Blunders made early in your field collecting

I collected this piece 20+yrs ago reaching between boulders in a blasted muckpile pulling out large pieces and later putting it back together. Not realizing other large chards of dark smoky quartz was part of the same piece I chucked them to the quarry floor so I didn't draw attention to spot by leaving them laying around. After closer inspection at home realizing all the pieces fit together and repairing the piece, I knew those large chards I chucked would have made this specimen complete. I learned the hard way. When I glanced at this piece the other day I wondered how many other collectors in their early days made similar mistakes and what they might have been.

I wouldn't call it a blunder. I'd call it full on stupidity on my part. I was in one of the major trap rock quarries in North Jersey. You used to be able to drive right in but on the date I arrived a gate was present meaning I had to hoof it in. The quarry was really known for dinosaur footprints but it had zeolites. Digging around in a large pile, I found rock that had these odd multi colored inclusions. I had no idea what it was, it was covered in dust but I knew I had not seen anything like it before. I hauled seventy pounds of it out on my back.

Washing everything off at home, I discovered much to my horror that I was the proud owner of seventy pounds of concrete. What a day.

Sounds to me David like you hit the mother lode of "urbanite"!!

My first (and most infamous) blunder occurred at a campground on Lake Superior many years ago. We were on vacation and decided to go hunt for agates during the daylight. We actually found quite a number of small ones and decided that since we had a UV light we would wait until night to search the beach for fluorescent minerals. Sure enough, we found lots of rocks along the beach that glowed a nice purple/white colour so we collected almost a 5 gallon bucket full and hauled them back to our campsite. Because it was late, we didn't check them under normal light and just went to bed. Next morning we woke up and began to examine our "glowing" rocks. It was then that we realised it was nothing more than sea gull droppings on common beach rocks......

I like that, Paul. Urbanite. Cool sounding.

Re, fluorescent repsonse. When I was very young and before age restricted collecting was the norm at Quarries, my Dad took me to a major Strontianite location in Winfield, Pennsylvania. We brought home quite a load and washed everything off in some sudsy water-I think we used Ajax. We then hit everything with a UV light. Everything glowed blue and white I believe. we were very excited until someone in the know advised us that what was glowing was the detergent!

Fun topic! I think back 30 years and am humbled by a blunder of youth. We spent a couple fruitless days hard rock mining at Crystal Ridge near Independence, Ca. The next year we returned, and the hole was exactly as we left it. Within a few minutes we removed a cap stone to a glory hole! It took an entire day to extract and package a wide variety of chlorite included quartz, with a bit of stilbite and sphene attached. Unpacking at home the next day, we discovered that in our hurry to get home to our jobs we had left a gym bag full of carefully packed crystals behind! One would think a couple of ex Boyscouts would have properly policed their campsite! The other two bags of crystals(the best stuff I tell myself) we did bring home still made it one of our best outings. It took years for me to stop kicking myself for the one that got away and now I try to remember to NEVER rush!

Great topic for a novice collector...I hope there are more responses!...thanks for sharing.
John

Hi,

On one of my first field trips back in 1966 I went to the Andover, New Jersey area with the Parkers to collect minerals. I was a novice and they were seasoned field collectors. I was proud of the large matrix specimen with black crystals I had found and showed the piece to Fred Parker, Sr. who immediately told me it was a beautiful example of concrete with rock inclusions.

Best wishes,

Joe

Joe relates an event involving concrete that made me chuckle. It involves a budding fossil collector.

We owned and operated a nature store in a mall for a number of years, and now and then people would come in with questions or with things to identify. A young man came in and said that he had a fossil dinosaur tooth in his car, and would I come out to the parking lot and have a look. I asked him to bring it inside as we were busy. About a half hour later he came back, staggering along with a great, conical chunk of pebbly concrete in his arms. The thing probably weighed 50 pounds! Even having dug the the thing up near an old construction site, the guy was absolutely convinced that he had a real fossil and that it was worth a lot of money. It took a while to help him understand why it wasn't what he thought it was, and he left....and he generously left the "tooth" for us to dispose of. I think that his budding interest in the hobby stopped right then.

Cheers!

Steve

Great topic. My blunder didn't actually take place in the field. I had just had a great day collecting. My field bag was full of fat heliodor crystals that I had pried out of the wall of a local pegmatite. As a novice collector, I was over the moon. I couldn't wait to get home and get my day's booty cleaned up. I had visions of gleaming deep yellow crystals in my head. I just needed to clean off the crust of bright yellow green, orange and dusty red scale. So I scrubbed and scrubbed, washed and scrubbed again. I even picked off those small golden brown crystal that where scatted along the length of the crystals. It wasn't until years later that I realized my "OK" beryl specimens would have been real stunners if they still had their association with all those wonderful secondary uranium minerals and those gemmy little zircons. Live and learn.

Cheers!
Mark

Ouch, Mark! Some of this thread is painful to read about!

Mike

Some 25 years ago I bought went by Interrail towards Morocco. But going there I planned a detour over the famous Panasqueira mines. So before leaving Sweden I checked a map at the library for the whereabouts of Panasqueira, jumped the train and went straight towards a Panasqueira in southern Portugal!! I cannot recall if I actually arrived or realized beforehand that it was heading to the wrong place. I just continued to Morocco...

cheers

Blunders?
Many :)
...and still make them.
It was 1982? I was 12, with my parents, in Odda. A month in Norway and Sweden.
My parents wanted to go walking in the Hardangervidda for a few days, sleep in mountainhuts etc.
My brother and I wanted to swim, to canoe and eat pizza every day.
We stayed on the camping in Odda and went for pizza.......

