Last year my friends and I went and dug for Trilobites. Well, their daughter was disappointed because she thought we were gathering geodes - oops! So, it was time for another ROAD TRIP to satisfy the budding geologist!
We headed out to the sticks. Well, not exactly the sticks..more like ticks (we actually passed a place called Tickville and it looked to be abundant with ticks!). From Lehi you follow the road west until it ends and then go another 50 miles on a good dirt road. This road traverses the old Pony Express route which is something I had wanted to see but didn't want to go out just for that so it was a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone or tick.
The Pony Express station we stopped at was Simpson Springs. You hear so much about the Pony Express but what I didn't realize was that it was only functioning for 19 months! For how much it is apart of the "Old West" I wouldn't have imagined. The Pony Express ran from Missouri to California in just 10 days thanks to some fast riding cowboys and changing mustangs often. Heck, the mail sometimes can't beat that now! Thanks to the telegraph however it was short lived. On the rest of the route there are stone markers quite often along the dirt road.
After several more miles and a few "I think we turn here" places we arrived at the Dugway area for digging Geodes. There is a large concentration of geodes in this area because apparently it was a shoreline for the ancient oceans and the geodes washed up there. You start digging with your shovels (bring all your own equipment) and find these bubble shaped lighter weighted rocks somewhere between 2-6' deep. Luckily, in this location they already had done some of the heavy digging with an excavator so the shoveling wasn't nearly as tough.
Unlike the trilobites which took several hours to find good specimen it only took about an hour to have more than our fill of geodes to take home and open. There are many larger geodes that are already broken open for various reasons but even softball sized pristine geodes aren't too tough to find. It is a good thing that it didn't take long because it got really hot really fast with all the dusty stone reflecting the sun. And, as the afternoon wore on a lot more people showed up. The area isn't that large so too many people could be a bit cumbersome.
Once home it was rather fun to take a hammer and chisel to the geodes to see the surprises inside. I'm sure if I was a little more refined I could have taken them to a rock shop to cut in half carefully and polish them but it was a lot more fun to just whack 'em!
