(Cross-posted from our family blog)
We seem to end up studying geology every few years in our homeschool—it's just one of those subjects we like too much to leave alone for long. We've been on field trips all over Utah collecting rocks, but we've never been to the Dugway Geode Beds before. It's probably because I got scared off by reading how to get there. You have to drive on a dirt road for over an hour, and then you need a "high-clearance vehicle" for the beds themselves. After getting stuck in our minivan out in the middle of the desert west of Delta several years ago, I didn't want to risk that ever happening again! So I always basically dismissed the geode beds as an option, even though they sounded like a cool place to go.
But…now we have an enormous van instead of a minivan. And I found a day that Sam could go with us. So I thought we might attempt it!
It turned out to be a beautiful day, and the dirt road was really quite well-maintained and not hard at all to drive on. (Well…Sam was actually the one driving. But I don't think it stressed him out too much either!) And it was pretty! Really pretty wild desert scenery, if you like that sort of thing—and I do. I had read there is even a herd of wild horses out there, and I was hoping we'd get to see them! And, on the way home, we did! A whole bunch of them were grazing not too far from the highway. That was fun to see.
The road gets a lot worse once you turn off at the "Geode Beds" sign (or "Grode Bed Road," as our GPS called it), but it was nothing our van and the intrepid Sam couldn't handle. I think any regular car would have been totally fine up to that point, but if you were coming here in a non-high-clearance vehicle I think it would be smart just to leave it at the entrance and hike in. (Which might be a little bit of a pain, because you have to go quite a long way in, and then you'd be carrying your buckets of rocks back out with you, but there were a lot of holes and dips in the road that made me nervous even in the van!) It was fine for us, though, and there are several branching and intersecting roads, so maybe you could find a gentler route if you searched a bit.
I had found a map with someone's suggested coordinates of a good spot to start hunting, so we drove into that area and unloaded our stuff: shovels, rock hammers, a pick, gloves, goggles, and buckets. Right when we got out of the car we saw lots of sparkly broken geodes everywhere—rocks other people had broken open and left there, I suppose. They were so pretty, and the little ones would have been totally happy just picking up those the whole time!
The digging was tricky and a little frustrating at first, because we didn't know exactly what we were looking for, or where we should be looking. You're supposed to dig down a bit to find the layer where most of the geodes are, but there are also some big pits where excavators have dug down quite deep, so you can climb into those and find good spots in the walls of the pits. Somewhere I'd read that you should look for pinkish and yellowish clay, with kind of a cookie-dough-like texture. We did find some pockets of that, and we did find some roundish rocks, but mostly the best stuff we were finding was still in fragments. The soil isn't TOO hard, but it still takes effort to dig down very far. And of course Sam and I were constantly trying to keep Ziggy from falling into holes, and mediating disputes about who got to use the rock hammers. So we didn't feel we were really maximizing our finding potential.
Still, with some effort, we started digging up rocks we were pretty sure were geodes. They were round and relatively light, and when we started breaking them open they had beautiful crystals inside! So that was exciting. I was yelled for urgently to "come see this, Mommy!" approximately 500 million times.
We were thinking we'd save some geodes intact, so we could take them home and get them cut open neatly at a rock shop, but the kids had a really hard time not wanting to just smash them open right then so they could see what was inside! So, they mostly just smashed away. And it WAS amazing to see how different each one was; each a tiny treasure box holding something new inside. There were all kinds of colors and textures and crystals. All beautiful.
