I am staying with Chrissy and Mike, and Ohla the dog, at Papatotara, a few kilometres west of Orepuki’s Gemstone Beach. Today, Chrissy and I spent three hours there, on a cloudy afternoon with a light breeze, the temperature being around 16 to 17 degrees. There were four vehicles in the carpark when we arrived, with two more arriving just after we got there. The beach in front of the carpark was predominantly sand, with just a couple of patches of stones on either side of The Stream With No Name (marked as “Un-named Stream” on the map below – see this Post for more on the beach and its location).
You can always spot stones in the Taunoa Stream. Today it was running low and was easily searched and then forded.
Normally, masses of stones appear on the beach not far on the other side of the Taunoa, as you walk along the Te Waewae Bay coast, but that was not the case today. We struck more and even more sand for a few hundred metres, with only tiny patches of stones along the base of the cliff backing the beach. The large area of stones didn’t start until maybe three hundred metres before the Waimeamea River – see the description of “Section Three” in this Post for more about this 1.5 kilometre stretch of beach. (I’ve included Chrissy in some photos to provide a sense of scale – thanks to her for agreeing to this.)
We decided to turn back at the Waimeamea River mouth. I think we could have forded it if we wanted to go further, but our backpacks were getting heavy.
It turned out that our backpacks became quite heavy. It was hard going trudging across the metres and metres of sand back to the carpark. When we got there, we met Robyn Bennett and her friend Judy. Robyn had messaged me about a week ago, having read TumbleStone Blog as well as some of my posts in the Facebook Group “New Zealand Lapidary, Rocks, Minerals, Fossils”. She had told me they would be coming to Gemstone Beach at the beginning of this week, so it was good that we were all there at the same time. We had a good chat and showed each other some of our finds, as rockhounds do.
This afternoon’s fossick featured trace fossil stones – I kept on coming across them, and some were very good specimens or unusual for some reason. They made up maybe one-third of the stones I put in my bag. And Chrissy always gives me good ones she comes across. We saw very few hydrogrossular garnets and I found only one tiny poppy jasper. But there are always interesting stones that crop up when time is spent along this part of the Te Waewae Bay coast. Fourteen of my finds are featured below.
First, the big and the tiny. This is the largest of the trace fossil stones I collected, with the longest trace I have seen for some time. And following it is a tiny poppy jasper fragment I found, which still looks amazing in close-up:
Green stones can often be found on this beach. Two green-coloured stones I picked up, one light hued, one dark:
A pink find, most likely a rhodonite, similar to one featured in an August 2025 fossick:
This next stone is very unusual, with a mineral of light cream colour set in translucent quartz(?). In addition, there is a smearing of dark brown iron oxide across it:
Another unusual stone, of mottled black and dark red:
A stone with fragments of different colours, maybe a breccia?
Finally, six more trace fossil in argillite stones I collected today, showing some of the diversity of this type of stone – variations in colour of stone, colour of trace, and shape and size of trace:
Gemstone Beach and nearby Te Waewae Bay coast never disappoints me. I’ve always found at least one unusual and interesting stone, usually many more. Even if, as today, I have to walk a ways to find them.
The next Post in this Series reports on another visit to Gemstone Beach, two days later. An Index to this Series is here.
Definitely a heavy backpack fossick! I reckon we need to set Ohla up with saddlebags! My favourite stone is the light cream coloured one – it’s a stunner!