Thursday, June 27, 2013

Oregon Sunstone?

In July I did a road trip and geo caching trip as will.
So the trip took me over to highway 395 in east Oregon.
I pick up a coup caches alone the way, heading down highway 140 to Lakeview.
My goal this day was to get to a place were the Oregon Sunstone is found.
As it happened, it is the only place, that is not a real a cache out there, but only a Earth Cache.
Just a place to find, but not a cache or log sheet to sign.
Most of the time you have do something or answer some questions.
Heading north up 395 for about 25 miles then turn right out into sage bush for another 25 miles of dirt, rock and gravel, and slow driving.
This part took about 2 hours and at times I was not
complete sure that I was heading in the right direction , but the GPS pretty much kept me thinking that I was going in the right way. LOL
I got out there about 3:30PM, and it was a hot one. Read the sign to see what I could do or not do.
As it turns out there is about 7 square mile area that the Sunstone are found, and all but 1 square mile is under a Mining clams.
The one square is held by the BLM, and is for public uses.
As you can see I found a few, this is like picking up diamond off the sand and dirt, just laying there.

The bigger ones is about 1/2" a bunch of 3/8 and lots of 1/4 inches.

Looking around there is a place in Utah that you can do the same thing, called Sunstone hill or something like that.
Here a little more info about sunstones.
A variety known as Oregon sunstone is found in Harney County, Oregon and in eastern Lake County north of Plush. Oregon sunstone contains inclusions of copper crystals. Oregon sunstones can be up to three inches wide. The copper leads to variant color within some stones, where turning one stone will result in manifold hues: the more copper within the stone, the darker the complexion.[2]
On August 4, 1987, the Oregon State Legislature designated Oregon sunstone as its state gemstone by joint resolution.[3]

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