![]() ![]() *Be aware that the Mill Creek Wilderness is nearby, and no collecting is allowed within the Wilderness boundary! White Rock Campground is just up the road and there are additional pits there as well. You can also walk around and explore tailings of the old pits and find some decent material to bring home and cut. ![]() Find one of the old pits and start digging to recover ‘eggs. There are dig pits all over this area and there is decent signage to help you find where to look. There are some nice picnic areas and campgrounds, and good agate beds that you can dig. This popular access is located between Prineville and Mitchell off of Highway 26. When the reservoir levels are low in the late summer it exposes even more gravels. There are thundereggs as well as petrified wood, agates, jaspers, and some fossil specimens. ![]() This site is basically like Succor Creek there is so much ground to cover and an abundance of good material. Take the beautiful drive through Leslie Gulch to reach the upper end of the Owyhee Reservoir. In addition to thundereggs, there are good picture jaspers and petrified wood here that you should keep an eye out for. This area has been hunted hard over the years, yet people still come back and find more. There is a lot of desert out here and many areas where good ‘eggs can hide. It is a fairly remote area near the border with Idaho. Succor Creek has long been known as a top rockhounding site in Oregon. Oregon’s Public Land Thunderegg Locations I have found a lot of select pieces by simply “poking around” in the vicinity of old dig pits and searching around discarded tailing piles. Digging is usually required, but not necessarily. The thundereggs can be found in a number of places. Others are simply spectacular and are highly prized. In fact, some of them have no chalcedony core at all, and they are actually quite boring and uninteresting to collectors. There are no two that look exactly alike. This includes pressure, depth of formation, temperature, magma composition, ground water composition and the composition of the host rocks.Īll of these variations result in the differences in each thunderegg. Other complex processes that contribute to the formation of thundereggs include constant changes of physical as well as chemical conditions. The outside part of the thundereggs may consist of complex magmatic processes, of which the inner part may be formed and changed by getting subjected to a number of cycles of late-stage hydrothermal fluids. Thereafter, the cavity of the porous rock gets filled with a dark matrix material followed by the inner agate or chalcedony core. The gas pockets of lava act as molds where the thundereggs are formed, and silicas form within void and pockets within the lava flow. The formation of thundereggs is traced back to the flows of lava known as rhyolite. But when one takes the liberty of slicing any piece in half as well as having it polished, that is when the most attractive patterns as well the internal contents are revealed. From their outward appearance, the only indicator that they are anything more than an average rock is a spherical shape. Thundereggs may appear like ordinary rocks to the untrained eye. These are the highest prizes specimens which are loved by rockhounds and collectors. Thundereggs often contain centers of chalcedony material with voids and crystallization. They are usually the size of an orange or baseball, although there are also possibilities that they can be found in different sizes of less than an inch up to a meter across. These nodule like rocks have a rough spherical shape. A Thunderegg has been likened to a nodule rock, which is also similar to a geode. ![]()
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