Visiting the Dugway Geode Beds // Rockhounding Utah

welcome back to the channel everybody well i feel like i've done way too many videos this year hiding by my vehicle uh we are out here in i guess you could say kind of north central utah at the dugway geode beds now it's extremely windy uh we just had some rain come through just had a dust storm and it's kind of rough out here to be totally honest it's not it's not the not the best conditions uh but we're gonna be walking around i'm gonna show you what the dugway geodes looks like show you some of the material and uh we're gonna be spending the night out here not sure exactly where uh probably not at the beds and you'll probably see see why but there's an impressive impressive amount of material and uh it's an interesting site so we're gonna we'll talk about that and walk around so behind me back here you can see the actual dig spot now you're probably looking at that and i i would assume that some of you are looking at it and thinking wow that's a really destroyed place well all of the giant pits that i'm about to show you are actually turned over by the bureau of land management they come out with backhoes flip the material so that you can come out and find geodes there's some amazing surface vines but if you want to find full solid geodes similarly to what you find in um well how to say this the geological conditions that produced these are very similar to the geological conditions that produce places like uh the little natchez and other thunder egg locations these geodes here it will have some druzy in them they'll have some light crystallization a lot of calcium some of which will be phosphorescent uv reactive material and uh the surface vines are amazing but if you want to get the big stuff you gotta find a clay layer it's gonna be under some shells you'll find a layer of seashells this used to be uh uh lake bonneville so uh you get below that and you'll see this clay that's where you're gonna find your thunder eggs and your jihads some are gonna be good some aren't i'll show you what we already have there might be some voice over bear with the wind noise please look at that that is quite pretty these are just surface finds [Music] that one kind of has like the the tubes going on i thought this one that sarah found was pretty good it's got that kind of a almost deep maroon to it with some betrothal and it looks like a little druzy pocket let's uh walk around well you can just see right here what some of this stuff looks like now there's two sites here this is just kind of one you can see these like half eggs that you know you can kind of pass on try to go for some more pure stuff back there there are some bigger specimens as well that i just saw sitting out so we'll uh work on getting some of that as well but really it's very cool materials it's pretty much everywhere look at that one that's kind of interesting we got some ominous clouds coming in those uh look like they might be bringing some uh some rain that's unfortunate look at that right off the ground it's not a full one but i don't know if i have have an enemy to uh do some really intense uh digging in clay look at that i mean i'll accept that i think that's beautiful now some of this material from my experience is going to be a uv reactive which that's cool too something to check in the material later on [Music] yeah that one's very pretty [Music] that it's partial but i could just maybe cut the face of that off and have it look really good so this almost looks like a a river cobble but then you can see a big chunk of agate in there very tempted to take that and see if it goes all the way through or not that'd fit so nicely in the saw hmm i might have to walk that one back [Music] so here's what i'm gonna do because i think this material is really cool and a lot of it is just it's so abundant and uh well i'm gonna give one of the pieces away the next good piece i find i'm gonna give it away drop a comment down below live in america and uh the subsequent saturday night special i'll pick a winner let's turn around look at the ground and find a good giveaway rock so this area in here seems promising for something to give away ah i don't know pick one more here how about let's see what's this no that one's pretty fractured up [Music] what do you think of this one sir giveaway rock yeah that's cool all right this is gonna be it we'll keep this one separate and uh we'll give this guy away here here's the site from above a couple other people over here digging pretty uh extensive workings thanks to the blm [Music] so one thing that you can do at dugway depending on the time of year which is kind of cool is you can find something like this right look at that it's like almost like the sectarian oh wow yeah i see that you found that which is amazing that one's beautiful there's also an abundance of this uh like banded volcanic glass it's pretty but it's all very very uh fractured up [Music] so let's look at this one here look at that geo i guess it's more thundering than anything but then i guess this must be a counterpart to it back here that big guy what do you think yard rock you want yard rock sarah what do you have yard rocks we only need one of the other ones wow that's a pretty decent size again let me pick this up and try to