About a month ago a friend at work told me about an Idaho Gem Club field trip to Carey, Idaho to search for moss agate. I thought that it would be nice to go to the East to collect rocks so I sent an email to my friend Tony in Gooding, Idaho asking if he was interested. Tony often comes to Boise and Nampa, Idaho to pick up our friend Jason and me to go to the West to collect rocks so I told him that Jason and I could go his neck of the woods for a change. Tony was game for this idea so the plan was set. Unfortunately, Jason had to work so he was not able to join us.
Carey Agate
Saturday morning, the 19th of September, I woke up at 5:00 A.M. hoping to leave the house by 6:00 A.M. I figured it would take me about an hour and a half to get to Gooding. I manage to leave a few minutes early which was good because I had to drop off some items at my storage unit and gas the car. The errands took about twenty-five minutes to complete. This set me back a little bit but I thought I had plenty of time to get to Gooding by 7:30. I felt like I was making good time at first but still didn’t get to Tony’s until almost 8:30.
When I finally arrived in Gooding I quickly moved my stuff to Tony’s truck and we headed to Carey, Idaho where we were going to meet the group from Boise. A couple of Tony’s family members also came along, Mel who often accompanies Tony on field trips and Wes who I met for the first time that morning.
On our way to Carey we passed through the towns of Shoshone and Richfield. Both of these towns brought back many memories for me. I lived in Shoshone as a small child and visited relatives there often after moving away. When I live there I often went to Richfield with my grandfather to purchase cheese from Ward’s Cheese factory. It had been a long time since I had been that direction so the trip down memory lane was nice.
Once we arrived in Carey we didn’t have to wait long for the group from Boise to arrive. The scheduled meeting time was 10:00 and we arrived about ten minutes before that at 10:04 the group arrived and by 10:10 we were off to the final destination at the Little Wood River Reservoir. When we arrived at the reservoir everybody stopped to discuss where to search for agate. I also met up with friends from work, Loah and her husband Ken. I wanted to spend some time rock hunting with them but after a long delay they went to collect around the reservoir and the group I was with wanted to check out some nearby hills.
On our way to the hills we stopped a few times to explore some dried up washes in the valley. In the washes we found many small pieces of agate and some Jasper. Mel found a larger chunk of tube / moss agate in one of the washes which was the find of the day.
Searching for Agate
Once on the hills we found many pieces of agate. The agate didn’t look that impressive; it look like fairly clear seam agate but once I cut a few pieces of it my view quickly changed. The first piece I cut had nice banding with a large and clean drusy quartz pocket in it. The second piece had even stronger banding. I am looking forward to cutting more of it.
After spending a few hours on the hills we then headed to Muldoon, ID. There isn’t much left of a town but there are many ranches in the area and some ruins. We were chasing down GPS way points that we had for locations where agate was to be found but all of them ended up being a bust. During our search we did find the remains of the old charcoal kilns that once made charcoal for mining smelters that ran in the area in the late 1800’s. I had seen these on the Idaho PBS stations before so seeing them in person was nice. Even though we didn’t find any agate viewing the history was worth going out of our way.
Muldoon Charcoal Kilns
When we left Muldoon we decided to go over Muldoon summit to the town of Belleview. We stopped a couple of times to check out promising looking areas and found some agate. Upon reaching the top of the summit we found some of the people from the club searching for petrified wood. We stopped and chatted about were each group had gone that day and what they found. We also collected a few pieces of the petrified wood. The petrified wood wasn’t the best quality (almost coal) but I took some just to have it my collection.
Muldoon Summit
We arrived back in Gooding a little after 9:00 that evening. I said my goodbye and see you in the morning before heading back to Nampa. I arrived home around 11:00.
Around 10:00 Sunday morning Tony and Mel were at my house to dropping off a 16″ slab saw that I purchased from Tony. After that our friend Jason joined the group and we headed to Kuna where we helped Tony load his trailer with a rock collection that he purchased. This was the end of a great weekend of rock hounding but also the start of new adventure with the slab saw. That will be the topic of the next post.
