North Saskatchewan River tumbles, lotta pics
Dec 8, 2015 4:00:58 GMT -5
bushmanbilly, Fossilman, and 2 more like this
Post by rollingstone on Dec 8, 2015 4:00:58 GMT -5
Hi, first thing to clear up about the title of this post is that although it's the North Saskatchewan River, I am actually looking for tumbling stones on this river in Alberta, one province to the west. Yes, the river does indeed flow through northern Saskatchewan, Canada, however it begins in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, then flows eastward through Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba... I think ending up in Hudson's Bay then on to the Arctic Ocean. Anyhow, I'm in Alberta and that's where I collected all of this material. I collected the stones at various sites, but mostly from a place called Prospector's Point, which has public access to a large gravel bar on the river.
So why called Prospector's Point? It's a place that was placer mined for gold last century and is still placer mined recreationally for gold, though on warm summer days it's main use now is probably for sunbathing or floating/swimming/tubing the river. Here's a pic from 2014 of the mile-long gravel bar, with my rudimentary gold pan stuff in the foreground, and someone using a small portable sluice to collect gold in the background.
And there is gold! This is a pic of my best pan from 2014 (I only went panning one day). Don't get excited, this is tiny flour gold, they are just specks to your eye, but look bigger here because I used the macro feature on my camera and then blew the pic up even further. Still, it's very cool to find gold in a pan of river sediment, even just specks! Oddly this year I went back and tried about 5 pans this summer (2015) and found only a few specks... seemed like the sluicers had really pockmarked up the gold-bearing gravels. Maybe I need to get out earlier next spring
Anyway, I wasn't there for gold this year, I came for tumbling stones. The beauty of river-tumbled stones is much of the work is already done for you. If I use rough-cracked rock, I may need to put them through 8-12 cycles of coarse grit tumbling, sometimes even longer. But if I use river-tumbled rocks, then I select the very rounded ones and then they just need one week in coarse grit to ensure a smooth surface. Here's another view of the gravel bar, looking in the opposite direction -- no end of gravel to choose from!
So I collected a wide variety of rounded material over numerous trips this summer, sometimes taking breaks and cooling off in the river if it was hot. But I was looking specifically for materials that would shine in a tumbler. This location has a mix of quartzite from the mountains that will take a shine, and granite-type materials from the Continental glaciers that will take a shine. Plus a million other rocks that are too porous or too soft or too fractured to take a shine.
In the end, here's the whole tumbled batch:
There really seemed to be two kinds of river-tumbled stones that would take a shine. There were some highly-patterned stones, which I'm guessing are granite-like stones from the Canadian Shield. Here are those ones:
This one is odd, I'm not sure if it is crystallized granite-type, or more sedimentary pudding-stone type. I'm leaning to the latter, but I get a lot of conglomerate in this stretch of river, and very rarely (almost never) would the cementing agent take a shine and not undercut. So if this is sedimentary conglomerate, this is a very unusual piece.
And now to the other type of stone I found rounded and tumbler-ready in those river gravels. These are quartz or quartzite pebbles, I don't know if these are mountain metamorphic rocks or continental granite rocks. But when you find them in the river you just know they are tumbler-ready. They look different. And when you pick them up, they definitely feel different -- very rounded, very smooth. You know right away that these will take on a very nice shine in a rock tumbler, with little to no pre-shaping required. Whole batch:
Now some closer pics:
Well, that's an awful lot of pictures. Hopefully I've shown a bit of what my local rock collecting is all about. (Petrified wood is another option here, but the Prospector's Point river location is generally not very good for petwood, so maybe that's another thread
At any rate, I'll be back there next summer, especially on warm summer days, looking for quartz pebbles for the tumbler, or shaking a few pans looking for gold flakes.
-Don
So why called Prospector's Point? It's a place that was placer mined for gold last century and is still placer mined recreationally for gold, though on warm summer days it's main use now is probably for sunbathing or floating/swimming/tubing the river. Here's a pic from 2014 of the mile-long gravel bar, with my rudimentary gold pan stuff in the foreground, and someone using a small portable sluice to collect gold in the background.
And there is gold! This is a pic of my best pan from 2014 (I only went panning one day). Don't get excited, this is tiny flour gold, they are just specks to your eye, but look bigger here because I used the macro feature on my camera and then blew the pic up even further. Still, it's very cool to find gold in a pan of river sediment, even just specks! Oddly this year I went back and tried about 5 pans this summer (2015) and found only a few specks... seemed like the sluicers had really pockmarked up the gold-bearing gravels. Maybe I need to get out earlier next spring
Anyway, I wasn't there for gold this year, I came for tumbling stones. The beauty of river-tumbled stones is much of the work is already done for you. If I use rough-cracked rock, I may need to put them through 8-12 cycles of coarse grit tumbling, sometimes even longer. But if I use river-tumbled rocks, then I select the very rounded ones and then they just need one week in coarse grit to ensure a smooth surface. Here's another view of the gravel bar, looking in the opposite direction -- no end of gravel to choose from!
So I collected a wide variety of rounded material over numerous trips this summer, sometimes taking breaks and cooling off in the river if it was hot. But I was looking specifically for materials that would shine in a tumbler. This location has a mix of quartzite from the mountains that will take a shine, and granite-type materials from the Continental glaciers that will take a shine. Plus a million other rocks that are too porous or too soft or too fractured to take a shine.
In the end, here's the whole tumbled batch:
There really seemed to be two kinds of river-tumbled stones that would take a shine. There were some highly-patterned stones, which I'm guessing are granite-like stones from the Canadian Shield. Here are those ones:
This one is odd, I'm not sure if it is crystallized granite-type, or more sedimentary pudding-stone type. I'm leaning to the latter, but I get a lot of conglomerate in this stretch of river, and very rarely (almost never) would the cementing agent take a shine and not undercut. So if this is sedimentary conglomerate, this is a very unusual piece.
And now to the other type of stone I found rounded and tumbler-ready in those river gravels. These are quartz or quartzite pebbles, I don't know if these are mountain metamorphic rocks or continental granite rocks. But when you find them in the river you just know they are tumbler-ready. They look different. And when you pick them up, they definitely feel different -- very rounded, very smooth. You know right away that these will take on a very nice shine in a rock tumbler, with little to no pre-shaping required. Whole batch:
Now some closer pics:
Well, that's an awful lot of pictures. Hopefully I've shown a bit of what my local rock collecting is all about. (Petrified wood is another option here, but the Prospector's Point river location is generally not very good for petwood, so maybe that's another thread
At any rate, I'll be back there next summer, especially on warm summer days, looking for quartz pebbles for the tumbler, or shaking a few pans looking for gold flakes.
-Don