Rubies!

Hi Friends,

I had been wanting to try rockhounding for a while, but my knowledge of rocks and minerals is not good so I have been hesitant to spend a day wandering around looking for things I can't really identify.

Well I had a free day last Monday where my family was busy with pre planned activities - I was thinking of gold prospecting, but decided to reach out to @derekrichardson to see if he could show me the rockhounding ropes.. he agreed, and we met up in the local mountains.

Derek had a plan of things he wanted to go look for and the area where we might find them so off we went on a hike into the mountains. After a lot of hiking through rugged terrain and getting lots of cuts from wild blackberry bushes, we ended up getting some Corundum, which is the gemstone mineral for rubies! Check out the find:

In blacklight to make it easier to see:

Regular light:

Here is what the host rock outcrop looked like:

Some scenery shots:

This Corundum is actually not red enough to be considered Ruby, so I think these are technically Pink/Purple Sapphires. The Sapphires are hard to get out of the host rock, so I need to do some work to get more out, but I think it would be cool to cut and polish some of the bigger ones into nice gemstones... need to do more research on that as well.

Thanks to Derek for a fun outing and I am already looking forward to my next rockhounding adventure!

Glad you came by,
Brian