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GEM CITY ROCK and MINERAL SOCIETY

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“MONROEVILLE: Pyrite balls in slate matrix. This is an excellent site not often collected and is self renewing daily. The pyrite nodules range from 1 inch to 9 inches in length; they are associated with black slate and make a striking addition to a collection. Monroeville is located directly south of Sandusky, on the map find state route #20, locate state route #99 -- this intersection is Monroeville. Pyrite is found all along as well as in the Huron River; a small park on the east side of the river provides parking (and a place to have lunch). The slate is all over the sides and the bottom of the river. Look for an irregular elevated area on the slate-- often the sparkling pyrite will be visible. Happy hunting ! !”

Well, that was a good starting point, but I would have liked a little more info, like, all up and down WHAT? The town? The River? Route 20? The poster added his name and phone #, and an email address, but the email bounced, and after quite a few phone calls with no answer (not even a machine!), we gave up on finding him and I asked around on some rockhounding email lists, and got several hints, but mostly second-hand – still, a better place to start. Also, we were told it was probably shale, not slate, that the nodules were in, and they were probably marcasite, not pyrite. Hey, still shiny things in black rock, right?

So Saturday morning, June 11th, we arranged to meet at 7AM at a mall parking lot to put together our carpool. Five of us showed up, and piled into 2 vehicles for the ~3-1/4 hour drive to just south of Sandusky, OH. The day was warm and bright, slightly hazy, but the drive was nice.

Jim (from a list) told us that the park mentioned was clearly visible from Route 20, and so it was, at the south (west?) end of town. We stopped, and sure enough, the access to the river was easy – access to the riverbanks, however, was NOT. And we hadn’t thought to bring waders, or Wellies, or water shoes, and wading on shale barefoot – especially shale covered in slimy slippery mossy-algae stuff – is NOT a good idea. So we decided to head off to the second recommended spot, and see if access was better.
	Ron (from another list) said he’d found a reference to a collecting site 2 miles north of the town on the Huron River at Lameraux Road. Looking this up on Yahoo! Maps, we found that we could take River Road north out of town to this Lameraux Road, so that’s what we did. The road goes over the river on a beautiful old pin-connected bridge – but there’s not a lot of room for parking. Lucky we only had 2 vehicles to have to find room for. Then we just had to find a way down to the river – not too hard on one side, pretty challenging on the other
As you can see in this view looking south from the bridge, there was nice riverbank on one side, and a great shale wall that looked pretty good for collecting on the other – with NO bank over there, in fact you can see the edge of the retaining wall between any access and the presumed good collecting spot. Darn! Need those waders again! The river isn’t too deep, only up to maybe knee-high, but if you don’t have appropriate footwear, wading isn’t fun. There was another shale cliff at the next bend north from the bridge, but that would have been an even further wade. And from what we could access of the banks, there was shale, but nothing much in it as we whacked it apart. Hmm – we decided to check out local knowledge to see if we were even in the ballpark.
We headed back into town, looking for either the police station, or a diner (for both local info and lunch). We found the police station first, right on the corner of Route 20 and the road that becomes the River Road. The nice officer who asked if he could help us said he didn’t know about any pyrite or rockhounding stuff, but that the best river access around was down in another larger park area where the local baseball and football fields are (“turn right on that road where the octagonal brick house is, and go on down to the ball fields, and the river is right there”). He also gave us directions to a local diner. But while lunch was starting to sound welcome, we headed for the river first!
	We found the park easily enough, and this was MUCH better riverside access! A broad bank, and plenty of shale to whack apart looking for shiny things, or even just walk along the river looking for shiny things – the pyrite / marcasite / whatever should maybe weather out, right?
But after an hour of walking up and down… and whacking apart LOTS of shale… we ended up with…
	piles of broken shale. MANY piles of broken shale. (No, we didn’t find treasure, that’s a quarter from my pocket for scale.) Sigh – nuthin’ to show for our efforts.
Then Ed said, “Hey, you want to see what I think we’re looking for? I found something in this rock.” Wow – NOT what we expected. I’ve seen shiny pyrite balls in slate, and shiny pyrite suns in slate, but this wasn’t shiny at all. But it was sure heavy for its size.
	He kept splitting it, and …
he found a few more.
We all started on neighboring rocks, but none of them had anything, so Ed said we should start on other chunks of his rock, and soon, we’d each found something.
	This is mine – along with a small piece of the one that I found by smashing it apart.
Here’s the one Brad found – still in matrix (with the ever-present quarter-for-scale).
	Here’s mine again, with part of the rock it popped out of, and a couple of the broken bits. They are shiny inside, so we knew we had the right stuff, regardless of what it looked like on the outside.

Since we’d each found something now from Ed’s one lucky rock, and found nothing else, nearby or not, we decided to call a halt to this part of our program. By this time, we were getting pretty hot and tired (“Oh, let’s go swing hammers on a hot, humid, 87-degree day, on a river, in bright sun, at noon – near the solstice!”) and even hungry, so we decided to head back to the diner to SIT DOWN and COOL OFF, and maybe even eat lunch. Which we did.

Then, since we weren’t exactly loaded down with the many pounds of our finds, we decided to check out a couple of Rock Shops that just happened to be on our way home. We stopped at Rocks ‘ N ‘ Chips in Cleveland, where some of us prudently looked around with our hands in our pockets, and some of us less prudently took along a charge card and found one or two or twelve things to buy with it. Then, further east on I-90, we stopped at Noema Gems in Austinburg, where much the same thing happened. Both stops were worthwhile, and fun, and did much to revive any spirits dampened by our very small success in finding what we went for.

In the week that followed our trip, apparently Ed was not convinced that we were really in the right place and kept on searching, and found another field trip report on the same locality at http://www.mcrocks.com/images/FTRStreeterJuly10,2004.html

Check it out – we were RIGHT THERE! Almost. These folks apparently had much better luck at nearly the same spot as our second stop by the bridge – but they came prepared to go wading, and got to the cliffs that we could only look at and groan. As Ed said, “Right church, wrong pew.” Well, live and learn, and we know more now if we decide to go back and try our luck again! It was still a fun day!



updated 16 August 2005