineville.
Chimney Rock is a distant cousin to the more famous Crooked River basalt formation Smith Rock.
