 Hello and welcome to the Rugged Rockhound. Today I am in Grand Junction. This is my first time rockhounding while living in Grand Junction. So we just moved Grand Junction Proppers down there. This is Fruta and this is the well known Opal Hill. So obviously being well known in close proximity to this town it's been hit hard. So I don't know how good of stuff I'll actually find but it's my first time here and I don't mind a challenge. So we're going to take a look. We're going to hike up there and just see what we can find. See if we can find any decent opal. Here it's common opal. Mostly it'll be white or cream and maybe some other colors. So the big thing we're looking for then is some good colors and maybe some opalized wood. So let's get to it. So that's the hill and I don't actually know where it's coming out although I think from what I've read it's coming out from kind of the top but to be sure I'm going to kind of explore it myself. So I think I'll just start looking at stuff down here see if I notice anything and then maybe go that working on my way up to the top and we'll just see what we find. So right off the bat I'm seeing some things that remind me of Cisco and Yellowcat. Got teeny little bit of red agate jasper type stuff. You got this selenite basically it's the fibrous form of gypsum and there see this looks a little bit like one of those barite concretions once again from Cisco and Yellowcat. Oh and that might be some of the replaced stuff. Okay there's a lot of a lot of stuff coming up coming off this hill. Yep see look at that some more red agate. This one looked interesting so I'm going to try and get it out. Again one of those kind of barite type concretions or maybe not even barite there's those concretions that you find at Cisco and Yellowcat some of them not barite replacements but they'll have this red agate in it interesting. Some of this red agate might be really nice if you can find it in larger pieces more of that jasper agate stuff. Here is the first piece of opal I'm pretty unsure that I found it's got the nice white color that you expect with the opal nice and light maybe even have a little bit of texture in it somebody up over here is wood but I'm not sure about that one. Now that looks more like a potential piece of wood. Yeah I would say that looks like a piece of petrified wood. I'll take it home and wash it off some more possibly even cut into it and we'll determine for sure if it's wood but it sure looks like it. So here's this one washed off so I wasn't sure if it was petrified wood took a closer look at it and sure enough it is petrified wood. You can see in it the little pores it's very interesting because it's got these little bits of red agate filling in some of where the the pores the the the xylem would have been where it was um drawing water so interesting that one has a decent pocket in it right of agate that red and then white in the center cool yeah I really wonder if any of these bigger ones will look really nice inside with agate I might have to take a couple pieces back and cut them I'll try and find the ones that look most promising that one's looking pretty decent it's too big for me to cut it this time but that's not bad here's a tiny short of opal and you'll see you've got some white there and then it goes to some other colors and it's definitely opal so we'd like to find bigger pieces of that and hopefully more color just wanted to point out most of the reddish agate that I was seeing I found down there as I'm getting up here higher I'm not seeing it as much so it looks like the red agate is coming out of the lower units here and so far as opal and petrified wood we'll haven't seen enough of that yet to be able to determine so I've made it up on top of the shelf there on the top of the hills up there so I did find a little shard of opal a whole white cream color so there is opal up here as well so I feel like because most time which when you get deposits they'll be in multiple layers so we'll probably find it in layers below here and in layers above it's just a matter of finding where it replaced something of good size like a piece of wood or a fossil or something like that look at that gypsum that's what they call satin spar so you've got some stream pebbles on the bottom too so you got this like kind of sandstone to conglomerate in some of this this layer right here looks like volcanics or clay that's your better chance for finding opal and stuff like that so here's a nice view from the top of opal hill very nice beautiful beautiful landscape here so what I've figured out so far and I mean it may not be correct but most of what I've been finding anything good has been below this this shelf below me here so below that kind of that sandstone unit so those greenish grayish well green gray brownish hill is where I seem to be finding this stuff the layers if you look here are tilted like this sloped like this so my guess is going to be that your best bet on finding this stuff is going to be below these cliffs on this side around the back here where we've got a nice exposure and then probably along that side as well you know if I was smart I would have come up the hill walking looking at the signs and so that's like there you find petrified wood in the decoder formation and it is total of opal that's what I thought so it is coming out at the bottom then it's huh that was correct all right I believe this is the decoder formation that's talking about it looks right so from this point down is kind of one of where you want to focus your efforts there's a nice little piece of red it's more jasper than agate that's kind of nice oh that looks more of a carnillion almost that's cool I only saw the tip but then I came out fairly large so we'll clean that off and see if that's nice that might actually be a nicer piece here's this one washed off it's got this like white center and red on the outside kind of cool so this one had a little red there and then this thicker layer with a kind of a dark red I don't know this one looks pretty nice all right all right I think that's a good one to take and cut here's this one washed off that was the best part right there and just a little bit right there so yeah mostly right there so this is interesting it looks like wood texture in there could very well be kind of a jasper opal whatever it doesn't really look like opal to me but if that's the wood see those fractures all through it that would explain why it's very hard to find wood because it is so fractured once it exposes it just falls all the pieces so right there this piece looks like it has quite a bit of red in it I'll take that home and wash it off and see how it looks here's this one washed off yeah there's not much on the other side just that okay right in there I've been I've been searching for a while finding mostly lots of little bits of red agate so I didn't really show this but I found this doesn't that kind of look like palm wood a little bit very interesting very interesting take that home because that might be some palm wood here's this piece all washed off definitely once again confirming that this is a piece of wood there's definitely more of a tropical tree with those large this island here's this one washed off so many of these red agate on the outside the center kind of a white calcite here's this one washed off the stuff in the center looks like calcite the way it fractured so I think it's some white calcite right in the middle and then red agate around the edge there's some more of that red agate with the white calcite in the middle and I'm back at the vehicle so the sun's starting to get low and time to get out of here but just so you know if you're coming out here to look stay in that lower half of the hill all right that's where you're going to actually find stuff that's where you find the red agate and the petrified wood and opal so it's all coming out of that so if you're coming out here the red agate is pretty abundant in small amounts right small veins but it's still nice so if you want to come out and look for red agate this is a good place the opal and petrified wood are definitely much harder to find so just understand if you come out for that you might be searching for a while so that's it for this one and remember there is treasure everywhere