Rockin the Rockies

Rockin the Rockies
Rock Hounding

Monday, December 2, 2013

A Return To South Denver For Petrified Wood

Andrew was pleased with this nice find

My nephew Andrew visited us for Thanksgiving Day and he decided he would like to stay with us another day. Andrew likes doing things outdoors but the Rocky Mountains are covered with snow and frost is down at least a foot deep, so I asked him if he would like to go petrified wood hunting in the plains. He wasn't sure, but after showing him some of the specimens I found in the past he was quickly on board with the plan. See Post: "An adventure in the Denver Basin looking for Petrified wood" See: http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7777370038715613557#editor/target=post;postID=3183572986641379303;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=86;src=postname As I have plenty of petrified wood from this site I planned to give Andrew everything we might find. I had found two fairly remote locations. One site with large pieces,of partially opalized wood from a petrified log and another site with more varied but scattered petrified wood. I had not been to either site for a year, so I wasn't sure what we would find. It took a long time to find the first site. I had picked up all the surface signs and the surface diggings I had done had been smoothed over by erosion. I was about to give up when I spotted an area with numerous round boulders laying on the surface. I started poking around and soon chips of petrified wood started to turn up. I called Andrew over and put him to work. After an hour or so of picking up primarily silver dollar size chips Andrew hit a nice limb piece, about 10 inches long with petrified bark and some opalization.
Nice opalized piece of petrified wood

We continued to find some nice pieces, but I was itching to show him the other site with the log of opazlized wood. We packed up and went to that site. Unfortunately after 5 years of my off and on visits to this site someone else found it and cleaned it out. Perhaps I talked too much. I was sorry Andrew didn't get a chance to work that site. We went back to our previous dig and managed to find a few more nice pieces and left Denver on a beautiful end of Nov 60F day!
Some nice tumbling material


2 comments:

  1. Ay man, saw you on "Prospectors"... thought you over reacted to that dude dropping a huge boulder on your vein...
    But I really think he's an overconfident douchebag who lets his emotions and fears cloud his judgement.
    By far, from what I've seen, he is the worst procurer on that show.
    I liked you better 'cause unlike him, at least you knew what you were doing due to being able to view things objectively... That big boulder was really no huge threat and would have given you more seconds to react to its falling than many others.
    You're a good man I liked you on that show... hopefully future episodes feature you. I haven't watched very many yet.

    Keep on working hard.

    Yours truly, a different type of dangerous-job working man,
    zangatti

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  2. Love the petrified wood! Hope to visit Colorado someday!

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