Fridays Rock! Magnetite & More

Spending the weekend extreme social distancing again, this time in Utah. I like to get up here at least once a year. This year I was able to locate another, new mineral locality, magnetite. It's actually spread across three different mountain ranges and I was only able to make it to one, but it paid off.

The magnetites from Utah are different than most others around the world except Pakistan. The magnetite here forms 2 different crystal types, octahedral and dodecahedral. The specimens I found today all belong to the octahedral group. The dodecahedral are very rare and as far as I know are found in only one mine, which I don't know the location of yet.

There is also apatite, siderite, barite, amethyst and calcite I found.

One other benefit of being up here is checking out land. I was able to drive by a few of the parcels I was looking at. I'm seriously considering it as Utah promotes rock hounding for tourism. I'm also thinking of offering mineral hunting tours to my Japanese dealers & friends. Gotta stay positive in these crazy times. No time to stop when there is work to do.

Tomorrow I'm going to hunt Red Beryl, one of the rare gemstones in the world. Wish me luck!