Saddle Mountain

On Saturday April 25th a small but merry band of rockhounders met up with Tony Johnson at the Shell station in Mattawa. There were six of us total. The weather was a wee bit on the nippy side with a very brisk wind blowing but that was better than the snow flurries we encountered at Snowqualmie Pass. We climbed into our vehicles and followed Tony to the collecting site. Tony pointed out a few areas to collect and Jim Sawaya and I settled on an area that has petrified wood with a reddish hue to it. The digging was relatively easy and we started to find limb casts pretty quickly. We realized that the best pieces were in a very narrow area so we concentrated our attention there. We soon realized that we had way more than the 25 lbs. each we were allowed so we did some serious high grading and left a lot for future rockhounders to find. We didn't even have to fill in our hole because someone else wanted to work it. As we proceeded to head back to my Jimmy some sort of insect flew into Jim's boot and stung him. We ran into a guy who asked us what we were looking for so we showed him what we had found and pointed out some areas to dig and what to look for. He thanked us and walked back to his truck. When he came back he had a couple Fat Tire Ales which we graciously accepted and proceeded to toast a successful day. The gentleman again thanked us for our help and left. About this time Tony wandered back and four of us decided to head for the diatomaceous earth pit for some opal.
When we got there the wind had really picked up. After searching around a short while I managed to come up with three softball sized pieces that weren't real fractured up and a piece that weighs at least 50 lbs. The wind really started kicking up dirt and it looked like a rain storm was trying to move in so it was decided to head for home. It was a great trip too bad the rest of you missed it. Rock on!