I visited the Back Beach for an hour after a rainy morning – the forecast storm turned out not to be too bad for the South. When I was a boy, our family had summer holidays at Riverton Aparima so a visit here again has nostalgic overtones.
Not long after I arrived on the beach, I picked up a small dark red jasper – and it turned out to be a poppy jasper!
I found another one, with slightly bigger orbs, towards the end of the fossick:
The only other time I’ve found poppy jaspers here was in a September 2024 fossick when I found two and my brother-in-law found one.
When looking at the photos of my finds in this Post, keep in mind that because of the cloudy weather we’re having, I was unable to take photos of my finds until the next day. This was still under challenging light conditions early in the morning, and some of the images reflect those difficulties.
A very dark brecciated jasper I found, in a kind of cylindrical shape:
A different type of stone with a similar shape (not sure of its identification):
There are quartzites along this coast:
A bright orange stone which looks like a kind of quartz (maybe also a quartzite?):
A small polymictic breccia, a type of stone that can also be found along the south coast, including Gemstone Beach – “polymictic” means that it contains fragments from a number of different rocks:
Finally, this dark brown stone looked interesting to me:
My next fossick is over the hill, at The Beach Past the Back Beach. An Index to this Series is here.
