Sweetwater Moss Agates at Agate Flats

Be sure and watch out for rattlesnakes, she told me as I discussed our days plan to visit Agate Flats. I was walking Molly and had stopped to visit with a retired lady that was picking berries for making jam. She went on to say that she had grown up near a rattlesnake den near Lander and her mother had kept her and her siblings inside.
I told Renita about my talk with the lady as we drove to Agate  Flats. We had been  there rock hunting last year and had found seven agates, not a great day but enough to make us want to go back. Armed with a BLM map of Bairoil, Wyoming, we had found on it a mine sign and so we wanted to return and look in the new site.
Now the book Prospecting Wyoming tells people that you have to dig for the agates as the surface ones have all been picked and so I had brought along a shovel and Renita was armed with her new pick axe, that I had bought her for mother day.

We left the truck and soon we both had found a Sweetwater moss agate. It took awhile before I found another but then I started to find larger ones away from the road. Looking at my watch I saw it was time to return to the truck and so I started to walk back on a four wheel drive road. As I walked I looked down and found a nice agate and then another.
By the time I got back to the truck I had found a whole pocket full of agates in the rutted road! Renita had found quite a few herself and so we spent the rest of the day picking up treasures. Now the sweetwater moss agates are well rounded, semi polished chalcedony with beautiful inclusions of dendritic pyrolusite,(in other words  shiny white to clear rocks with black crystals shaped like little branches of moss). They are similar to Montana moss agates but much rarer and found in a small area.

By the time we called it a day we had over five pounds of agate, twenty five of which were already shaped into cabochons and just needed  polishing. As I write this I can hear the tumbler making its low pitched sounds and can't wait for them to be finished!
We never did see any rattlesnakes this time, we saw two last year, nor did we find any World War Two artifacts but it was a great day for agates. More rocks for our house! Clear skies.