Bones of the Earth

This page last updated on 01/26/2019.

Rocks, stones, boulders, pebbles - I just love rocks and geology! I’m much more interested in the forces that shaped the rock than I am in gems, although opals are my favorite jewelry stone. I remember Mom looking for rocks on family vacations, Dianne still finds her college textbook on geology fascinating, the kids and I always look for rocks when we go places, and Elaine takes Jackson fossil hunting in Republic, WA - I think rocks/fossils, like boating and flying, must be in the family genes.

In Illinois in the 1960’s, I remember seeing what I thought was green quartz along the railroad tracks and thinking vesicular basalt was fossilized raindrops. Dianne, Lori, and I hunted for fossils in the gravel Dad brought home for the driveway and looked for Indian beads in the gravel alongside the road. We searched for cool rocks in a streambed near our campsite in Glacier National Park, and were absolutely positive we were going to be millionaires the day we discovered iron pyrite in a stream in Colorado - fools gold for the fools!

At work I had to walk a ways to get to my office, and was always eyeing the tumbled rock at the side of the road: some were egg-shaped and striped, some were square like caramels, and others were disk-shaped with one side darker than the other.

The riverbed above Palouse Falls is utterly fascinating to me. Over the eons the river has smoothed the gray rock into soft pillows and humps, and in some places a stone must have gotten hung up and the river current turned it round and round until it hollowed out a bowl into the bedrock - some of the hollows are a foot or more deep and still contain the stone that made it. The rock in the cliff face has been folded into a V-shape, and at the bottom of the V the current is undercutting the cliff and has exposed a fossilized tree turning into opal.

One of my most favorite things to do at Priest Lake is paddle the canoe about 5-6’ offshore looking for rocks. The water is so clear in some places that you can see the bottom 15-20’ down. One year Zach and I paddled around the nearby islands and along the far shoreline filling the bottom of the canoe with granite/quartz rocks for my rock garden, then waded through Priest River where I found a rock bigger than my fist and as round as a baseball and another rock about the same size shaped into a triangle. Margaret and I paddled the canoe around Baritoe Island and went snorkeling for rocks in about 4’ of water. Near Papoose Island there are boulders the size of cars in about 20’ of water, and one of those boulders has a band of quartz running through it that looks like it’s 6-8” wide.

There are marble-sized/shaped rocks and a cliff of conglomerate rock (rather rare to find so I’ve read) on First Beach on the Olympia Peninsula. The beach near Ft. Worden State Park is littered with large round rocks and beach glass. Wish I could bring all the cool rocks I find home, though I suppose I would have the largest man-made rock garden in the world by the time I was done.

jlb: January 2005