Dugway Geode Beds Field Trip

(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!

Right away, Abe saw a tarantula and called us all over to see. (I like spiders, as do we all. Ziggy likes them A LOT and has even made up his own version of what they "say": "Poh, poh, poh.")(Because what good is an animal if you can't make the noise it makes?)(Though I have no idea where he got "poh, poh, poh.") This was such a big tarantula and it was cool to see it just crawling around in the wild here!

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.

The kids were as proud of their geodes as if they'd made them themselves!

After an hour or two we took a break to eat our picnic lunch, and then we moved to another spot to try digging there. And it was like magic. Sam walked to a little hollow and said, "I have a feeling about this spot right here! It just seems promising!" and started digging. And almost immediately, he started pulling out round geodes—huge ones! One after another! And then Seb started digging nearby and finding geode after geode of his own! Everyone got really excited and the kids were all yelling back and forth, "Come see this! Come see this! Look what I found!"

We even started finding geodes in the washes at the bottom of little inclines, in piles that you didn't even have to dig up. It got so we were just tossing the smaller geodes—the kind we'd been so thrilled about finding earlier that morning—back down on the ground because it wasn't even worth picking them up compared to the bigger and better ones we were finding! I felt kind of sorry for the tiny ones and I'd say "I'm sure you're beautiful, though!" as I tossed them away. :)

Teddy and Ziggy had a grand time playing in the little holes and caves they found. Even Teddy was finding geodes! Ziggy, on the other hand, insisted on picking up the ugliest, heaviest, most awkward-to-carry rocks, and when I'd try to give him a better one to hold, he'd throw it away in disgust. I was also constantly trying, unsuccessfully, to stop him from falling down and hurting his hands and knees on other sharp rocks. The soil was loose and hard to walk on even for us! But he was fairly good-natured about it all. Mostly. For at least some of the time.

(It may not look like it, but he is holding this geode very grudgingly here. And he threw it away immediately after.)

But it was really so amazing. Everyone was so happy, just grinning and laughing like we'd found the best buried treasure—which we had, really. The excitement of it all was contagious. We couldn't believe our luck! I don't think I've seen such a huge smile on Seb's face since—well, I don't know, but it's been a long time. It made my heart joyful to watch it.

He found this amazing specimen, which is one of my very favorites anyone found. Look at those cool bubbly crystal formations!

Zig, happy about having found a rock to sit on.

Seb and Sam, digging in the magic spot

Sam found one geode so big, Abe did NOT believe it was a geode. He was convinced it was too big and heavy to be hollow inside, and he was SO sure about that that Seb and Sam started to doubt themselves too. So they decided to just tap at it with the rock hammer and see if maybe they could break a tiny piece off and see. But when they tried to do that, the geode just sort of sprang open and broke into three pieces! And THIS was what was inside:

It was GORGEOUS—the crystals inside were so well-developed, and so clear, and they even had that lovely distinct six-sided prism shape, terminating in a pyramid at the top. I didn't think you could see geodes like that anywhere besides in a museum, and it was SO COOL to find one ourselves! I couldn't stop thinking about it for days afterward—how those mineral crystals had been forming for hundreds of thousands of years, unseen inside the hard shell of rock. And NO ONE (except Heavenly Father :)) had known they were there or ever seen them at all UNTIL US. And now WE got to be the first humans ever to see them! It made me feel so lucky and awed and full of amazement. You can see from Sam's face he is pretty excited about it too. :)

Here is a better look at it. SO BEAUTIFUL.

Here is another look at one of the ones I loved that Sebastian found. See it after it was polished, below. I will put a * so you can find it.

Too soon, it was time to start heading home. We didn't want to be caught out anywhere near here in the dark. The boys had places to be. And we were all tired and dirty. But we also wished we could have kept hunting for longer! It always felt like there was another amazing discovery just around the corner, and it was so hard to stop!

But, along with the geodes we'd broken open already, we had managed to collect a whole bucketful of unbroken geodes, which we wanted to have cut open with a lapidary saw, or else break more carefully ourselves later. (I have also heard you can use a tile saw. We haven't tried that yet.) So, that consoled us somewhat—we were really excited to see what surprises they held!

The drive home was nice, and uneventful, and went a little faster because we weren't constantly wondering if we were really going the right way. And we saw the herd of wild horses, as I mentioned earlier. So it was a really good day and a great adventure. We keep talking about when we can go back!

I ended up taking a bunch of the geodes to a rock shop in Ogden (closest one I could find) and having them cut. They really do look great when they have such nice smooth cuts in them! It was a cool rock shop, maybe with a clientele leaning a little more toward the 'healing crystals and balancing chakras' crowd, but the guy who cut our geodes was a real rockhound, super excited and happy to gush over how awesome our geodes were with me, examining and giving each one its due, which was fun. (And when Ziggy saw one of the other guys who worked there, he said, "There's Jesus," so there's that.) 

After the geodes had been cut, I had the rock shop guy polish some of my favorites, and those turned out amazing too! I LOVE polished rocks. Some of them look better rough and unpolished, so we didn't do them all, but it's fun to have both kinds. And we still have half a bucket full of small, unbroken geodes, which I'm kind of dying to see the inside of—so maybe we'll go back at some point and have those cut too. Or borrow someone's tile saw. We'll see.

Here are a few of my favorites!

I love the hanging crystals on the top of this, like a chandelier. And the layer of translucent rock around the outside of the cavity.

THIS one is amazing! So big and marbled! So many intriguing little pockets that just hint at the crystal inside! And don't you wish you could shrink yourself small and crawl into those tiny crystal caves? It's like one of those cool Easter eggs where you can put your eye up to look inside at a little scene—like in The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.

I looooove this one. It had a double cavity!

This one is Sam's favorite. Aren't those black sugary crystals cool? And then there are so many different textures in there, in addition to the little black craters around the outside of the main cavity.

Goldie wanted in on the pictures.

This is the other half of the geode I put the * by above. Seb broke it apart at the site, so it wasn't cut in half at the rock shop later, and it's probably for the best because I love those bubbly formations and wouldn't have wanted them cut through!

But we did get this other side of the same * geode evened out a little, and then polished. You can compare it to the rough version up above. I love this polished half so much! Those wavy rivers of milky quartz (or whatever it is!) are so pretty.

Another angle of that one.

And here is another double geode that I love even MORE than the other one, if possible. I just love the window-pane effect of that right side. And the puffy crystal-y pillows inside. And the stripes through the brown outer layer echoed by the paler stripes in the transparent part. Isn't it beautiful?! Aren't they ALL beautiful? I can't stop admiring them. I guess since we found them ourselves, they feel a little like our own children. :)