I don’t know if anyone really knows or cares about agates here on the SDMB, but I found a really nice Lake Superior Agate…(this is the picture of the agate) today. My brother and his wife bought 40 acres and I helped them clear some brush today, and I went exploring. They have a dry run-off on their land and I walked down it, following the path through the woods.
I was walking along, looking at all the various rocks stranded at the turns, when I spotted this baby. I have been collecting Lake Superior Agates since I was a youngster (I think it’s a Minnesota thing), and this is one of the largest I have ever found.
Lake Superior Agates are thought to have been formed sometime around 1.1 - 1.2 billion years ago, when there was volcanoes in the north. They formed layer by layer, and later glaciation transported them down to the places they are found today. They are commonly found in MN,WI,MI,IA, and NE, but some have been found as far south as Kansas and Missouri. I hold the rock and really think about how old it is. A billion years…
You found that? That’s a beautiful rock! I used to be a bit of a junior rock hound when I was a kid, and I never found anything that nice. That’s fantastic! You going to leave it as is, or tumble it?
In Maryland, the best stuff we used to find was fossilized shark’s teeth and limestone and sandstone rocks with shell impressions. We’d scoop them up on day trips to Calvert Cliffs which we took every year at my summer camp. There were like a ton of shark’s teeth, but lucky was the kid who actually found a rock with shell impressions!
Also, my father would bring us home feldspar and moonstone chunks in the raw, from work. He taught my sister and me to polish and bevel by hand, using a grindstone and wet fine-grit sand. That was cool. We still have our stones.
What else do you all have out there where you live?
I have a rock collection that is currently gathering dust in my cabinet. I’m gonna take it out and look at it now.
I’ve been collecting agates since I was a kid. I got a rock polisher a few years ago, and now I’ve got, oh, twenty pounds or so of polished agates…some as big as your fist.
My son is into it now, too. Good thing, 'cause his eyes are better than mine now.
Creaky, I’m glad to hear you’re dusting off the old rocks. I thought I was the only one.
I was a Jr. Rock Hound as a kid, had my own polisher, I did! I’ve recently renewed my interest in gems and minerals and got out some of the old collection, too. My favorites were the geodes.
Since I was raised on a farm in clay country I got to spend a lot of time picking rocks. Every now and again I found a nice one like yours, Boscibo Have no clue where they all are now, though - a box in mom’s attic, I suppose
Wow, lotsa rock people here. I have a few ice cream buckets full, I have a tumbler but I leave most of my agates as is. I use baby oil to shine them up a bit, a technique I learned about in this great agate book.
I used to have my best ones up on my webpage, I think I’ll re-photograph and stick the page back up. creaky - way to go! Get those rocks out, buff em up! We have a lot of fossilized limestone, I have a tiny chunk of amethyst I found on a beach, but I have mostly gone for the agates.
Rysdad- fist sized? I am jealous. I have maybe two that are that big, one that my sister gave me, and one I found on the banks of the St. Croix. The other one I found is almost a total agate, only one little chip off it shows the banding.
chique - get that box out. Renew your rock collection! They are so cool, and so old. This find today made me want to go back out and find more.
I love them, but most of my good ones are bought, not found. I’m sucker for banded stones like agates, or malachite, but love most minerals. However, I pick up pretty rocks wherever I go, whatever minerals they’re made of. Mom used to frisk me before returning from holiday to try to stop the inevitable transport of half a county in my pockets/suitcase.
I can offer milky white to black flints, some the size of my doubled fists, from my garden. Very chalky soil with lots of flints in it.
My husband is from Illinois, and the first time we were out walking, he couldn’t figure out why this Minnesota girl was going so slowly, with her eyes to the ground.
Lots of people collect agates around here, my mom and dad have probably about 50 number 10 coffee cans up in the barn full of unpolished agates. I don’t have that many, but I’m getting close, and what I pick up includes more than agates. I bring home anything that looks interesting.
Just got a tumbler. Haven’t done a single run yet, I’m sorting through what I have and trying to classify it (with the help of a few books), learning about the Mohs scale, and realizing that I need more rocks of every kind. I’ve got almost enough excellent quality quartz sorted out for a full run. I’m going to do a batch of quartz first, it’s softer than agate and will give me a faster result while I learn the patience required.
I think my 8 year old son has the fever, too. He asked me the other day where agates fall on the Mohs scale because he knew that gold is at 2.5, and he needed a comparison.
Wow, that’s beautiful. I am just getting into the wonderful world of rock appreciation. My mom has a nice collection that she’s giving me. I’m very excited.
BTW, if anybody’s interested, I can tell you how to make gorgeous cabinet pulls out of rocks. We saw them in some fancy kitchen-remodeling studio for $13 apiece. We made 40 of them ourselves for $20 total.
On vacation, my parents used to give me a container and said I could bring home no more rocks than would fit inside of it. They had to set a limit somehow.
I get it from my dad, though. He used to take me rock hunting in these big beds in the Badlands of Nebraska. It was so cool. Now, we have a tradition of bringing him big rocks from wherever we travel. He puts them all in a wild rose bed on our beach. In a thousand years, geologists are going to wonder what the hell happened in his backyard since there are large rocks from all over the country in one place.
Every year under the Christmas tree one of his buddies wraps up some big rocks from near his cabin up in Minnesota.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that we have so many rock geeks on the list.
Agates always remind me of my grandfather, he loved to collect them and he had a shed on his yard where he had a rock polisher set up. I remember being six years old and sneaking into that dusty old building where he had his rock polisher and having him show me the rocks he had found and polished. He would take his agates and make them into jewelry, I remember getting a bolo tie with an agate on the clip when I was about ten years old that I treasured for years. He also had a large collection of native artifacts he found on his travels, hundreds of spear points, arrowheads and even some chips off of the arrowhead. Sadly I lost it and I don’t have any of his agates anymore. All I have to remind me of his collections is an indian stone ax he found on one of his prospecting expeditions.
I’ve collected agates since I was three, all of them ones I found washed up on the beaches around the Puget Sound. I’ve got hundreds of 'em now, and the magic still hasn’t worn off. Yay! Agates!