figure out what it weighs so that's that's gonna be 80 pounds 85 pounds that's not bad but that's also not the biggest agget we're to find on this trip this is probably the biggest one here right now so that was just one of the beds now you might be asking yourself why why is dugway so abundant okay where why are the scraps just there other than the blm coming out and making it look like this and helping we're in the middle of nowhere right uh there's gonna be listening up on the website you can go check it out up there i will have a have gps and maps and all of those things but we're like 45 miles down gravel roads um the pony express is out here pony express it was yeah they don't they don't deliver mail by horse anymore um we're gonna go to the second bed now and then on after that we will look at some of the other kind of pony express stuff we're gonna find a place to camp in the area uh we gotta find something kind of protected forecast said how how strong are the winds tonight low teens in the city way you know 30 miles away the city the military base city so this is dig site number two [Music] now one thing that me and sarah were talking about a little bit was uh is it even worth it to try and dig your own holes or do what the blm has done and if you want those complete thunder eggs it's absolutely worth it uh maybe that doesn't matter to you it is going to be a massive amount of work digging hey looky lance it's going to be a massive amount of work digging in the clay out here so something to be aware of may not want to do it on that 100 degree day yeah this is location number two this is a the one that all the books tell you to go to pretty out here material seems um less less good i guess less abundant and that would make sense since uh the rockhounding utah books and all that they tell you to come here a lot more uh river tumble gravels yeah i don't know i don't know about this looks like a peanut yeah there's certainly a slight difference between the two locations as far as uh i don't know the other stuff seem to have bigger things but certainly kind of more busted this seems to have a lot more uh small medium rocks in general and in turn more complete complete eggs just like that we picked up enough we're we're we we don't need tons and tons and tons of material we got about one tote one seven gallon tote of quality material stuff that's fractured some holes should be a lot of fun to go through clean it all up cut it next step as well we're gonna go do a little exploring go try to find a place to spend the night something that's uh well flat and not too windy it's not really uh the road for cars coming in here you could probably do it but you know it's a place for uh trucks and jeeps and people that don't really care about their subarus thought i would share this real quick so this is the road going out and this is a wash here's the road so uh you know if it rained a lot you can imagine what's gonna happen here this road's gonna be uh missing a big piece well we have a we have a torrential downpour coming down now as we uh climb out of this basin but out there is where they tested what did they tested chemical weapons military testing yeah so it's kind of interesting to think about and they what they killed a bunch of sheep by accident once and you killed a bunch of ranchers livestock by uh they lost the they accidentally mailed anthrax yeah city of dugway made a bunch of mistakes but it's not a real city it's a military you can't get in it a military site yeah we're back there we left uh just just in time forgive me for not wanting to get out but here's one of the pony express stations it's kind of neat finally stopped raining just in time for more rain to come in but most importantly we found a lovely spot to camp but let's let's look at the view back here because it's pretty pretty quite nice just a little piece of blm nice uh big campground not a campground just like you know a big flat spot with some trees basically look at those mountains looks like that rain's coming this way we had a great day at the dugway geode beds it was very interesting experience we got a lot of great material so let's head back to the shop look at it cleaned up back from dugway i have to admit um not all of the places that we went to on our trip to utah are places i plan on returning to however dugway is certainly one of them now we didn't pick up the best material or the most material but in the limited amount of time that we were there i think we did pretty well for ourselves so i have all of this which is uh kind of complete pieces that we plan on cutting we have an assortment of fractured broken up material which is very very pretty pretty stuff with a large variation in what we have um if i was going to do it over again which i would love to do i would probably need three days at dugway and not two-thirds of a day three days so if it was me uh i would go back there and then spend a day kind of just cruising around figuring out the lay of the land poking around exploring um probably another full day of like hitting the two beds that are already there like one do one in the morning do the other one in the evening and uh another whole day just to like punch my own fresh hole in the ground and uh do some digging but uh very um very cool material even