 Welcome to the Rugged Rockhound! Hello and welcome back to the Rugged Rockhound. I'm back. I'm back! Almost done with my degree, so I'm back to rockhounding and this will be the first of many to come. So today I'm here out at the Vernon Wunderstone area. This is a well-known rockhounding area. We've already got some other people out here digging away at it and we're just going to see what kind of patterns we can find in this Wunderstone. And if you would like to know exactly where this is I'm going to post some GPS coordinates up here for everybody to follow. So there you go and we're just going to get at it. We're going to look around and see what kind of Wunderstone we can find here. A lot of times when you're digging here some of the nicer pieces will be very dirty and you can't really tell. When you look closely at a broken spot you'll see that they're actually quite nice inside and quite often a lot of pieces get missed just because they're so dirty they're hard to see. Good reason to bring a spray bottle and we unfortunately forgot the spray bottles today. But I do have some water I can pour on them in case I need to see if they're any good. Okay let's get to digging. Let me wash that off. Show you how this one looks. It's got a nice pattern on it. There you go. It's got a pretty nice pattern looking on it. That'll make something nice. Just found another one that looks pretty nice. Let's take a look at that one. It's got some nice colors and patterns in that one. Yeah we'll be keeping that one. We'll make some nice stuff with that. So I haven't dug very much as you can see but they're coming out. Some nice pieces here and there. Okay that's not a very nice piece. That's a better looking one. And yeah it doesn't take long to dig through this. Find some nice stuff. Ooh. Take a look at that piece. That's nice isn't it? I like the patterns in that. Good swirls. Whoa. So I was just hitting right there and broke this one right here. And look at that. It's beautiful. The other side looks like... Looks like it's got a yoke inside. It does. That's a nice one. And chemical weathering what it does is as the atmosphere and oxygen and other things work their way into the rock they will oxidize or alter the minerals to form up and that's how they show up in these colors and that's why they form in the bands and you'll see that the bands will follow where the natural fractures are in the rock because that's where the weathering is taking process as water and oxygen get down into those cracks. Chemical weathering. Oh let's go ahead and bust this one open just to see what it looks like because it doesn't look the greatest there but maybe it looks better for grin. Whoa. Well look at that. That's not too bad. And now I know the surface that I want to cut so it looks like I'm going to want to cut this like that. Whoa. Nice. Ah there we go. That's wonderful. Ooh wash it off. Let's wash that thing. That is what you're looking for. This is what you're trying to find when you come out here. So I'm getting in here a lot of loose stuff that doesn't have much dirt in it and down here we've got stuff that has dirt in it so this stuff was recent so this is probably not good to look through I'm not going to find much so I need to come back here where there's more dirt where the stuff has been buried for a longer period of time so I'm going to continue going that way. Ah. It might be the other side of that one. Oh. Look at that thing. Yeah we're adding that to that. I've got some large pieces here. Let's see what we can do. See from this side doesn't look like much but from this side you can see it's got the pattern of those other ones so you want to cut these in this direction. Nice. That's staring at me. Look at that. That's beautiful isn't it? Beautiful. Look at that. Beautiful. It's not as big as the others but it's got those patterns you want. There we go. Another nice one. Beautiful. Now this came out of the same spot. I'm pretty sure the inside of this is going to look a lot like those even though you can't see it. So this is where the natural fractures of the rock existed before anybody dug this and this is where the chemical weathering is happening. That's why you can't see into the rock. This is a complete piece. If you look at the very bottom where it's broken you can see it's got the stuff. We're going to keep that. I think I'm starting to get down into close to the bedrock because I'm getting a lot of consecutive pieces like the one that connects to this one is right here. So we should be getting some good stuff coming out now. See another one of those. Now where it's just barely exposed you can kind of see the patterns. We're in the good stuff now. Boom. There it is again. We've got another one here off the side. It's again you can't really see it but it's in there. It's in there. This one you might be able to see some. Let's see if we can wash it off. It's just one big circle but that's neat in its own way. Oh boy. More good stuff. And next to it What's that next? That's the best piece. More good stuff. What else do we see right here? More good stuff. That one might not be as good. One of those which you can see it's got it in there. Whoa. Oh boy. Look. That's a good one, isn't it? What? There you go. There's just some wonders to it. I'll wait. So you're just going to have the hole because I got to get out of here. Because I have to restrict myself to one bucket because I don't have much space at the house. We brought three buckets. We brought three buckets. I'm back from the Digette Vernon. We got some nice pieces. Let's go ahead and take a closer look at them. Washed them off a bit. This one's quite nice. Got the patterns in that thing. This is definitely the better side. This one had a nice little yellow center to it. I really liked that one. This has got a bunch of tight patterns. Really small ones all over. That's pretty cool too. This one I liked the pattern right through here. It's like a tree there. So I like that. This was my favorite one. It kind of looks like one of those African ceremonial masks or something. Maybe this way. Either way, pretty darn cool. And this one just had a big circle on it. Really nice stuff overall. I did have a few others. I'm going to go ahead and take a look at them. I'm going to go ahead and take a look at them. I'm going to go ahead and take a look at them. They're really cool. I did have a few other pieces that I collected. But you can't really see anything on them yet because I got to get them cut. There you have it. Some really nice Vernon Wonderstone. I do like that place. I go out every couple of years just to get some more stuff. But it's great. It's easy to find. It's a wonderful location for just about anybody. The drive up to it's pretty easy. It's not far off of the main road. You don't need four-wheel drive. You don't even really need high clearance if you take it slow. Now I do want to kind of update you guys now that I'm back. I'm back. Back to rockhounding. Pretty close to done with the master's degree. I'm past the difficult parts and so now I've got more time. So I'm going to be back out rockhounding. I'm going to try to be uploading a video every week. The pieces that are kind of large and stuff, I do want to actually cut those. I currently don't have equipment for that. I just have a small tile saw and that's mostly because we're moving around from apartment to apartment right now and until we have our own house. Yeah, this actually isn't our house. We just live in an apartment over here. We eventually want our own house and when we do that's finally going to get all the bigger equipment so I can start cutting things, cleaning things, polishing all that fun stuff. Eventually I will get to that point. So this is a new year. This is a new year of rockhounding and after, you know, several months of rockhounding on YouTube and just kind of finding out what you guys like and getting more familiar with it I've noticed that really why you guys come here is because you want to see me rockhound. So I'm going to try and mostly do rockhounding videos and occasionally do other little things like cut things or I don't know whatever comes up I guess. I'm also going to change the formats of the videos a little bit. I've been thinking about it, looking at them and I'm going to try and cut down the fluff I guess you could say and really make the videos about rockhounding. Just good old, get out there rockhound, show you guys what I'm finding, tell you guys about it educate if I know more about the area and also just have fun you know and I hope that's what you guys want. I do appreciate when you guys let me know what you're looking for your suggestions because I really want to be able to do stuff that's fun for you guys. And one thing I've really been thinking about and this is where I kind of want your help is I really want to think about rockhounding in areas that are not well known where they're not in books they're not just published everywhere especially if I can just find things that on my own you know and that's what I'm going to try and push for mostly with this channel is try and go to the places that are not well known so guys let me know what you think about that and that's the plan for the future because like I keep telling you there is treasure everywhere