This afternoon I spent an hour looking for stones at a Riverton beach I call “The Beach Past the Back Beach”. The Post “Some Recently Polished Stones from Riverton” includes a location map for this beach, and the entry for Day 14, Tuesday 2 March 2021 in this Post has photos and more information on it. I initially parked at the Back Beach, at the end of the road. While I was taking a photo of the Back Beach, a young man asked me if it were dolphins that he could see swimming in the bay. I would not have noticed them if he hadn’t mentioned them! There were about six Hector’s dolphins there, the same kind that I had seen at Ward Beach on 27 February, on my way south.
I then walked over the sand dunes to The Beach Past the Back Beach. I collected 33 stones there today – good stones are not as common as at Gemstone Beach but some interesting ones can be found.
Seven of this afternoon’s finds are featured below. The first is a light tan colour with pieces of quartz in it:
There’s intense epidote green in this stone:
In contrast, there’s a light pink in a large part of this next stone. This is often due to the presence of manganese:
The “swirls” are solely on one side of this fourth stone:
Another example of one of those small red jaspers that, when viewed close-up, turns out to have a fascinating composition:
When I picked up the next small stone on the beach, I could see there was something interesting to be seen at one end of it. The close-up confirms this:
The final stone featured in this Post is a small argillite with a light-coloured pattern which includes three or four trace fossils:
Part 14 reports on a Gemstone Beach fossick which included the finding of a petrified wood stone. An Index to this Series is here.
4 thoughts on “March 2025 Stone Collecting Trip – Part 13, The Beach Past the Back Beach, Riverton Aparima, Thursday 13 March”