Google Earth and GPS
When I got serious about rock hounding last spring I had quite a hard time finding places where I could find gem quality material. A co-worker had told me about Sommercamp road and where to look for jasper and other materials. After visiting this site a few times he introduced me to Google Earth and its satellite images. It was amazing he zoomed in and pointed out areas where he knew material could be found. Afterwards I was able to find other places just by studying common characteristics in the satellite images.
Soon after being introduced to Google Earth I purchased a DVD that had many GPS waypoints. I imported these into the program and instantly had many places to study. I later purchased a GPS unit and start programming it with waypoints from Google Earth. Finding places to find gem quality materials was no longer an issue.
Last weekend I joined a group of friends and went to Succor Creek Park to look for thunder eggs and other materials. The night before we left I entered many waypoints into my GPS unit. As we started getting closer to the park I pulled out the GPS and a laptop and started telling how close we were to collecting sites. One of the members of our group (John Howell) knew about almost all of the places. The first one I pointed out was a Jasper collecting site. John told us that it was not that good but we could stop if we wanted. We stopped and sure enough he was right. The next spot he did not know about but as we got closer to it we quickly figured out why when the GPS pointed us up a cliff that was at least 100 feet high.
Technology may be great tool but still doesn’t hold up to experience. I will still continue to use my electronic tools when I am out prospecting by myself but when I am with somebody like John who knows these places already I think I will put away the tools and let them guide the trips. That is exactly what I did this last weekend.
The first good spot that we stopped at was a thunder egg dig. It was high above the park on cliffs of the canyon. Looking back into the canyon it is hard to believe that there is a road that leads to the site from behind. However a four wheel drive vehicle is need to go over that road. We dug for thunder eggs for a couple of hours before John asked us if we wanted to go to the good sites.
The next site we went to was an old claim where blue opal could be found. Recently the mine pit at this location had been filled in so we just collected on the surface. When an owner of a claim is done with the site it is now required that they fill in the pits and plant seed to restore the native plants. The material at his site was seems to be very nice and I am looking forward to working with it. It would have been nice to collect her when this site was an active dig.
After leaving the opal claim we stopped at the original Owyhee jasper mine. There was not a lot of material left at this site so after spending about fifteen minutes we left and set off to find two more jasper locations before heading home.
Our next stop was an incredible jasper mine. Gene was able to back his truck into the mine and we were able to pick thru the piles of jasper that were on both sides of the truck. I took a lot of material from this site. To see some of this material please look at the Owyhee Jasper Gallery found on the “Gallery” page. We spent so much time at this site that we decided to make this the last stop of the trip.
A lot of great materials were found on this trip. All of the sites except for the blue opal site were listed in my GPS coordinates but we were lead to them without the use of technology. The technology would have lead us to the sites but would have taken much more time and we would have covered less ground and collected less material. GPS and Google Earth are great tools and I will continue to use them and highly recommend them to any rock hound but if given a chance to go on a field trip with a knowledge guide I would leave them behind. I would still take the GPS unit along to take location readings so I could return to the site in the future.
