On Thursday July 9, 2009 I took Pam and Kirby Harris to a couple collecting sites alongside the Columbia River, east from Portland. Shellrock Mt. is at milepost 53 on I-84 and is accessible only from the eastbound lanes.

Pam & Kirby are also field trip chairs for the NorthWest MicroMineral Study Group, and belong to the Mt. Hood Rock Club.

They had never been to Shellrock Mt., so it was quite a treat. We collected backpacks full of quartz, stilbite, and calcite and saw blebs of pyrite. Some of the quartz was amethyst.

It was a lovely day, so instead of just going home I showed them another site on the Washington side, just upstream a couple miles. We drove to Hood River, crossed the toll bridge there, and drove back west less than 10 miles to Dog Mt. where we collected matrix pieces until our cars were full !! What fun !!

---

In order to leave comments to this blog post, you must be registered