So my brother is going through a rocks and minerals phase, and he’s got several kid’s books on gems and crystals and so forth, and it got me thinking about geodes. It’s always been a fantasy of mine to find my own geode and crack it open (after I found my goggles, that is). The problem with this plan, apparently, is that geodes tend to live in the southwestern deserts. New Jersey is not a southwestern desert. New Jersey is northeastern, in fact, and not exactly known for its natural wonders. I did fnd one website that said geodes “have been found” in an unspecified area of the Garden State.
So… say I were an an obsessive rock hunter with a lot of time on my hands and no understanding of probabilities. Where would I start looking if I wanted my very own pretty crystal?
In Indiana (Not New Jersey, but not the desert Southwest, either) geodes are usually found in creek beds. Might be a good place to start looking, if you don’t have any other guidance.
If you want to narrow it down a bit, though, you might just try contacting someone in the geology department at a local university. If there’s a natural history museum with geologists on staff, try them too. You might get shuffled around a bit, but in my experience geologists are often happy to talk to geologophilic members of the public.
First of all, New Jersey is known for many natural wonders. Well, not a whole lot of wonders. It has some…
Okay, I can’t name any, but since you’re talking about rock collecting, do you know that New Jersey is known for its deposits of amber? There’s some good sites around Sayreville in Middlesex County.
Maybe it’s not as great as breaking open an ugly round rock and finding some beautiful crystals inside, but amber comes in a range of strikingly beautiful colors, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find what is called an inclusion which means that some sort of creepy crawly thing got caught in the amber before it fossilized.
Less than a 90-minute drive from Chicago is a town named Coal City. I went there with a buddy who said there were plenty of geodes and fossils in the area. We stopped at a random spot on the shoulder of a main road where a creek ran and it was just as he said. Most of the geodes were not impressive, and IIRC the fossils were almost all scallop shells or something similar. But they were there and they were easy to find.
I was taken to the Sterling Hill Mining Museumtwice on school trips, so it’s obviously very educational. There’s no geodes there, but it ought to be very interesting to a budding New Jersey geologist. Among other things, they specialize in fluorescent minerals.
But, New Jersey is just over the river from me and I would also like to find a geode. Qazwart I have a friend who is very into amber. Could you give us more information?
Well, maybe not NOW, but in a million years or so all those skeletons from decades’ worth of mob hits and other dead bodies dumped in the Meadowlands ought to make for some pretty exciting human fossils!
That’s not you, ducks; that’s just New Jersey! (I’ve been killing off a few plants lately myself.)
