September 2024 Stone Collecting Trip –Part 18, Petrified Wood Find on Gemstone Beach, Wednesday 25 September

Today was a relatively fine day, though cool. I spent four hours on Gemstone Beach, walking down past the Waimeamea River lagoon. The tide was low and the sun came out for some of the time. I had a chat with the local gold miner down the beach, and later also met Paul near the lagoon – he was looking for hydrogrossular garnets. There were two other serious fossickers I passed on my way back to the carpark.

[The weather was cloudy for a number of days after this fossick and it has been difficult to get good photos of stones – low light conditions means that wet stones get a lot of reflections on them. You will note this issue in some of the photos below.]

For the first time I found a piece of petrified wood on Gemstone Beach. I have a couple of pieces that were given to me by someone who fossicked on the beach some decades ago (see this Post), but am not aware of recent finds. The piece I found is four centimetres long:

The pink in this stone caught my eye:

The next stone has a lot of pistachio-hued green in it, typical of the mineral epidote. But there’s a lot more going on in it – a complexity of composition:

Another epidote-green stone, this time with a very large quartz vein in it:

A breccia with many different types of fragments in it:

A small dark stone with a fascinating composition:

An even smaller stone, a hematite jasper with some fire in it:

An amygdaloidal stone – the photo doesn’t do it justice (due to light conditions affecting sharpness and colour):

A small brecciated jasper?

And, finally, two trace fossil stones to add to the great diversity I have collected of this type:

Part 19 is a fossick at a Riverton Aparima beach. The Index to the Posts in this Series can be found here.