June 25th, 2015

It's been an exciting afternoon! My grandparents took us over to a nearby park for an afternoon of bocce ball and card games. While we were there, Nick and I climbed down a steep trail to a creek running back through the trees. He went off and explored, but I stayed near the stream bed, looking for rocks. I found a whole bunch of neat ones!

There was plenty of Quartz, of course. Making up about 12% of the earth's crust, it's an extremely abundant mineral. I've identified them as follows:

• Far left: Medium grain Quartz crystals mixed with pink Feldspar; probably some type of granite
• Left: A sedimentary rock of some kind (some sort of Jasper, I think) with Quartz growing out the top of it.
• Top right: A massive (as in, rock-like rather than crystal-point, not as in "huge") chunk of Quartz
• Bottom right: A smaller, more translucent piece of massive Quartz
• Far right: Quartzite pebble

I was also excited to find some pieces of what look to me like Unakite. Unakite is the combination of green Epidote with pink Feldspar. The distribution of the two wasn't the most balanced across all the pieces I found. In particular, I think the bottom left is Epidote and Quartz, while the bottom right looks like Epidote and Slate.

And then I found some miscellaneous stones.

• Top left: Granite; when I picked this one up, there were some neat blue flecks in it which were really pretty.
• Bottom left: Not sure yet what this is; it's probably sedimentary, although it has more rings than it seems to layers. I don't think it's an Agate, though.
• Middle: Fossils! I thought maybe it was just some rock conglomerate when I picked it up, but then I was looking at it more closely, and it does appear to have at least some fossilized bones in it.
• Top right: Red Jasper? It looked more like some when it was wet. I don't know how I could find out for sure, since I don't have the equipment for a streak test, or really to test hardness, either.
• Bottom right: This is probably more pink Feldspar, but it looked a bit like Rhodochrosite, which I know occurs in neighboring states, so I figured I'd keep it just in case.

Ultimately, I'm very much an amateur where identifying my own stones goes, so if you see anything you recognize, by all means, let me know!