this kind of stuff that's not complete you know you can imagine the the size of the geode that this was part of based upon well how round it is here but very cool very cool stuff now we've got a large variation of cal sydney quartz crystals um some different like more tube features this piece i in particularly like because we have a number of things going on here we have quartz crystal growth we've got the tube uh two baguette growth we've got some fortification around the perimeter and then what i really like is this piece right here it's actually broken and then reformed into it you can kind of see that right there it looks like you could just pull it out but you you can't um we do have some mystery material now um this i believe to be filled with jasper okay so in my testing of it we have jasper here which uh this was the only piece like that that we found and uh i haven't found any photos of that anywhere else this okay so we have a number of things going on here now part of what is really nice about living somewhere and exploring your local material is you can get a really good feel for it you can figure out what exactly you have around you so it can be quite difficult when you're traveling around and you're just i don't know um you don't have the experience to be able to determine what some of the material is that you might be finding this almost looks like a banded calcite um onyx depending on where you want to look now when i take it to the microscope it certainly looks more like a volcanic glass i don't actually know what these red spots are let's look at some microscope photos you can clearly see the volcanic you can clearly see that it is some type of volcanic glass i have no clue what these little uh pink pink reddish nodules are if anybody knows you want to help me out i would love it the material has a hardness between three and four and it doesn't match any known samples of anything that i have now one thing that i would like to somewhat maybe later rest a little bit um if you look at mndot you'll get some other listings they will talk about this stuff having uranium embedded in it therefore producing a uv reaction well let's turn off some lights we will look at this stuff under the uv and uh see what we have going on here and then we'll break out the geiger counter so we do have some very distinct green glow here we're looking at this under the 365 nanometer uv beast light and particularly like this one that sarah found it's almost too bright if i go directly on it very cool material yeah i mean a lot of it is uv reactive now one thing i noticed in here this mystery material that we have we have a little bit of uv reaction the pieces in particular that i'm interested in right there you can kind of see them now let's uh bring the lights back up and uh check it out with the geiger counter so currently out here in the shop we have a background radiation of 19 cpm cpm is counts per minute essentially it's the number of ionizing events taking place each minute so we can place that next to that and uh it should be uh should go up to i think uh probably in the 30s um is probably what we're going to uh land at there um i do not believe that the green glow from this is caused by uranium um if it is i would love to see some real really good evidence of that in my experience at least there's a lot of other minerals that should be looked at first when trying to identify something simply based upon fluorescence so that is something to uh take into account here you know we're going up ever so slightly not really an amount in my opinion worth uh saying oh it's definitely uranium um you can see we're clicking up here going like you know 15 18 likes we're still well within the range of what would be considered background radiation at least for this part of the country you know if we take it over to some of these other things other specimens that we have if they are actually getting their fluorescence from uranium you would see a much higher peak than that you can see we dropped down actually over there so that's just my own observation if you have any information about this material i am all ears i would love to hear it and uh i will pin what i find in the comments down below so yeah um dugway is a must a must visit spot in my opinion and give yourself some good time up on the website there will be high quality photos of this uh material along with some maps because a little bit of a confusing area should be an excellent listing for you to go check out and uh until next time everybody i will catch you later thank you so much for watching my entire video if you like the videos well you'll probably also like the website currentlyrockhounding.com there's all kinds of great listings and articles and it's growing all the time along with different photos just all go check it out go check out the website it's free there's no ads it's just there for your enjoyment so uh as always thank you so much for coming by the channel hanging out with me watching take care everybody

Channel: Currently Rockhounding

Views: 24,483

Keywords: Currently Rockhounding, CurrentlyRockhounding, Rockhounding, Rockhounding Utah, Dugway, Dugway Geode Beds, Dugway Utah, Geodes

Id: PkaXapVFg7g

Length: 24min 52sec (1492 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021