At this time of the year, 2,000 vendors of rocks, gems, minerals, fossils and everything else imaginable create one of the world's largest open air flea markets in Quartzsite.
Eight major gem and mineral shows
as well as vendors of raw and handcrafted merchandise peddle their wares to snowbirds, collectors and the odd stray Brit like us.
But there is the car show as well.
People trailer their beautifully restored classic and spend two days sitting behind it making sure people do not touch while answering the same foolish questions over and over again.
Not every thing was a conventional classic and I liked this old time truck with it’s working likker still and animated talking doll beside it.
We came away with some unusual
semi precious stones and now have to work out what to do with them.
CAROL'S BIT.
I have always wanted a good piece of Amber a lot of the stuff you see is a sort of resin made up to look like Amber. This piece has a lot of dead bodies in it, flies, spiders and a few unidentifiable ones. This stone will cut and file easily, but I will probably put a bell cap on it, so that a chain can be attached.
The green stone is FUKITE it glitters and seems to be made up of several layers. I have left this as it is and had a hole drilled. The silver Bale that you see will fit through the hole.
The Red and Cream piece is MOUKAITE - Australian Jasper. It would make a nice back drop for a picture of Charro.
The torqouise and red is CHRYSOELL and CUPRITE - Senoran Desert. These make nice pieces on their own on a stand.
Those little rocks are IRON PYRITE - fools gold. This rock grinds easily into granules and could be used to fill in the faults in the MOUKAITE to add interest.
John has some flat pieces of AGATE and TIGERS EYE which he intends to use as inlay in the table on the boat.
The prices of this stuff was amazing, and I guess people come from worldwide to stock up and take back to their own country, to sell at a big profit. I have seen some of the large geods at alternative medicine shows that cost thousands of pounds. I can imagine what Harrod's would charge. You could get hooked on making things or just displaying what comes out of the earth naturally , and drive yourself nuts looking for it.
So far we have avoided becoming rockhounds but we are looking down and are starting to pick up interesting looking rocks. I am told that the next step is to buy a bag of marbles and every time we pick up a rock we should leave a marble. When we have lost all our marbles then we can call ourselves rockhounds.
After Quartzsite we moved to Casa Grande then on to Coolidge where the Casa Grande ruins are. Confused? We certainly were!
We joined a ranger lead tour of the ruins.
Anyway we already knew a bit about the Hohokam and their irrigation based culture but much of what he said was new to us,
Casa Grande is four stories high and about 60 feet long and 40 feet wide. All constructed from caliche a kind of desert hard pan mud. It is one of the largest prehistoric structures ever built in North America, its purpose remains as much a mystery as the people who built it.
This building was at the centre of a community of three to five thousand people and at the end of a complex canal system twenty miles long.
It was a giant undertaking with stone hammer and wooden digging stick as the canals were 70 feet wide and 18 feet deep in places.
We also discovered that they were small people.
Carol got through the doorway but I could not make it.
The ranger finished by telling us that the Hohokam lived in this area for a thousand years and had little impact on the land as they used renewable resources. He then asked us to look at all the dead trees in the back ground. He said that in the last 30 years deep well irrigation has dropped the water table in this area from 12 feet to more than 100 feet, out of range of the deepest tap roots!
We have to hang around this area because I have to go back for a stress test on my heart at the end of the month.
No comments:
Post a Comment