Treasure Hunting For Fire Agates
Posted: Monday, April 14, 2008
by David Cowley
dfc investment team
Agate Banded
Fire Agates is a layered stone that is formed then water that is saturated with colloida silica and iron oxide enters a cavity in a rock and the mineral in the water starts do form new rock. When cutting, the stones layers are ground or polished off following the natural contours of the stone until the desired colored is all that is left. Grind off one to many layers and the stone is ruined.
Searching for fire agates is considered hard rock mining. The agates are usually found embedded in layers of dense limonite and rhyolite rock. Removing these gemstones from the underling bedrock without breaking the gemstones takes time and experience.
Tools required will consist of several different sizes of chisels, a screwdriver, a stiff bristle paint brush, a heavy hammer, goggles and a spray bottle to clean your specimens. After you have found a suitable claim site brush of the area with the paint brush. This will reveal the gemstones embedded in the bedrock. Very carefully chip around the gem with the chisel. Chip to close and the gem will break into pieces, this is where the experience will show.
Agate Ring
If you are lucky you will find an seam or even a pocket full of agates. Size and shape of the gemstones has created its own language to describe them. Flowers, dog-tooth crystals and castles are just a few of the names applied to them. Dog-tooth usually is applied to the gemstones that grow from the sides of the pockets and the castles grow from the bottom. Pockets can range from orange to football in size.
The Opal Hill Fire Agate Mine is the only mine that I know of that allows the public to mine for fire agates. It is located in the the Mule Mountains not far from Palo Verde California. Normally when you think of a mine you think of a long tunnel you have to traverse deep into the mountain to find the mineral deposits. The Opal Hill mine is more of an open pit where you can spend $15 to stake your three foot square claim for the day.The mine owners will take you by the hand and show you what to look for and how to extract the precious gemstones. Once you have mastered the process they will remain in the area for any additional questions or advice. If chipping at rock sounds like to much work you are free to search the tailing area of the mine in your quest for these elusive stones.
Another area that has become quite popular with the rock hounds is the Black Hills Rock-hound area in Arizona. It is open to the public without fees or permits. For more information contact the Stanford district, Bureau of Land Management.
Many of the finished fire agate gemstones do not look like the traditional gemstones that you find mounted in jewelery. Agates are beautifully textured and come in very odd shapes and sizes. Once you see one of these unique gemstones you will see why they have become so popular.
Fire Agates have only been discovered within the last 60 years making them the newest and rarest gemstones on the market today. Fire agates have also been found in Kingman and Golden Valley Arizona, Needles California, Mexico, and areas around the Colorado River. I strongly suggest that you visit the opal hill mine prior to hunting in any other area. This will allow you to see the type of bedrock to look for and what the embedded Fire Agates look like in there natural form.Happy Treasure Hunting.
David Cowley has created numerous articles on Treasure Hunting. He has also created a Web Site dedicated to Treasure Hunting. Visit http://www.treasure-hunting-team.com
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Top-level comments on this article: (6 total)No this article is bogus at best , the fire agate from Opal Hill, Safford and the Black hills are not even semi precious quality, the only GEM fire Agate comes from Slaughter Mountain San Carlos Indian Reservation, And it dose not come as this author claims , so there is no use going to the place he tells yoyo it will not help you at all. As a matter of fact the beautiful gem Fire Agate he has on this site, was a stone he copied from fire agate dot com which I cut and Polished and Photographed and put on . fireagate dot com. This Author may have given free reprint rights but i do not as far as the picture . . I have contacted the Author 7 times with no response.
In the first place I have never heard of you. I am not hard to find or contact. I think Opal Hill Fire Agate Mine will disagree with you as to there quality of there gem stones. Slaughter Mountain San Carlos Indian Reservation only allows tribe members to mine. All of my pictures come from wikipedia which usually gives you free reprint rights of all pictures. Do a search for fire agate and agate on wikipedia to see a larger verson of the pictures.You claim you have never heard of me I emailed you 7 times, that photo that you are using is a stone on fireagate dot com this stone was cut by me, polished by me and put on that site by me along with the photo work, and the reason you do know who i am is because the site tells who i am, the best stones of fire agate in the world are on that site i mentioned , and you know that because you took the stone off that site , and you know how everyone can tell, because there is not a better fire agate stone on the entire internet than the stone you coppied .And that is why you coppied it.Being you think Opal Hill will disagree withy me. post 0ne of their best stones and see if it is 1/1000 of the stone you coppied, Their best stone will not be 1/10 as good as the first 100 stones on my site.There may be pictures on Wikipedi but they do not compare, and you got the picture off my site , not wikipedia, i have no stones on there, but you know that.The picture of MINE did not come from wikipedia,If youy really wish to know the slighest bit about Fire Agate you need to go to the site spelled out. You know nothing about San Carlos Res, most of the hundreds of stones on the site i created came from San Carlo as rough agate, bought for millions of dollars over 20 years , and 97% of those gems I cut Polished and Photographed . I would bet you have never seen such gem Fire Agate in your Life.
Dave I think this guy is right why don't you post a gem fireagate from the opal hill mine, i have looked all over the internet there is not one picture of GEM opal hill fire agate, but when you go to there site the link that says fireagate takes you to another link where they try and make you think Petosky stone is in fact Fire Agate and try to sell it to you
Dave -Can you please tell me why, when doing a 'Google' search of your mine, no matter which website I use, I might be lucky to see one very small photo of a rather lackluster Fire Agate. Even the literature that goes with each website about the Opal Hill "Fire Agate" Mine is rather lacking.Why is it that no one has ever seen this Fire Agate on eBay?? Why is it there are only one or two photos of it anywhere??For you to take a photo of one of Joe Intili's works of art and say that it is from your mine is either wishful thinking or probably just plain stealing!! My money is on the latter!This thread is comical...Opal hill has fire agate, I have quite a bit of it. It's large and quite interesting, but none of it compares with the fine material of Slaughter and Deer Creek, or even some of the good Calvillo material. I have a lot of great material from all, and he's right, there's no comparison. You can go dig your own material at Opal, but you're better off just stopping in at T-rocks in Quartzsite and buying it there, where the mine owner sells it. Along those lines, anyone who is a serious collector knows of the work of Joe Intili and his partner in Tucson, and I would think he knows his own work!
You are shwag Cowley, did you get all of your info from Wiki too?
I used to live in Havasu. I have gone to Black hills many times. I have not really found anything worth much money, but I really enjoyed looking. One thing to note is that there is a guy up there who claims to have a claim on all of the local fire agate. Last time I was there he was charging something like $15 a day to dig in his site. At a near-by souvenir shop, there are quite a few stones for sell for $10 each. I personally looked through the whole lot of them and found that not one had any hint of fire. Though that many be, I have found stones with fire on the hillside a few hundred feet outside of an inadequately marked claim.Are you sure this was Black Hills-you mean Palo Verde? Black hills is in eastern AZ and is a public BLM site. Anyone trying to charge you would have been laughed at and run off. PV is a fee site tho, $15 at last word, but don't know about the fire. I saw the same guy's site and listings and he was charging a ludicrous amount for common colored chalcedony chunks.
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