Hey everyone, this is some bruneau jasper that I just took out of the tumbler
yesterday, and I'm pretty excited about this stuff, this is one of my
favorite rocks.
So let's take a look at a few pieces up close!
This is not a particularly good piece, just kind of plain brown - it's got a
little bit of the good stuff right there but I'll show you some better pieces
in a minute. So this is, as I said, a type of jasper
it's from Idaho. There's a spot I missed, that one's going to the grinder and then
back into the tumbler. But anyhow, it's from the Bruneau River Canyon in
Idaho, and I've never been to Idaho, so I don't know where that is
western Idaho, I think I read.
But it's got these really cool oval shapes in it that kind of overlap and just
generally look really cool.
Really really shines up nicely too. Like I said I'm saving the better pieces
for later.
Because I don't want to spoil you right off the bat.
So this forms in rhyolite, from what I read, and a lot of it had this stuff on
the outside, which I assume is rhyolite, it forms in nodules. So I spent a lot of
time trying to grind this stuff off. This stuff shaped up nicely right away, but to
get this stuff off, it just took a lot a lot of tumbling. I did put it on the
grinder - this I think is a piece I might have cut off the end,
I know this piece is, you can see it's flat on this one side here
so I cut some pieces off, I ground some, trying to get to - get to the good stuff
And it just took a long time.
So I read that this stuff is no longer being mined, I guess it's really hard to
get to the place. One website said it hasn't been mined since 2009.
Another one said 1996. Sounds like it was mined mostly in the '70s and '80s
Er no, '70's. Closed in the '80s. There's a good piece, this might be my best piece.
You see how it's rounded on the top there? (laughs) That's where, that's the
shape of my grinding wheel, where I was trying to get to some of that -
get that bad stuff off of there.
That's a nice piece.
Here's another boring piece.
That one's pretty good!
Couple of little pieces
and here's some of the really good stuff.
So I do have some before pictures of this, and I will try to match it up for the
slideshow, but I ground so much off this I don't know if anythings going to actually
match. But I'll show you a couple before pictures, whether they match up with these
or not.
Here's a nice piece.
Cool stuff!
If it wasn't so darned expensive, and was more readily available, I'd buy a whole
bunch of this stuff and tumble it.
Alright! That's all I've got, know I didn't have a lot of it, and I'll
put together a slideshow and show it to you next!