Pre-Phoenix

I can probably help you with the cell phone pics, I'm still between regular cameras and use the phone exclusively.

The mystery zeolite rock at Papago Park.



its somewhat like Thomsonite,
yet with further inspection its probably better classified a Amygdule

.
Here a picture from wiki that better shows the texture and clearer specimen shot



amygdaloidal


Like everything in the Papago region the crust is crumbly on the rock .
Can be broken off by hand.
I got some close up pictures of broken up piece
with splayed zeolites crystals.

Plus I got pictures of the proliferation of mollusks.
How the shells and and amygadule got in the Papago park remains a mystery?

My original thought was that boulder was dug up from the depth.
Not so sure that right now
Will have to do further digging to discover the truth…

Till then...
Ed

Right on Dave

This isn’t the most clear picture
w/ my shaky hands an inexpensive camera



You;ll have to give this some thought
Donchya think
origin and type of rock
Is a bit anomaly in buttes…?


Glad you brought the cards into the thread Dave

For this tale that hasn’t been told yet--- in this intriguing thread.

It concerns how Jacob Waltz rediscovered
the Lost Dutchman Goldmine…mostly

So roll up a rock, sit a spell and I'll spin the tale

Ya see back in 1853 Jacob Waltz (and Jacob Weiser) were down in old Mexico prospecting, of coarse.
They happened unto a high stake card game.

Waltz noticed that the dealer was cheating an old padre who was sitting in the game .
Waltz & Weiser intervened.

Its not sure if bloodshed happened.
But long knives & pistola’s were pulled.
Putting an end to a crooked game.

After that ruckus it just so happened
that one of the players being cheated was none other than that good padre

Don Miguel Nemecio Silva de Peralta de la Córdoba the III.

The same Spanish Peralta, who's descendant from Mexico in 1644,
were mining a rich gold vein in the Superstition Mountains.
In what then called the Primo Alta.
That what the Arizona territory was known as to the Spaniards at that time.

Not sure what the Hohokams called it besides home.

The famous Massacre of 1644 occurred in those mountain involving the indigenous natives .
At least 200 miners met their fate from an ambush.
The miners were driving a 20 Mule team
heavily leaden with leather bags of rich with gold ore
heading to one of their arrasta.



Tales told by later miners surveying the Massacre Trailhead
have found human bones, old deteriorated leather satchel bags & some rocks.
Surprisingly no mule bones.

The Superstition Mountains are sacred to the natives.
Not the gold-- but the mountains--- so that how the tale is told.
I have certain reservations on that theory.

Anyways an ever grateful

Don Miguel Nemecio Silva de Peralta de la Córdoba the III

(being saved by Jacob Waltz & his Buddy Weiser),

endowed those 2 chaps with a trail map to that gold vein!

That was the only surviving document from the few survivor of the massacre.
No miners had dared ventured north into Primo Alta after the 1644 Massacre.
For those mountains are cursed.

What Waltz and Weiser did with map is the stuff of further legends...

Question?

Are the Peralta Stone Tablet faithful reproduction

or

just a fraudulent engravings
perpetuated by
James Addison Peralta-Reavis,
the so-called Baron of Arizona?

1dave I was there too and identified the zeolites. They have a radial crystal structure like the ones I've seen in basalt vugs in the NW. They are pretty weathered, any delicate crystals were gone, and I figured it was probably illegal to try to go deeper than the little crumbly bits on the surface. The truly interesting thing about the rock is that the other side of it had pockets of quartz crystals.
The other baffling thing is the abundance of small mollusc shells on the banks and all around the canal, not fossils.

Thanks for THIS sharing!

mohs My first duty station when I joined the Navy in 1968 was at the
boat house on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor Hawaii. Some of the time I worked
on the shuttle boat that took visitors to the USS Arizona Memorial. Still have
some faded photos I took of it then. Even as a young sailor it was an emotional
place to work.

Edit: PS - Two week's pay for a newly enlisted sailor in Hawaii was about $60.00 every two weeks. That was very depressing.

I'm on that canal path
trying to stay of the ditch

...m stly

Good question 1dave Dave!

I really don’t know
maybe I have some insights later

Thanks!!!

Ed