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GEM CITY ROCK and MINERAL SOCIETY

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Trip to Richardson's Recreational Ranch, Oregon

	So after we spent the early part of the day at Mt. St. Helens, we collected the truck and drove east through the Columbia River Gorge -- very scenic, and we took a few minutes to stop at two (of half-a-dozen) waterfalls long enough to take a few photos. But we were later than planned leaving Portland and we wanted to get to The Dalles (rhymes with ‘pals’) before stopping for the night.
	It was amazing to see that while we’d been driving through lush, damp, almost-rainforest the evening before in the lower Columbia River Gorge, now that we were heading up to the plateau to the east of the Cascades, we were in high desert – really quite dry in the rain shadow of the Cascades.
Now, there may be some of you who haven’t heard of Richardson’s, but it is actually pretty famous in rockhounding and especially rock-sphere-making circles. They are the home of the Priday thunder-egg beds, and they also build sphere-cutting machines – as well as making spheres of all sizes, from all kinds of rock. So in addition to digging your own thunder-eggs in any of 4 currently working beds, you can shop their “yard” full of piles of rock of all types from all over the world that they import to cut spheres from. You can see scattered chunks that they’ve cut cores from to make spheres, but there’s plenty that they haven’t gotten to yet that they’ll sell by the pound (see their web site for lists & prices). Then they’ll sell you a sphere machine so you can go home and make your own – though the machines for sale only cut spheres up to 9” or so at a guess, whereas some of the machines they have hidden in the back workroom will cut spheres over 2 feet in diameter! And they have just a few for sale! So being the sphere-oholic that I am, I really, really wanted to stop for at least a little while, and the only time we could work it in our limited schedule was on the way home. So we left The Dalles early Wednesday morning heading south on Route 197, and got to Richardson’s a little after 10:00AM.
	The entrance to the Ranch is about 11 miles north of Madras on US 197. There are directions to the Ranch on their own web site, Richardson's Recreational Ranch, and also on Tim Fisher's Ore-Rock-On web site on Oregon Rockhounding. You turn in at the sign, bump over 3 miles of lesser paved road, turn at another sign, go a bit further on gravel road, and finally come upon a group of buildings with big piles of rock out front. Hmmm -- must be the place!
Now, we really didn’t have a whole lot of time to dawdle on the drive cross-country, so I budgeted only two hours for the stop, which some other people had said was enough to dig a fair amount of agate, and $100 for digging / shopping (hey, I may be broke, but this was likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity). As it happened, they’d had enough rain that the digging areas were closed, so we couldn’t dig at all – but that didn’t interfere with checking out the shop, or shopping the ‘yard’! As it happened, Brad amused himself watching me drool over rocks for a while, then went to study the maps to decide whether we would go back north to the Interstate or should just take the scenic route east on Route 26 across the Oregon High Desert (which we ended up doing). Then he decided it might be time to get going, and started nudging me along, and we actually ended up back on the road not long after 2:00PM. So, okay, it was a little bit over 2 hours. (I also exceeded my monetary budget, but by not as large a margin, and that’s all I’m going to say.)
The Yard:

The Shop: (Note Quarter for scale in pic 2)

WOW! (Note Quarter for scale in pics 1 & 3)

I did not buy this huge tourmaline-in-quartz, or the massive chunk of rose quartz, or the $5000 amethyst geode. No room in the truck (grin).