Hiking two miles with 65 pounds on your back is alright for the young and foolish, but as I get older I find it harder to carry that much rock. ?Scott and I headed for the Skokomish River today to look for orbicular jasper, and when we found two large boulders of orbicular jasper, we couldn’t leave them behind.

Low water on the Skokomish.

Thankfully, Scott is still young enough to think carrying that much weight is not that big of a deal.

We arrived at our parking area at close to 9:30am and promptly headed down the trail to the river. ?I think it is about 1 3/4 miles on an old abandoned logging road to the river.

Ready to haul.

The river was LOW!!!!!!. ?I don’t think I ever have seen the water this low. ?It made it nice looking for jasper, but there was so much algea on the rocks that wading was treacherous.

Water so low almost made me think I was in a creek instead of a river.

My first finds were nice jasper pieces with white quartz in them. ?I like this type of material, but I was determined to bring out only orbicular jasper, so I left them behind.

A nice piece but not what I was looking for.

The second find stayed behind also.

My third find was the find of the day. ?It was a 53 pound boulder of the most beautiful orbicular jasper I have seen from this river.

The find of the day.

A close up of some of the orbs.

This boulder was HUGE!! ?I really had to think long and hard about how to get it to the truck. ?I finally told Scott that we would leave it for the time being, and I would consider the options as we continued our hike. ?The river had cut a new channel through this area, so it shortened up the hike. ?It wasn’t any easier, because of the large log jams, but there was also new material to look over. ?I did find a very colorful bit of bark that caught my attention.

These colors aren’t often seen coming from tree bark.

It wasn’t a jasper though, so I just snapped a picture and left it lay.

We continued on past the new channel and pretty soon Scott called me over to look at his find.

The second find of the day.

Close ups are nice.

This piece was also full of orbs. ?It was smaller that the first large find, but still weighed 25 lbs. ?Now I had a problem. ?Did I try and take both boulders or leave one for another trip? ?What would you have done? ?I told Scott we could break this one in half, but I was reluctant to do that, so once again I postponed the decision, and headed up the river.

My next find was in the middle of the river and it caused me to change my mind about only hauling orbicular jasper. ?It was a softball sized piece of red jasper with some really nice yellow jasper patterns in it. ?It was great looking and I just couldn’t leave it behind.

I couldn’t leave this one behind.

We finally stopped for lunch, and Scott convinced me that we could haul both of the big ones out. ?So we decide to head back instead of continuing up the river. ?We stopped at his find and I put it in my back pack. ?We then used the old channel (that was completely dry) to reach the bigger one. ?Scott heaved it up to his shoulder and we headed for the trail out. ?Scott carried the big one on his shoulder for quite a while before we wised up and exchanged the big one for the the smaller ones in the back pack. ?This meant that Scott was better able to carry the rock, while I carried our two bags and the other finds. ?We did make it back to the truck in about two hours, but I was pretty worn out. ?We weighed our loads when we reached home and Scott’s pack weighed 65 lbs. while I had about 35 lbs.

Thanks for joining us on this adventure, we had a great time.

chasfire