P.s.: my first "mineral" was a piece of rounded frosted green Heineken glass I found on the beach (when I was 7?). I went to the local library (no Mindat back then) and looked for a gem book, because I thought I had perhaps found an Emerald that someone lost on the beach. Yep....

I know of two cases where a person found an interesting rock in the winter, brought it home, and found it turn into a dog turd after it warmed up and defroze

@Alfredo... my wife keeps insisting a strange odour eminates from my mineral collection...I'm going to check it over carefully...immediately

Love the Heineken story, Frank. In addition to minerals and gems, I also like beer.


Two years ago I was at Upper New Street in Paterson when I came across what looked like Fluorite with Calcite in basalt. Although that occurs in some trap rock quarries, I was unaware of Fluorite being found at New Street. I gathered a large amount of the material together when suddenly all was revealed. A Mockinbird was gorging on purple berries above my head and was busy making deposits in the rocks below where I was sitting.

Moral of the story. It really helps to discover a potential blunder before you leave the locality.

When hunting (Indiana) geodes you learn, after some time period, which are hollow and which are likely to be solid. Also you learn which rock layers are likely to produce really nice specimens with displayable secondary minerals and which layers are not so likely to do this. So you learn to not be impatient about opening those geodes collected whole and thought to be "good inside". Before that time period you impatiently open them all at the roadside time of collection. BAD IDEA ! The millerite sprays blow away with the passing cars and the barites are likely to break. Now I wait to break them all under more controlled conditions. By the way, I do not personally know Alfredo so I am NOT one of the 2 people he refers to in his post !!!!!! Good hunting BOB

Here is a repeat of one of my posts from last year in "Biggest Blunders and Oversights". There are some doozies there and those who missed it may want to check it out.

This is not my greatest blunder, but one of the lesser that I can finally allow myself to admit to. I was at our mineral group meeting last night and one of my very old friends(?), John, had to relate to the group about one of our field trips, some 40 years ago. My version of the story is far kinder than his.

We had each been digging in our own holes, perhaps 20 feet apart, and I began to find some fairly nice epidote crystals. As I remember, it was very hot, but I dug feverishly through the decomposing garnet, epidote and quartz, while hording up all the epidote crystals that were contained therein. Noting my silence and the amount of material flying out of my hole, John called over to me to ask if I was finding anything. I replied, "no, just some crappy quartz" and tossed a couple over to him. I was keeping the epidote a secret to blow his mind later at camp. He asked if he could have some of the crappy quartz and I responded that he could have it all, while gloating over my find of great epidotes [www.mindat.org]. Well, there was quite a lot of the quartz and he took it all, to my amazement. I guessed that his taste in minerals was not yet as advanced as mine. Later, at camp, when I showed him the epidotes, he was indeed surprised and very impressed by the specimens. I kidded him about not finding any of the epidote and after the fun was over, he casually asked me if I had kept any of the scheelite crystals for myself.

Gene

That's a great story Gene.....

I go out at night with the SW light looking for fluorescents and usually find some nice stuff but can't carry it home in the dark . . . I make a mental note and try and leave a small rock or a stick on top of it so I can go back the next day in the light to get it. One particular morning, I got back to my find and the rock seemed bigger but there was the stick so I lugged this eighty pounder a couple of hundred yards through the woods to the house and off to work I went. I was so looking forward to washing it off and seeing how really nice it would fluoress. After work I waited for dark, put the light on it and there was nothing. I brought home the wrong rock... I don't leave sticks on rocks anymore!

Biggest blunder: Passing up an opportunity to go collecting with Luther Thomas, famed mountain man and major mineral collector in the Spruce Pine district. He invited me and a friend to go along to a secret kyanite spot and we figured there was another place we wanted to go. When we saw the stuff he found later we were kicking ourselves - gorgeous glassy blue blades multiple inches long. To this day I don't know where it came from. That was one of the last field collecting trips Luther ever went on and I missed the chance to be there with him, and find that fine stuff. A double blow.

While collecting at the Buckwheat Mineral Dump in Franklin, NJ I found a foot long specimen that had a one inch light purple fluorite crystal on one end ( which at the time was the largest I knew of from Franklin ). Being just a little too long to sit protected in my bucket I decided to do a quick field trim with my hammer on the opposite end, after one sharp tap, to my horror, I watched as a spray of fluorite flew into the air and decorated the ground at my feet. I realized that the force of the "tap" was transmitted down the length of the rock to the fluorite crystal that HAD been there and HAD been the biggest one I knew of...past tense now!!

A decade ago while collecting at Limecrest Quarry in Sparta, NJ a fine mirror faced brown crystal of uvite about 3 inches in diameter was located in a tight opening between monster boulders of marble. I was able to skinny into the opening but had no room to swing my hammer and so I reluctantly left it there in place and thought to retrieve it on my next field trip back to the quarry. It was "out of sight" and protected. So at the next FOMS field trip there I went to the bench where the boulders were and to my great dismay that bench had been back-filled over the boulders with dirt and waste rock to a depth of about TWENTY feet. There was no specimen retrieval possible now and that crystal lies buried and entombed. In retrospect not putting in the effort THEN to retrieve the crystal was a big blunder!!!