Delta - Sunstone Knoll

Every few weeks, my wife and I take a trip to one of the towns in Utah. We usually spend most of the day, see what there is to do there, and I try to get in a rock hunting trip. Delta is a mecca for rockhounding, with its proximity to the Thomas Range and also the House Range further south. There are also many mining activities further south toward Milford. We had heard of Sunstone Knoll, and decided to give it a shot.

We hopped in the car and took a jog down to Nephi, then drove down hwy 132 through the West Hills (not the ones in L.A.) to Lynndyl. We passed the two pioneer charcoal kilns -- they look like beehives -- and then took a short jog down to Delta.

Delta was built as an agricultural investment around 1910, and they still provide a significant portion of the nation's alfalfa. It is strange to be somewhere so flat and green, and think that you are still in Utah (you're actually in the Great Basin). The road running NW out of Delta goes to the Brush-Wellman Beryllium mine, and there are many mineral operations based in Delta.

On the outskirts of town we drove by the Red Rock Cheese company, and had to stop in (Alisha used to work in a cheese shop at Wegman's in New York). They had a good cheddar, and some feta made from cow's milk, which I had never heard of. We bought a block of white cheddar and some raspberry jalapeño jam (which is very good, especially on grilled ham & cheese). We asked the kid there what there was to do in town. He said "well, you have to make your own fun in Delta".

We drove on into town, and our first stop was The Bug House, a rock shop owned by Loy Crapo. He owns the Dugway geode claim, U-Dig Trilobites, and a Septarian claim in Orderville. The shop is actually next to his house. We admired the barrels of rough outside and he came out to open the shop. Loy is a very nice guy. We talked rocks for awhile, he showed us a bunch of interesting stuff, and we ended up buying a few things we couldn't live without. I got a septarian slab, and another for my uncle. We also got a few fossils from Morocco. He showed us some sunstones and told us how to find them. He gave us good deals on everything, and we promised we'd tell all our friends about his place. It was hard to peel myself out of the shop, and then I had to pass by the barrels of rough on the way to the car. But we had our own rocks to find. We grabbed a quick lunch at a cafe and headed through town.

Our next stop was West Desert Collectors on the main drag in Delta. They had a larger store and much larger collection. The prices overall were more, but they still had some good deals. We met a very nice lady there and found out she was Loy's sister in law. One big happy family, I guess. I told her I was looking for a cab of bertrandite, and had heard that they were able to get their hands on the stuff. They did have a lot of it, but it was expensive. I picked out a little teardrop cab of the purple stuff, to put on a necklace chain for Alisha. This time it was really hard to leave, as they had tables and tables of stuff - Picasso Marble, ocean jasper, many kinds of fossils, and so many other things. But our time was running out.

We headed out of town and turned south on hwy 257. Delta sprawls out over the countryside, but is sparsely populated. As you drive out of town you feel like you're heading to the edge of the world. We passed Fort Deseret, just four adobe walls on the side of the road. After that you are following a train track in the middle of nowhere. A few miles later we saw the sign for Sunstone Knoll, crossed the train tracks, and drove around the south side of the hill.

We didn't really know where to look, just that the east side was better. We drove into this little cove with a huge rock standing in the middle. It looked like someone had placed it there, like an Easter Island statue. We got out of the car and started looking around. The rock was crumbly, and there were little white and yellow crystals in it. Very pretty little things. They weren't large, but I couldn't keep from staring at them when I found them. You can find little tumbled ones on the ground in the gravel. They are very bright and iridescent, especially when the sun shines on them. If you want to break open the asphalt-looking rock you can find larger ones. I saw a few that were a half inch wide, but still no more than 1/8 or 1/4 inch thick. I think there was something voodoo about the things - I couldn't take my eyes off them. I was down on all fours, my face inches off the ground, picking them out of the gravel. They definitely weren't as large as I had imagined. I got about a handful of them, picking them off the ground and dropping them in a water bottle. By then it was time to go home, so I reluctantly got back in the car.

We had to make good time, so we tore back through Delta and up the 6 hwy (the loneliest highway in the world, but we were on the not-so-lonely east end). We decided to follow the 6 all the way through Eureka and Santaquin, instead of retracing our steps through Nephi. The scenery is very beautiful. You pass Little Sahara's sand dunes and Jericho Junction, before approaching Eureka. There was almost no traffic, and we arrived home in no time. This turned out to be a very nice day trip.


Sunstone is a yellow form of labradorite, a volcanic feldspar glass. It is the state gem or Oregon, and you can get some very beautiful faceted ones from there. The color ranges from white to yellow, to red, but you can have multicolor inclusions that range all over the place.

