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INDEX
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World's Largest Mineral Collecting Tour?
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The annual event at Trona every October seems to involve much of the local community and they go all out to make this experience a memorable one for the participants. In addition to staging a two-day gem and mineral show with an auction, tours of the
local plant, visits to historical sites, and special breakfasts and dinners, there are the arrangements for the Searles Lake field collecting. This is an activity one local paper, The Inland Adventurer, refers to as possibly being "the world's largest
mineral collecting tour in the country." With up to 800 participants, just the logistics of getting so many people lined up in their vehicles with tickets purchased in advance, is a wonder. Every open area adjoining the show buildings is filled with neat
lines of vehicles, nose to tailpipe waiting for the moment of departure. And when it comes, there is the sense of a wagontrain heading out to adventure.
The North American Chemical Company opens its facility on Searles Lake and works with the Searles Lake Gem and Mineral Society to prepare safe areas filled with rare mineral specimens, some found nowhere else in the world, dredged or pumped from great
depths. When was the last time someone pulled up specimens from 20-450 feet underwater for you? But that's part of what NACC and SLG&MS do for these field excursions.
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The drive in along the work roads is an experience in itself. The desert landscape is reflected in the huge salt lake. The salt drifts at the edges look like snow fields or wayward clouds depending on the day's lighting. This year, with rain squalls
passing through and threatening the morning trip, the sky was a rapidly changing screen for light effects. By the time the caravan started toward the first collecting area, the clouds had retreated a safe distance away. Their reflections, though, created
an unforgettable series of images, different from minute to minute.
There are four field trips. The first is one where pressurized air is forced down one pipe and as it comes back up a second, larger one to the surface, it carries with it brine and crystals loosened by blasting the previous day. A dike is bulldozed
around the dry sand collecting area, with the jetting machine in the center, at one edge.
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While waiting for the technicians to prepare for the actual jetting, collectors gather up specimens brought up the previous day for them. When the equipment is ready, everyone is asked to move back beyond the dike for their safety. The process is
explained, and then it begins.
It has the sense of excitement that an old-timer would recognize from the street hydrants being opened for the first time in the summer in the big city. But this gush of water also carries Searles Lake mineral crystals with it: hanksite, halite, borax,
trona, and the sought after halosulfites. After the water jetting stops, there is a rush into the collecting zone, with brine still running rapidly across the sand. For a first-timer, it's hard to know what to pick up, and it is probably easier to scoop
first, sort later. The puddles and running brine are great, though, for quickly rinsing your finds before popping them in your collecting bucket. Dignity is something you leave back at the parking area. The only way to pick up these crystals is to get
down there with them.
Once you've broken the dignity barrier, it's not a far step to the mud. Yes, mud like you have never seen before. Briny, sulfurous smelling and hiding potentially enormous clusters and crystals of the same hanksite, trona and borax as the morning
jetting session, but also other minerals as well.
Sometimes, you won't know what you have until you get to the brine trough and wash off the mud with the brine provided by NACC. Ordinary water will melt these crystals.
After extracting your potential treasures from the gooey, clay-like, black mud, you take it to the brine trough and apply elbow grease with toothbrush and scrub brushes. I personally saw a lucky collector at the trough hold up a single hanksite crystal
about 12 inches long and as thick as his forearm. Sometimes, what you thought was a solid cluster disintegrates into a thousand chips and tiny crystals, and sometimes, you get a beauty to take home.
There is a night-time fluorescent collecting trip to a local closed quarry led by the SLG&MS. That is one that we'll try to report on next year.
The Sunday morning trip is to the red brine areas of the lake to collect pink, peach or cranberry colored halite. This takes a few strong arms in the party to wield the long, chopping tools used to break off halite plates from the underwater ledges.
These pictures are from the 1996 trip with members of the Reseda, California based VIP Gem and Mineral Society on the lake.
The color of halite is affected by the conditions while it was growing. In the desert summer, these waters can be 150 degrees F, and there are saline loving bacteria who thrive in it and add shade of red coloring to the halite. The hopper crystal
formations are beautiful in both single halite crystals and clusters. Brine is also used to clean these specimens, but not much cleaning is needed.
For those less able to dig for the deep ledges, there are surface uplifts that provide access to the younger halite formations.
Whether or not you find the elusive sulfohalites, gaylussite, pirssonite, searlesite, galeite, teepleite, thenardite, nahcolite, northupite, burkeite or tychite is a matter of luck and probably experience. But the good feeling of collecting in a friendly
crowd, at sites well prepared for you, and among people glad to see you is something you'll definitely take home.
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Copyright, 1997 by Carol J. Bova
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