March 2025 Stone Collecting Trip – Part 21, Visiting Slope Point Again, Monday 24 March, Post 1 of 2

I drove the 90 minutes over to Slope Point this morning, the southernmost part of the South Island. I had also visited there two weeks ago. I took the chance to check out the new public toilets and information shelter at the tourist carpark. These photos were taken on my phone, often quickly because of the number of people around:

There are always unusual stones to be found at Slope Point, very different from Gemstone Beach. I spent just over two hours on a beach there, arriving at high tide. Despite the beach being only about 250 metres long, there’s a lot of stones there. Again, the photos below were taken on my phone.

The waves were powerful, the weather coolish but sunny. I had a productive fossick, and collected just over 130 stones. This Post features 22 stones taken from a group of 85, the first bags I emptied when I go back to my accommodation.

The first is a bright colourful stone that easily caught my eye on the beach:

I was pleased to find this small petrified wood pebble. A lot of Slope Point petrified wood is black but there are some really nice non-black pieces to be found there too. This stone has enough light brown in it to make it really interesting:

The next stone was a totally unexpected find. It appears to be a type of agate (chalcedony). I’ve not seen anything like it at Slope Point before (or anywhere else, for that matter):

Another light-coloured stone, appearing to have a lot of quartz in it? On the beach, I could see lots of tiny features in it:

Another unusual stone, with intriguing shapes in it:

I picked up the next stone because of the interesting different-coloured patch in the middle of it:

Two stones with green in them – the first with a little white in it, the second with a lot of black:

When I picked up the next stone, I thought it was simply a quartz stone, with bits and pieces of quartz in it. More careful examination reveals that it is a breccia, made up of tiny fragments of different rocks:

There are a range of types of breccia stones that can be found at Slope Point. Here are other breccias I picked up:

Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish between clasts (tiny fragments of rock) in breccia and crystals in volcanic stones, but I think the above five are all breccia.

Next are four of my finds that looked fairly regular in their composition, though the close-up photos often reveal unexpected details. Usually the tiny features are crystals:

Four stones that I think are likely to be rhyolite:

The next Post features more stones from this trip to Slope Point. An Index to this Series is here.