Greenwater River

Snow Day.

I headed up to our claim today to check on the access roads. ?Needless to say our winter snowfall has made it a bit difficult to reach the claim. ?This picture is still more than 5 miles from the claim.

Snow

Not traveling any farther on this road.

The weather was perfect though, so I decided to go over to the Greenwater River area and look around for some Blue Opal. ?Once again I was stopped by snow. ?This spot is still a quarter of a mile short of where I wanted to be.

Snow

Snow! Snow! and more Snow!

I was ready to give up and head home, when I came around the corner and met up with Woody and Kathy.

Woody and Kathy

It's great to meet friends in the woods.

They were here for a field trip put on by the Kitsap Gem and Mineral Society. ?We talked it over and decided that a short hike over the snow wouldn’t be out of order. ?We put our boots on and grabbed our gear and headed out. ?Once we got to the opal site we were greeted with a snow free zone.

Snow free zone

Snow Free Zone!

I went up, Kathy went down and Woody went exploring. ?I scratched the dirt in a few places and managed to find a few small pieces of green jasper and two very small chips of partially blue opal.

Digging

This hole isn't very deep.

I continued up the hill and finally located an old seam of black jasper. ?Digging around near it I was able to break off a piece or two. ?Not knowing if it would be worth hauling out I only kept a couple of pieces, before heading back to the road and meeting up with Woody and Kathy. ?Kathy found the best one of the day, and after admiring it we headed back to the trucks.

Over all we probably didn’t spend more that an hour at this spot, but it was great to get out and enjoy the day.

Here is the biggest pieces I found.

Jasper

Still dirty, but lots of potential.

Thanks for joining us.

chasfire

Greenwater Green Jasper

Scott and I were able to head up to the Greenwater area for a short afternoon of rockhounding.  We started out at noon and spent part of the afternoon at the Tahoma agate claim working on trail maintenance and exploring for new seams of material.

It was quite warm.  I didn’t want to kill myself so I decided to leave any material I found for a future trip.

After getting back to the truck, we decided to check out some of the other areas of the Greenwater River valley.  We drove up a few logging roads without any success and finally decided to head home.

As we were driving out we slowed down for almost every road cut.  We were finally rewarded for our diligence when Scott yelled out to stop.  I Stopped and Scott jumped out and picked up a few small chips of green jasper.  I left the truck running in the middle of the road and started up the side of the road cut, picking up chips as I climbed.

I finally asked Scott to park the truck off of the road, in case others wanted by.  I continued up the road cut to the point where there had been extensive digging.  There was evidence that a lot of material was hauled out of this site.  Most of it probably was green jasper, although we did find small clear agate nodules, thin seams of agate with plumes, some small pieces of seam opal, and some gray agate.

Sorry that I didn’t take any pictures, but it totally slipped my mind as I scrambled around the hill.

Thanks for joining us.

chasfire