Rockhounding Utah

In a last fling of summer adventuring, Bradley and I took our kids and some friends (our Bishop, his wife, and four of their kids) and went rockhounding on Saturday. We'd been talking about such an expedition for months, and finally we found a date available for both families.

Leaving Spanish Fork at 7:30am, we headed out south of Delta to our first stop, Sunstone Knoll. These low hills are volcanic vents, formed of basalt and breccia. The basalt is studded with large crystals of transparent yellow plagioclase feldspar--also known as sunstone. The eastern slopes of the hills sparkle in the sunlight with little sunstones that have weathered out of the hard rock.

I was terribly excited, not having been rockhounding for years and years. Bradley was slightly less so, given that he was going to be taking care of Gee (2.5 years old) and Hebs (10 months old), while I got to explore and teach my older two kids the wonders of geology.

Of course, it didn't quite work out that way. It turns out that all five-year-old Zee wanted to do was climb mountains. I don't want to pick up rocks, Momma, I want to climb. To the very top, please. And four-year-old Em--all she wanted to do catch and hold a horny toad or lizard. Please catch one for me, Momma, now.

Typical. My children don't have to love geology, I know, and apparently they are too young to even pretend to care. (Really, though, the only thing that mattered was that they had a great time. And that Em understood that I really, truly, honestly was NOT going to catch a lizard for her. Sorry, kid.)

After an enjoyable ninety minutes collecting sunstones, climbing rocks, holding horny toads, and learning to go to the bathroom in the desert (Em: I can't pee on the rocks! Momma: Oh, yes, you can.), we set off for Topaz Mountain, north of Delta.

Topaz Mountain is one of the premier gem-hunting sites in the state. The abundant topazes are found in a rhyolitic ashflow tuff which erupted 6-7 million years ago. Like the sunstones of Sunstone Knoll, the very gravel of Topaz Mountain sparkles with small topazes, weathered out of the rock. The topaz found in this area is naturally amber colored, but because the color center responsible for the "sherry" tint is destroyed by exposure to sunlight, the loose topazes found in the gravel and washes are colorless. To get to the (more valuable) colored topaz, you have to be willing to do a little hard rock mining, and get lucky. (On this trip, we didn't find any colored topaz.)

We lunched at Topaz Mountain, and then started hunting. Zee made friends with another rockhounding group with children. After they left, he and Em started climbing more mountains, although Em quit after a while in favor of cookies in the shade of a juniper tree.


At one point, Zee was high enough to get a little scared, and called down to Daddy. Once Bradley made it up to him, Zee was comfortable enough to keep going. Eventually, Bradley and I traded places, and I looked for topaz while Zee kept climbing up. He was so proud of himself once he made it to "the very top" of the mountain. I was proud of him, too--he was careful but mostly fearless, and worked hard to reach his goal. Even if he scared me to death a time or two.

After Topaz, we made a quick stop to pick up some Apache tears--rounded pebbles of obsidian. Em opted to stay in the (air conditioned) van for with Daddy and the little boys for this stop, but Zee, naturally, wanted to climb yet another mountain, and came all the way to the top of a little hill with me.

From there, we said goodbye to the Bishop and his family, and they headed straight home while we decided to take a more roundabout route. In making the decision to go north to the Pony Express Road, I didn't realize just how long it would take us to get back to "civilization". We very nearly bit off more than we could chew, but fortunately we had plenty of gas, the roads were very good (for dirt roads), and (miracle of miracle) we had no flat tires. The video player in the van kept the kiddos happy, Bradley read "Journey to the Center of the Earth" aloud, and I just soaked up the joy of rocks, rocks, and more rocks, gorgeous barren mountain ranges, beautiful cloud formations, and spending time with my favorite people in the whole world.

We made a quick stop at Simpson Springs, where a Pony Express Station once stood. Then we traveled on into the late afternoon. To the absolute delight of our children, we saw numerous pronghorn antelope (quite close up), a herd of wild mustangs with foals, and two deer with three precious baby fawns, still with the spots on their fur. We passed abandoned mines as we wended our way through the Tintic Mountains, where many tons of silver and gold were produced in the late 1800s. And eventually, we made it home, tired, dusty, and thoroughly satistifed with our adventurous day.