Walk a dry wash

On the way to Stanton last Sunday we stopped to take a walk into a dry wash tributary to Antelope Creek.

Dry falls
Presumably, a lot of gold has been taken out of the washes in this area and almost all the public land has been claimed for mining. There are stakes and markers everywhere.

Water smoothed schist
But we really weren’t out gold mining, well maybe a few pretty rocks.

Quartz in schist
The surrounding rock in the Weaver Mountains is primarily granite and schist. The granite was formed by slow cooling in the earth’s crust about 1,000 million years ago. It is typically medium- to coarse-grained and created by magma made up of various combinations of primarily hornblende, feldspar and quartz.

Schists are formed from sedimentary shale or sandstone, igneous basalt or metamorphic slate under temperature and/or pressure. In fact schist is a Greek word meaning to split as the rock will break easily into slabs.

Mica in granite
Within certain areas of these rocks are found thin quartz veins which carry pyrite, galena, and gold. We did find some pyrite and a lot of mica in the rocks.