Glass Butte Obsidian
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On August 6th we went hunting for obsidian in central Oregon at a place called Glass Butte. The area is well known for its many varieties of obsidian.
My mother, nephew and I made the hour and a half trip from Bend Oregon. We turned off the highway past mile post 76 and made the drive into the collection area on a bumpy dirt road. We scouted around for awhile and found a spot next to a pit with a lot of mahogany and dug there for awhile. I found a nice piece of gold sheen there but my mother scouted out a spot she thought might have some amazing stuff. We moved our area of operations a couple hundred feet over and dug there for the next four hours.
The day was perfect the sky was filled with small poofy clouds and it was not too hot. There was no shortage of obsidian anywhere, the trick was finding some color or good gold sheen. We unfortunatly found mostly unusable stuff with the exception of some mahogany and some pieces with white bands going all through it.
While we haven't found any of the killer stuff yet we will be going back to do some more hunting in the near future.
(Obsidian continued) On the 12th we journeyed out to the Glass Butte pits to dig for the day. The day started out great we where there by 11:00 am and it wasn't too hot. As an unexpected surprise we found a friend had come up the previous day and had stayed the night. We talked with him about his success and he told us he had found some nice stuff the day before. We were excited about the opportunity to dig some good material. Soon after we started in on our hole we had visitors from the Bend Bulletin newspaper. They had wanted to come out and meet with us for a piece they are doing. We dug and out came the good stuff. Most of it was being dug by our friend, some of the stuff he found was incredible. He showed me a piece that was flashing a rainbow of colors all through it. We managed to find a piece or two of the good stuff and collected quite a bit of obsidian from the area the color was coming from. We packed it in at 2:30 pm. We talked some more with the reporter and the photographer before we left, then we took off for Hampton Butte. We never made it out to Hampton Butte that day however we did manage to make it to the Outback steak house for dinner. |
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