Today we simply needed to get out of the house for a while. We decided to go for a drive and soon found ourselves heading to the same location we had done some rockhounding earlier this year.
We were enjoying the drive so much that we didn’t realize we had passed the location up. After a while, we realized we had gone too far so we decided to drive to the San Rafael Swell in East-Central Utah on highway 70 near the Colorado border.
We had been considering looking for the red grape agate that is supposed to be found there. Once we got to the location there was no cell phone reception so we couldn’t check to be sure we were in the correct spot.
Following the directions we had read about the location earlier we set out on foot looking for the beautiful agate. After hiking around in the area for 2-3 hours we really didn’t find much except somewhat appeared to be some nicely agatized Puddingstone and a couple of pieces of common opal.
We really didn’t prepare for the trip and so we put our small findings in a plastic grocery bag that we had in the car.
Eventually, we decided to walk back to the car, going separate ways to get there, my wife Annette soon found herself in a location that had some nice red grape agate.
I wasn’t so fortunate until I was almost to the car and I found what we were looking for, a small piece of red grape agate. It was quite small, only about 1 1/2″ x 1/2″ but it was absolutely gorgeous and rivaled anything I had seen on the internet.
I was almost to the car when I realized there was a hole in the bag that held our small collection of rocks. I walked back and picked up the rocks we lost but I was unable to find the grape agate. What a disappointment. I followed my footprints hoping to find it but it was gone.
I heard some noises near the car and noticed my wife loading up what she had found. I told her what happened and she helped me look for them again. Unfortunately, we were not successful.
I told her that since I now knew that we were in the right area I wanted to search the immediate area where we were parked. We were unsuccessful in finding anything that was worth picking up and we started walking back to the car. Just then a small something caught my eye that was relatively close to the car.
We looked a little longer for any more pieces but were unsuccessful and headed home. We made a couple of stops along the way to take pictures and took note of the exit on the freeway we originally wanted to take.
