Saturday, October 26, 2013

Collecting Obsidian (Apache Tears) near Topaz Mountain

If you're going to look for topaz at Topaz Mountain, it's totally worth going a few miles farther to find obsidian at this site. Awesome JDan, whoever he is, has directions here---you basically just drive 7 miles past the turnoff to Topaz Mountain. Supposedly there is lots of obsidian in the Black Rock Desert, but when we visited Pahvant Butte Volcano we didn't see any, so this was very exciting. Especially these "Apache Tears," which have been stream-polished and are therefore quite shiny and rounded and beautiful.
Such beautiful views! There is truly nothing for miles around. Another reason I was glad to have Sam along for this trip!
It was even windier here than at the topaz site---probably because we were exposed up on the top of the hills. We thought we might blow away!

Once you start looking, you can find the little Apache Tears everywhere!

They are all over the ground on this hill.

Here are some of the obsidian pieces. They are so pretty and shiny! We are polishing some in our rock tumbler right now and I will update this with how they turn out. (UPDATE: the post is here.) But even just stream-polished, they are lovely and we had such fun collecting them!

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