(Note: the multicolored sunstone you see above is mined in Oregon. I don't know if you can find stuff like that in Utah. We only saw clear and yellow ones. Another kind of sunstone has a schiller effect -- copper inclusions create the appearance of lines within the stone. You can kind of see the schiller in the faceted stones to the right. )

Pelican Point - Calcite

The Lake Mountains west of Utah lake have a number of collecting sites. A local rock dealer told me you can go to any random slot canyon and find many different kinds of minerals: optical calcite, onyx, fossils, and limonite pseudomorphs after pyrite. There is even a special type of banded calcite called root beer onyx. We decided to try our luck.

Pelican Point is about 30 minutes from Provo, and a few minutes south of Saratoga Springs, one of the new communities that sprang up on the west side of the lake during the real estate boom. We followed some instructions a rock dealer gave us (erroneously, we later found out) and turned off the lake road down a dirt road just north of the huge quarry, and came around the backside of the hills. We drove south through the valley, up the left side of a gravel quarry, and saw a little dirt trail heading east and curving up the hill to a cut at the top. I drove until the road seemed too steep for my Honda Accord, and walked the rest.

The quarry was pretty crazy - only a twelve foot wide cut in the middle of the hill. We looked down either side of the hill and the cut started and stopped every fifty feet, like some huge scalpel had cut a perfect straight dotted line in the mountain. The ground was littered with calcite: big boulders covered in white crystals, masses of yellow and green, and some cool blocks of optical spar. We were pleasantly surprised, but then we realized we would have to back our little car for a half mile down a hill on a narrow road.

We eventually made it all the way down the hill, with a few choice words, and decided we had a little time left to look for some fossils. We kept driving south, and the road curved to the right and looped north again. We reached the end of the road for our little car. There was a hill covered in slate tiles. We dug around a bit, found a little piece of discarded root beer onyx, but no fossils. Oh well, there would be other days, and next time we'd bring an SUV.

Nebo Loop - Calcite Onyx

My wife and I were looking for something to do one Saturday afternoon, and we had heard there was a calcite onyx quarry near Nephi. So we hopped in the car and drove down the I-15 to Nephi, took the Nebo Loop exit and drove into the mountains. There had been a number of bad fires earlier that summer, and the hills were covered with blackened shrubs and dead trees. Enough time had passed for the vegetation to grow back. A light rain was coming and going, and the scenery was so green that I almost thought it was spring.

The loop turns north a few miles into the canyon, and then forks. We stopped the car in a little parking lot and started hiking up the hill between the two roads. Luckily, the rain had stopped, but there had been enough to turn the ground into sticky clay. Every ten steps the clay would build up six inches thick on the bottoms of our shoes and we'd send it flying off with a good kick. We came to a cut in the hillside and could see the striped layers of calcite. The collecting area was fairly small, and the onyx was limited to a few veins, but it was nice looking stuff. Mostly white, red and brown stripes. We both filled our coat pockets with it and headed back to the car just as the rain started falling again.

When we got home I looked on Google Earth and realized that we were so excited to find a collecting site that we never looked for the main quarry. If we had walked on another 50 feet we would have found plenty of material. We came home with enough, though, and calcite is easy to cut and polish.

Eureka Agate and Vernon Wonderstone

I had a friend who was marginally interested in rocks, so I decided to try convincing him to take up rockhounding. I had to design a trip that would reel him in and hook him, so I decided on this one. We drove down toward Eureka and enjoyed the scenery, then turned off the road a mile before the road turns south into town. You drive for about half a mile and then park and hike up a hill to an agate quarry. I had never been to this spot before, so it was a gamble. hiking to the spot, we could see red jasper pebbles on the ground, so that was a good sign. We eventually came to a road curving around the hill, and between the hill and the road was a gully. We could see that many cuts in the hill had been made, so we hopped down to investigate one. I didn't see much agate, but there was a lot of really neat dendritic jasper. The jasper is yellow, and it develops cracks in it where the metals deposit in fernlike patterns. I have seen cabs of it, and can't imagine how they do it, because the dendrites are only found in thin layers. Really cool stuff that could be made into something nice.

We picked up a few pieces of brown looking agate. We wanted to look at some of the other cuts in the hill, but we wanted enough time to get to Vernon, and some guys were having a little shooting practice around the other side of the hill, so we started heading back. We kept our heads down to minimize the risk of being seen and mistaken for deer, and that gave me an excuse to pick up a few jasper pebbles.

