 and we're just coming into what says helper and so price is just that way and can you hear the snow hitting the ridge this is the end of april and we're going to go rockhounding we think hello and welcome to the rugged rockhound today we are out in the san rafael swell area we're about halfway between price and green river so we're just off of the main highway which is over that way and we're up here in an area not far from what's called the summerville wash and what we're going to do is we're going to go up one of these washes i'm in the car because it is windy today it is very windy so i don't know how well this is going to work it i might have to dub over a lot of the audio because it might be just too much wind but right now when we're back at the vehicle i at least have the vehicle to block some of the wind but anyway we're going to go ahead and try going up this wash right here which is the first one you come to just as you enter in this area and we might try some of the other washes or we might try another area basically what we're looking for is a red agate that sometimes bands with black and white and maybe some petrified wood there is dinosaur bone you can get out here but that's illegal to collect so if we see any we'll just show it to you and then move on okay well we're in the wash and fortunately we're down low enough we're not quite getting as much wind it just kind of gusts every now and then and i found this piece it's definitely some agate quality wise it's just okay but hey it's the first sign of something a little windy right now just found that it's a little that's nice it's a little bit of red agate a little something so in this conglomerate rock i just broke it out look at that i guess it's a piece of limestone that had some shell fossils in it or something that's pretty nice though kind of a lucky thing to get in the conglomerate i also found this little piece doesn't look like much but when you hold it to the sun you can see the orange coming through it on the edges my dad checking out that little valley right here much bigger pieces look at that much bigger pieces unfortunately the stuff around here is so heavily fractured and here's somewhere that red spotted stuff very interesting i wonder if it would look nice it's a whole bunch right here as if it was coming out right here maybe so there's the wash behind me come up here and it looks like it's an actual layer of agate i'm not getting any light through i guess but it looks like it hello women i'm gonna bust into some of this to see what it looks like the main wash is over there we're a fair bit up from where we parked i came over to the smaller wash and this red just screamed at me look at that wow huh that is nice though the little bit that's right there wow okay i'm getting more excited now those are nice and it looks like somebody's been here before digging i meant they were digging for that stuff that is nice looking yeah i think i might hold on to those get back down in the wash and i'm finding these nods of jasper too they tend to be kind of a brownish to orange and sometimes red in it and just straight up the agate is getting so much better you're seeing it everywhere now so my dad and i were just sitting here showing each other the stuff we'd found and right there i pulled this up look at that that might be beautiful to cut assuming it doesn't shatter we'll find out look at this this is looking pretty nice right here the difficulty i'm finding with this area is finding big enough pieces that you can actually do something with that aren't shattered so like you've got a little bit right there on the edge but is it enough to do anything with than this one so shattered you can't really do anything so this right here this looks promising so this is good size right here and it goes pretty deep right into here and me even go further it's hard to tell this looks promising this is something i might be able to make stuff with in that piece maybe this is the other side of this which maybe right here we've got stuff we can work with i don't know for sure i'm going to keep digging see if we can find any other good pieces but yeah the majority of the stuff is either too fractured or too small so you really have to search that looks promising wow look at the size of this rock okay okay okay oh look at that you got some botched riddle calcidoni on it which is you know agate churn quartz jasper that's uh look at that botched riddle on it that's nice i'm finding more on this i think it's coming out of the hill right here i think this is the unit um positive but this is the unit it's coming out of but right here this looks like a good spot to uh dig into a little bit wandering over here a little further that's where we're finding those nice pieces and look they keep getting bigger and maybe even better as you keep coming up this hill you just keep finding more and more look at that thing we'll just take a quick little gander just so you get a feel for how much is here pretty back from exploring part of the sand raffle swell with my dad and that was pretty interesting i wasn't expecting that much good quality red agate on that one hill so that was very exciting so let's go ahead and take a look at the stuff i found i went and cut up a bunch of them a lot of them i haven't cut yet they're still a little too big but let's see what was inside of some of those were they better or not than what they looked like on the outside let's take a look we'll start by looking at some of botryodal formations so we got this one right here smaller piece so this is very consistent out there you get this red agate and then this kind of colorless to gray agate that just kind of meld into each other it's actually quite pretty here is a here is a larger piece it is fractured most of the stuff that we found on the surface had fractures running through it due to weathering over time which is unfortunate here is the largest piece that had the botryodal calciton on it agate basically because of its translucent got some calciton right here and then this side was really nice look at that so you can see how this stuff has these veins running all through it mixture of that red and kind of gray agate this was a piece of red and yellow jasper so there are some nice jasper didn't find where this came from it's probably further up than where we went but it is nice okay now we're getting into the cut pieces so here's one that I cut I don't know how well you can see the light coming through there but it's nice nice agate see look at that it's got a red and white colorless here is another nice piece I mean look at that closely look at how nice that agate really is it's just sad that it's so fractured very nice a lot of the times when I cut it only a small area of it would actually have the agate and the most of it was the host rock which the host rock to me looks volcanic which is very typical when you find agates they're usually in a volcanic rock some kind so yeah most of this was the rhyolite and then right there was where the good agate was nice banding though see this this is pretty nice stuff here we've got a nice one that's just got little layers of the agate going through it you can see a little bit of light coming through on some of it wanted to quickly show that little fossil rock that I found that was probably just a stream pebble cut into that you can see the clamshells in them it's pretty cool and this last one that I cut open is my favorite that particular look at that beautiful red banding here nice clear area right there and then you've got this one it's the other side of it not as good as the previous side still very nice pretty nice stuff right some nice red agate with banding and it it was beautiful stuff it usually came in just very small layers going through the rock and most of them are fractured and I'm guessing that's probably due to smaller pieces and their proximity to the surface because they were all on the surface I collected these all the surface and you saw how much there was all over that hill and the big ones I wonder if you can get those bigger ones or maybe dig into the hill if you can get some better pieces that have much more consistent veins of agate that aren't as fractured that could mix for some beautiful material I think that's a wonderful location there's some great stuff there and as you could probably see didn't look like that place had ever been touched like we found the stuff all over but didn't look like anybody had ever dug anywhere or even collected stuff on the surface so that's a great location that we probably found based on the book from a guy who had searched in the area but probably didn't find that hill so go check that hill out go see what you can find and then maybe dig into it and see if you can get some really nice banded red agate all right until next time remember there's treasure everywhere