Good morning everybody!
So, in today's video I'm gonna be sharing some of the researching steps that I do
when I am looking for interesting places to go rockhounding.
What you're looking at right here is the Mindat website.
And this is one of the starting research tools that I like to use
when I'm looking for something interesting to go check out or just a new spot in general.
This is a great starting point that is not the only resource that I use
and we're gonna touch on a couple of different things here, but let's, let's start here.
So, when you go to mindat.org, you'll see the search bar right here, and you can type in your state.
I live in Washington State. So let's just type that in and hit the search and see what pops up here.
So, this is uh what you'll see, and our primary concern is to look at the map.
So, you're gonna want to click on your state right here.
And we will pull up this map.
Come on. Okay. So let's let's expand this.
I live in the extreme northeast corner of Washington State here.
So, let's zoom in on this and you can see the number of listings that start to pop up.
There's a lot of things to click on here. Now, not everything is something worth going rockhounding yet.
But like I said, this is a good starting point for us. So let's look up here.
I'm gonna go to a spot that I already have some experience with and we can go, go from there.
So, uh. There we go.
So, this is the Metaline Falls area.
You can see right up here,
to give you kind of perspective that's Canada. There's Idaho. There's Metaline.
Let's zoom in here and start clicking on some stuff like this right here.
The Josephine Mine. This is uh an interesting spot.
So, there's also the Yellowhead Mine and we have some other listings here.
Now, not all of these listings, the little tags, are going to be perfectly accurate on here.
This is, after all, a user updated website.
And you know, it's good in many ways, but not perfect.
So, Josephine Mine.
This gives us some basic information and we can click on this and it will pop open here.
Alright, so we uh can see some of the different minerals that could be found at this mine.
Now, not all mines are open to the public. Not all mines are safe to go to.
I know for a fact that this is no longer a claimed mine and it is on public lands.
Which means you can go and visit it.
But let's uh, click on some of this stuff here so that we can see like, oh, maybe you do not know what calcite is.
Mindat is a great resource to see some different examples of what calcite could look like,
along with some specifics for that mineral.
Now, the photos that you see here are of course some of the the best
pieces that we have as examples, you know museum quality stuff.
You're not gonna go out there and find this.
I mean, as you can see right here that piece right there is from the United Kingdom, but it is
a starting point. You can start googling calcite.
Let's go back.
Okay, so we are back now looking at the Metaline Falls area and
here is the Josephine Mine which is known for calcite.
Let's zoom in here and we will get a, oops there you go, we will get a GPS tag in the area of it.
Right there and we can search on Google. There's this. Let's pull it up on the map.
Here we are. We're looking at a satellite view of the Josephine Mine tag.
Now, there's some specific information you want to get from this.
First off, you want to make sure that is accessible.
And what I mean by that is over here on the left side of your screen, you'll see the Boundary Road.
I know for a fact that you can pull off the Boundary Road and there is this open gravel lot that
is typically used for viewing bighorn sheep and mountain goats up here on this hillside right there.
So, that is a safe place to park off of the major road here.
And you can walk right up the Yellowhead Mine Road here.
And there is a gate. Now, typically gates will be visible.
But this one just happens to be in the shadow of this satellite photo.
And you can then see how far you have to walk in.
Now, I know that if you hang a right here and walk down this road
you can get into the Gold Hill Mine, which I've visited before.
There will be a link to that up in the right-hand corner of your screen.
So, I know that there's mining activity out here for calcite, and other minerals have been found.
The Josephine Mine, which is that right there that little dot out in the woods,
which is something that you want to be able to identify. You want to be able to identify these tailing piles.
Now, when most people, most people, most miners go out and do this they're mining up until the 50s in this area.
A lot of heavy equipment was being used. They're compressing the soil, building these tailing piles.
Well, the forest hasn't recovered from that. So, you can clearly see these mined out locations on satellite
and that can be a great tool for attempting to locate Interesting stuff.
You know, we can see that there is another mining operation going over there.
So what do we have here now? We have an area to go visit.
We know, I don't think there's a street view, but we know that you can...
Nope, there's no street view.
We know that you can pull off of the road here safely and that you can walk in to this site.
We have a GPS tag on where to go. And when you pull off of the road you can have a GPS location there as well
so that you can easily find yourself, find your way back.
And if you refer back to the previous video in this rockhounding guide series
where we talk about GPS and the benefits of it.
You can tag both locations so that you can find your way to it and then find your way back from it.
So, we know that the Josephine Mine is here. We know that it has some interesting material to go look at.
Next we're gonna want to see if there's any historical information that we can read about
and find some things about, about the Josephine Mine.
That's calcite. That's not what we're looking at. Let's go over to the USGS.
So, the USGS is a really underutilized website with a lot of great information, along with the DNR.
I mean, you're just looking at some Google search results here for USGS Josephine Mine.
And I throw the state in there, as well.
Let's click on some of these PDFs, you can see right there that it's PDF,
and we will see what we can read about for, for this area
So, here we go. We have the Geology and Ore Deposits of Metaline Zinc and Districts of the Pend Oreille County in Washington.
These are some long PDFs that you can read.
I like to read these types of things in the morning when I'm having my coffee.
This is a 115 page PDF file and there's a lot of great information in these types of documents.
These old documents about mining in the area and,
and you can see right here, let this load,
We have all of this different information
about different mines in the area.
Different mineralization. That you can you can learn a lot.
You can learn a whole lot. We'll just drop down here.
I'm not gonna waste a bunch of time on this.
Here's another one from the State of Washington.
PDF from the 70s. And you can see here some of the listings.
Now, you can then continue on and be like, well, what's the Deep Creek Mine?
What's the Farmer Mine? Where are these located? You can then take that information back to Mindat,
back to Google, and look up these mine locations as well.
Just for the sake of argument here, let's look at the Deep Creek mine here.
So, this is all the information that was produced about it in the 70s.
Lots of great, great information that you can you can learn from here.
So, uh Josephine Mine. This is uh western mining history.com.
And you can read some of the info here as well.
Some of the commodities. They just list whatever public info is available. It's nothing too special.
But yeah, so um using Mindat is an amazing resource that you should 100% be using if you're into rockhounding.
So, as always, thanks for watching. I hope you found this video to be informative.
There is a playlist on my main channel.
So if you click, click my name you can go there and scroll down and you can see the rockhounding guide series.
This is part 3 and there will be many more parts to come.
Thanks. Have a good day!