When we got back to the car I noticed that the power locks weren't working. That was a little puzzling, until I put my key in the ignition and realized I the car wouldn't start either -- I had left the headlights on, we were a mile off the road in a rural area. I didn't want to hunt down the guys with guns either. Ironically, after the five seconds it took me to realize all these things a pickup truck came barreling down the road past us. I immediately jumped out and waved them down. They happened to be some more rockhounds, so they gave us a jump and we gave them some directions. It turned out to be a good thing, if not a little miraculous.

I was slightly disappointed by our first site, and I could tell my friend Jeremie wasn't hooked yet, so we drove in to Eureka and turned north toward Vernon. I had underestimated how long we would have to drive and was starting to think I had made a wrong turn, when we saw the train tracks and knew we were okay.

Just before you get to Vernon, you will see some train tracks. Just after crossing them you turn north onto a dirt road and follow the tracks for a mile or two. Eventually the road turns away from the tracks and dead ends in a little quarry. That is where you find the wonderstone.

I could tell this would be much better when I saw the red tailings of specimens and could make out the bands from a considerable distance away. We parked the car and ran excitdly into the pit. Wonderstone lay a foot thick like gravel on the ground. The colors varied from brown and orange to yellow, and there were veins of bright red and pink stone. Jeremie started picking rocks off the ground. For some reason I went to the edge of the quarry and started hacking away at the walls. Guess I needed to get some aggression out.

You really need to try this spot out. It's about the easiest collecting area you can think of, and the material is spectacular. You can find wonderstone in other areas. The stuff in Salina has grey bands in it. This stuff is very dramatic -- my favorite was cream white with thin, intricate bands of bright red through it. I couldn't wait to get home and polish some of it.

We had gathered more wonderstone than we could carry home (or store at home), and the stinkbugs were staging a revolt, so we decided to head out. Thinning out our haul was a little painful, but the stinkbugs helped motivate us, and we headed back home. Overall, the trip was a success. I could tell when Jeremie asked me when I was heading back for another trip. I knew he was hooked.

The wonderstone was soft, but still polished up nice. One thing I hadn't realized was the cracks. It seems many specimens had little cracks in them that didn't polish out. Oh well.

Eureka - Silver City Mining District

This was a fun Saturday trip for me and my wife. We hopped in the car and headed down the I-15 to Santaquin. We drove through Genola, Goshen and Elberta before coming to Eureka. Goshen and Elberta are very quaint towns. There is a nice apple orchard run by the LDS church in Goshen, and Elberta has the tiniest post office I've ever seen (along with the oldest gas station in existence, although it hasn't operated in probably fifty years). Eureka is a very interesting town. It sprung up 150 years ago and was heavily influenced by the Knight family of Provo prominence. You definitely get the sense that mining has been going on here for over a hundred years. Old shops line the main drag, next to a mining museum, and 100 yards away is a modern, functioning (silver?) mine, complete with a 50' tall wooden winch. We resolved to come back sometime just for the town itself, and sped on a few miles to Silver City.

The 6 highway has been called the loneliest highway in the world. You get a small sense of that after Eureka, even though you are still in relatively metropolitan territory. Still, the only things to keep you company here are the ghost town of Mammoth and Little Sahara sand dunes.

Passing the road to Mammoth (yet another future trip, I guess) we turned off toward Silver City. This is a long standing mining area: some of the shafts run for miles under the mountains and end up back in Dividend on the eastern end of the Tintic Range. Some of the tailings piles are over a hundred years old, but others were deposited a few days ago. We drove by the first dumps we saw - didn't find much, maybe if we dug quite a bit more. We were excited to move on, so we drove on down the main road. A no trespassing sign made us backtrack a little, but we settled on a fresh looking mine dump back up the road.

We could smell the sulfur the minute we stopped the car. There were huge chunks of it, which exploded in a cloud of pyrite dust when you gave them a good whack with your hammer. I found some pyrite, and a very large chunk of something I still can't identify. (I'll post a picture on here when I get one). It was a solid mass of small ditrigonal crystals that were yellow to brick red. I thought it was some kind of massive jarosite, but it put a scratch on my knife blade, which meant it was much too hard to be jarosite. Maybe a limonite pseudomorph or something. I'll post a picture and you guys let me know if you've seen it before.

We drove around a little more, found a nice old tailings pile a few miles down the road with nice chunks of pyrite and some galena, and decided to call it a day. I still felt the urge to stop every time we drove by a new mine dump, but we were running out of time. We drove the mining roads around the back of Sioux Peak, and ended up back at the High School in Eureka. Then it was a short jog home.

