Fieldtrip report:
Saltville, VA trip
December 31st, 2004
by Drew Laing
First off, I'd like to wish everyone a Happy New Year!Now, the trip... I had read about a site for celesite geodes, and Tate and I wanted to check it out. So we tried to figure the best way to get there, and we went yesterday. Tate's Mom, Dad and Sister went with us, and we got to the site at about 10 AM after about a 45 minute drive. First we parked at a boat landing on the river that is supposed to have the goodies. We walked around the riverbank and looked around, we really didn't know what we were looking for, so we busted random rocks to see what they looked like. The boat ramp was new and the parking lot was pretty big. Most of the material was fill material, even some of it had been dumped into the wooded areas beside of the ramp, so it was not easy getting anything but gravel. Finally I found a few pieces of what I thought was chert, it is a yellow color, really smooth and silky. I also found a few broken pieces of what looked like unakite, but thought it was flint or chert. We decided to ride down the road to see if there was another access point to the river.
We parked a little way down the road, and started walking up the river. Here we were also busting random rocks to see what they had. I picked up some more of the yellow stuff, and also an unidentifed specimen (I will talk more about this below). After milling around for an hour or so, we decided to go get some lunch and maybe visit the museum in town. Saltville was the "Salt Capital of the Confederacy". Salt was extracted here in huge quantities, and with that salt they found a complete mastadon skeleton, sabertooth tiger, giant beavers and many other Ice Age mammals. The museum had a great deal of these specimens, but also information about the salt extraction, the geology of the area, etc.
As always the tour guide was the best part of the visit. After grilling him on questions I'd had on sites in Smyth, Co., which he invalidated most of the sites I had heard about, he shared some collecting sites with us. He also told me that the yellow "chert", was actually yellow jasper. I sure was glad I picked up a few good sized pieces of it! The first site we visited was a new roadcut which cut right through an old gypsum mine. There are 2 types of gypsum that I saw, a white type that was like ribbon and a very bright orange/red type that was massive. The orange/red stuff was covered with this sticky gray mud, but is very bright. After 15 minutes of picking up these specimens, we parted ways with Tate's family and went to the other spot that the guide had told us about.
This site was a recently bulldozed area where someone has recently quarried some limestone. The booty was doubly terminated quartz xls, and boy was the booty present! Tate and I picked up so many xls in 45 minutes that our legs hurt because of the xls in our pockets. Most were small, but they were perfectly terminated, not many broken. Some are 1.5" long with 3 or 4 segments, some have little brothers and sisters growing out of them.
I will try to add some specimen pics to this later, especially the unidentified specimen. It looks like it could be selenite (pure gypsum), it is in a sperical shape, and one little edge is broken off. This crystal is growing off a pure white rock (I don't think it is quartz), and has many little sparkles to the area around the xl. On the backside of the specimen, there seems to be a few little pieces of limestone growning out of it. I'm not sure what it is, so I don't know how to clean it yet. But it will look good if I can get the algae off of it.
One heck of a day! It closed 2004 really well!
Drew
