Three of these rocks are from the Willamette and three are from the Washougal River, where it feeds into the Columbia River: rhyolite, hematite ore, petrified wood, unakite, chalcedony and iron stained quartz. I cut and polished these self collected rocks to share with you!
Watch the video:
Transcript
Spoiler alert, this one’s my favorite. God, it’s cool. I’m going to show them to you wet real quick. Wet. What do you think?
Six more river rocks. I have three from where the Washougal River meets the Columbia and three from the Willamette. This first one is from the Willamette. And I think looking at it, we can guess why I picked it up. It looks like it could be petrified wood.
Do I still think it’s petrified wood? No. I think it’s rhyolite, but rhyolite is beautiful, too. And any rock that even remotely looks like petrified wood, I’m pretty likely to pick it up. It’s a favorite.
This rock might not look like much right here, but it does it I will polish it. I’ll show it to you at the end. It’s very beautiful. I think it’s beautiful. Just don’t judge it yet.
Let me polish it and show it to you at the end. It’s not It’s It doesn’t show the camera much in this moment. It will. Rock number two. This rock is also from the Willamette River.
And I think I picked this one up also because it has a little bit of a petrified wood appearance. I generally hope that after I’ve cut the rock open, I will have a little bit more clarity as to what the rock is, you know. In this case, cutting this rock didn’t solve the mystery necessarily because I’ve never seen anything like it. Streak test was reddish-brown, indicating that this is a hematite-rich rock. This is also another rock that I really don’t want you to judge by this it by this by this photography moment here.
This is not This is such a beautiful rock. I’ll show it to you after I polish it at the end. It’s beautiful. Rock number three. Another rock that I picked up because it resembles petrified wood.
And lucky for me, this one is petrified wood. I was starting to get worried. If there’s interest out there, I might do a video and show some of my petrified wood look-alike rocks because I found quite a few. This is actually a nice little piece of wood. It has a really cool bit of uh blue agate that runs along the little notched seam.
Kind of pretty. And I’ll show it to you soon. Rock number four. This one came home because it’s green and weird. I found this one on the Willamette River and it definitely stuck out from the others because of its color.
It’s a slightly softer than the agate material and quartz that I brought home. But it’s not a soft rock. Initially, I thought, you could be serpentinite. But the color combination makes me think something else. Unakite.
I’m not 100% certain. But that’s That’s what I think this one is, unakite. Let me know what you think. Rock number five. It’s not particularly colorful.
We have a dark brown rind, a white material. It looks like there were botryoidal formations, maybe some crystal formations, that were rounded off by the river. So, there’s not much showing on the outside at all. Really, we have no choice but to cut it open to see what’s going on in here. I mean, that’s that’s my story, and I’m I’m just going to stick to it.
All right. Here we are. And I wouldn’t call it a quartz bomb. I would say this is white chalcedony with a colorful rind. Yeah.
I would just call this white chalcedony. Rock number six. This was the biggest rock of this bunch. This rock has several areas where there are crystal pockets. The crystals have been mostly eroded by the river.
But there’s still a couple visible crystals here. It’s really tough stuff. I think this is a piece of iron stained quartz. I rarely see exactly what I expect, but I expected this to be mostly white. And it’s actually not.
It’s a lot of iron. Side of quartz with mostly iron almost. I don’t know. It’s just pretty cool. I’m going to polish these up and we’ll take a good look at them.
Here’s our rock number one. I think this is it would be a great addition to my petrified wood impostor collection. It’s a beautiful piece of rhyolite. It took a great polish. I don’t I love it.
I think it’s a great rock. But I think at first glance you might think, “Wow, that’s petrified wood.” Rock number two. This is hands down my favorite rock of this bunch. I think it’s amazing. This little end piece broke, but I do have it still.
I haven’t cut open a lot of metallic ore type of rocks, but this is crazy to me. I love this thing. How does this even happen? Why does it have this weird leopard grain to it? It’s green and yellow and red.
I mean, but the colors aren’t there from every angle. This is What is this? Is it just hematite? I realized that I have magnetite with apatite from Iron County, Utah that I can compare to this rock. That might sort of help.
I mean, I definitely see some some similarities here. But, not Not quite. Also, the magnetite is ferrous. And this hematite ore is or well, presumably is not. I’m a huge fan, obviously.
I think we should be I don’t know. I want to see what all the other ores out there look like. Are they this attractive? Cuz this is neat. Rock number three.
This is the piece of petrified wood. And it’s one of the really dark pieces that we get a lot here in Oregon. I’ve heard that you can bleach some some pieces of petrified wood and I’ll try it with this one. Why not? But most of the pieces that I’ve found, the local ones, they don’t they don’t seem to uh lighten.
It’s still it’s beautiful. Here’s rock number four. I do think that this is unakite. This took a really nice polish, but the peach part in the center, it undercuts a little bit. I don’t think that takes anything away from the beauty of it.
I think it’s just a nice pattern. I don’t know. That doesn’t bother me. So, I think this is a really cool rock. Pow!
Rock number six. Wait. Rock number five. We’re still on number five. There were only six.
Um I really like the colors in the edge here. A little bit of blue hiding there. Um yeah. Take it This is a beautiful rock. It wants to be polished.
So, you know, we obliged. I think it’s quite beautiful. Oh. Oh. Oh.
You know, obviously a little bit plain. We have rock number six. Wow. This one’s favorite. Dig it.
That’s really cool. Don’t forget to tell me which one’s your favorite.