Dugway Geode Beds and Topaz Mountain

A field guide to Topaz and associated minerals of the Thomas Range, Utah (Topaz Mountain) volume 1

If you ever take one rockhounding trip, this one is a must: Dugway Geodes and Topaz Mountain. My cousin Tom has some kids who have become interested in rocks, so we thought this would be a fun trip. We hopped in the van around 6:00 am and headed out around Utah lake on hwy 73 and watched as the sun rose over the hills. We drove through Faust to Vernon, and then the pavement ended. After that it's desert and jackrabbits. We headed up over Lookout Pass and enjoyed the view before descending into the west desert.

The dirt road you take is actually the Pony Express route used in 1858 to carry the mail. You can visit the Pony Express stations along the way. We stopped in Simpson Springs for a break and checked out the little cabin. Time seems suspended out there; you can almost imagine what it was like for the guys running the outposts--living in the middle of nowhere with a couple of horses and waiting to get scalped by the locals. But the view was nice and the kids broke of some weird green tuff near the monument.

From there you drive along the edge of the Dugway Proving Ground: this place is straight out of a Tom Clancy novel--they test all kinds of war toys out here. Not a nice place to venture into (not that you'd get far -- the snipers would probably shoot you first). I have a friend who's a firefighter, and they dropped him by helicopter into a brushfire in Dugway once. He said he wandered over a ridge and saw a bright green pond.

We followed the Pony Express road for another 20 miles and turned south just before the Dugway pass to go to the Topaz ampitheatre. We followed the Pismire wash for 15 miles along the east side of the Thomas Range until we came to the Weiss Highway and turned into Topaz Valley.

Once you're in the valley you can pretty much pick a spot and start looking for crystals. The whole mountain range is made of rhyolite that formed with huge gas pockets in it. You find a crack and pry it open with a crowbar. The inside will be filled with sand and crystals. You can also look in the dry washes for clear topaz crystals. We opted for the tried and true location - the west side. Just walk up the side of the mountain and start looking in the cracks. We pulled out a handful of clear topaz and a few specimens of the sherry-colored stuff. It's really nice to look at, I must say. You can also find what they call clinkers. They are topaz that is so included with quartz that it becomes opaque.


I was having a blast, but some of the kids were starting to get whiny and fighting over the crystals, so we decided to go somewhere a little easier. We headed out of the ampitheatre and drove a few miles up the west side of the Thomas Range to a collecting site for Apache Tears. You drive up a small canyon and pretty soon the ground is littered with obsidian and jasper pebbles. Apache tears are little round pebbles of black volcanic glass. You can also find mahogany obsidian, which has brown streaks in it. I climbed around in the hills and found some wild rocks - bright red and pink matrix with black obsidian in them. After 20 minutes or so we were done there. We hopped back in the car and drove north through the Dell.



I was salivating over all of the mine dumps I saw, but we had to get to the Geode Beds so we kept driving. The Dell is a scenic place to be; many mining operations (even a Deseret mine. Hmm). Eventually you come around a bend and descend onto the edge of the salt flats. We're talking edge of the world here; it's an amazing feeling. You really feel exposed out there--it's so flat you can see the curvature of the earth. Soon we hit the Pony Express road and a few miles later turned off at the geode beds.

My hat is off to Loy Crapo. He bought the claim and maintains it for collectors. He periodically digs a new pit with his backhoe when collectors have exhausted the previous one. The minute you drive up to the site you can see piles of geodes left by the previous collectors. If you go on a Saturday you might see up to a dozen other collectors, but everyone is friendly. Just walk right into the pit and claw them out of the clay. If you are lazy you can paw through the piles of geodes around the sides of the pits. Just be careful you don't fall in. As collectors dig further into the sides of the pit, there is a risk for minor cave-ins.

The geodes here are usually filled with a blue or white chalcedony, with layers of black or white quartz crystals. I have heard of amethyst and barite being discovered in some of them. If you find a nice large one, resist the urge to break it with your hammer to see what's inside. Go to a rock shop and pay them a few bucks to saw it open for you. It's worth the wait.


We gathered as many geodes as we could. The clay they are found in is pink and yellow, and bears a striking resemblance to refrigerated cookie dough. I was getting hungry. We gathered the troops and sorted through our haul, discarding some of the finds for the next guys who came around, and headed back to the road.

I always have a strange feeling reentering civilization after a trip into the desert. The trip out there feels strange, because every hill you pass over becomes more and more desolate. After a day out there I adjust to the peacefulness and find myself feeling more anxious as I can see the city again. It's an interesting transition. I usually end up wishing the next trip were sooner.