Rockhounding and Adventure Trips – South Dakota, October 2020

After the crazy busy summer that completely wore me out, my friend, Sharon Smith, asked me to go with her and her boyfriend to South Dakota to go rock hunting.  She, also, has had challenges as of late and needed to get away.  We were going to go later in October, but the SD weather in early October was perfect, so we moved the trip up.  It was sunny the whole week with temperatures in the 70s and 80s.  We timed it perfect since South Dakota had snow the following week.

I left Grand Marais and rendezvoused with Sharon and Tom in Brainerd, MN.  We then headed west to Kadoka, SD.  We found a small campground with almost no people and stayed for several nights.  On the first day of rock hunting, we drove only seven miles away to the White River.  The water level of all the rivers is extremely low.  When we pulled off the highway, we saw a guy driving a four-wheeler, so we drove over to talk with him.  He leases the land and gave us permission to rock hunt.

We parked the truck and followed cow paths down the bluff, through the willows, and over rocky terrain to the river.  All along what is currently a dry part of the riverbed there were thousands of rocks.

We found vast quantities of chalcedony seam agate, petrified wood, and Sharon found the only Fairburn of the week.  We also found petrified wood and chalcedony.

The next morning, we drove around 20 miles to the southwest of our campground and met up with a woman, Carol, who is a relative of one of Sharon’s friends.  There were rocks covering vast sections of the terrain.

The next morning, we drove through the Badlands National Park to and from our next rock hunting area, which was the Railroad Butte area.  There were tons of buttes with adjoining drainage ditches.  Again, there were rocks everywhere.

Of course, we had to stop and take pictures of the badlands formations.

During our drive, we saw bison, a mountain goat, and a ram.

Here are some more close-ups of some of the rocks I found.  I’ll start with some of the chalcedonies.

I also found petrified wood and one piece of rose quartz.

In the past, I have brought with me on trips out west my standard rock hunting UV lights.  This time I decided to bring a couple of the 365 wavelength UV lights, which are used on the Lake Superior shoreline to find the fluorescent syenite rocks.  OMG.  The amount of fluorescence was amazing.  The chalcedony fluoresced mostly green and the petrified wood orange.  The first photo shows some of the specimens in normal light.  The remainder shows fluorescence under 365 wavelength UV light.  I did not notice until I arrived home, but some of the chalcedony specimens had phosphorescence after the UV light was turned off.