Story and Photos by Ray Brooks

Twenty-five years ago, I took a big step in recovering from my lifelong addiction to rockhounding. I took six boxes containing my teenaged collection of Idaho agates, jasper, thunder eggs, and geodes to Bob’s Museum Rock and Gift Shop in nearby Bliss. I did not know Bob at the time but I hauled all my boxes of rocks into his cluttered shop and explained what was in them.

Bob started to protest that he couldn’t buy the rocks and I told him I was giving them to him.  He was pretty happy with that deal and at my request he even drove me around what remained of old Bliss, down by the Union Pacific Railroad tracks. Unfortunately, the next summer Bob was bitten by a mosquito and soon died of the West Nile virus at the tender age of eighty-six. His empty store survives in downtown Bliss, its sign faded but still readable.

Rockhounding is a popular pastime in Idaho, where silica minerals such as agates, jasper, thunder eggs, and geodes are nearly everywhere. I found my first agates at the age five. Just north of Ketchum, the Wood River Valley has abundant deposits of Challis Volcanic Group rocks, which date to flows that occurred widely in central Idaho forty-five million to fifty-one million years ago.

It’s estimated that about ninety-five hundred square miles of Idaho are covered by the flows of the Challis volcanics, and many of them contain numerous agates, jasper, geodes, and thunder eggs.

My rockhounding addiction took a while to fully afflict me, but by age twelve I was out in the hills hunting rocks with my similarly hooked parents. We brought home hundreds of pounds of agates, jasper, geodes, and thunder eggs, the latter of which are agate-filled nodules.

Most were not especially pretty or of any worth, but my parents bought a rock tumbler and fairly expensive abrasive mixtures with which we tumbled our agates and jasper into round shiny specimens. My father made a rock saw, so we could saw open geodes and thunder eggs. By the way, thunder eggs are Oregon’s state rock, although that still doesn’t make them worth anything.