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Meteorite Hunting "Store Closed Gone Hunting" was sort of the theme we began with on Monday evening. The weather was looking more ominous but we knew from the past, that what happens on our side of the mountains is very different from what happens in the desert. We needed a place to stay the first night so we picked a place Paul had ridden motorcycles. Which as it turned out was only a couple miles from one of my haunts for shooting. We had decided to give
Lucerne Dry Lake a look even though it has been extensively hunted and yielded
few and very small meteorites. We headed down Highway 247 toward Barstow and without knowing it found ourselves
passing the BLM Field Office. I said "Paul I think that is the Old Woman in
the window." We wiped a slow u-turn, (which is the only kind you can safely
do in a long motor home) and pulled in the parking lot. We went in with cameras
in hand ready to capture this gem of the Mojave for ourselves.
The rain was imminent so we decided to stay in Barstow and drove to the KOA east of town. The only meal we ate out till the end of the trip was at Peggy Sue's Diner a 50's theme restaurant, it has been featured on TV several times. After dinner we talked away some hours with my laptop playing with pictures of the Old Woman and the scenes from the day. The rain was intermittently beating on the roof of the motor home, but never very hard and stopped before we went to bed. Looked like we would be able to get out on some dry lakes after all. During the next several days we hunted meteorites until around one o'clock then ate lunch and headed off hiking to somewhere else interesting in the area. Some pictures of how we occupied ourselves are included below.
We walked and hiked more than ten miles
for sure each day. Some of the lakes had obviously been hunted by others on
meteorite quests. It was mildly disconcerting that some of the lakes were
clearly posted prohibiting driving of any Friday we spent a killer
day of hiking in a long and winding rocky canyon. We worked our way all the way
up and out the top; where we ate a lunch of beef jerky, a chewy bar, and one of
our bottles of Gatorade. We took matching GPS
readings of where we ate lunch and then went off to find a new way back to camp. Up over the side of
the mountain and down the other and into one of the canyons that should be about
next to our camp. We hiked down into the canyon and about a mile in we ran into
drops off of more than ten feet that we were not equipped to negotiate. We hiked
one ridge over and tried again after another mile or so the same story. We were
about three hours from the camp now and had no liquid resources for another bad
turn.
The decision of what to do the last day
was the hardest. We could spent most of it on a road that we thought from the
map was paved but turned out was not. Or we could go an easy hour's drive to
another location and spend most of the day hunting.
We chose the latter and as it
turned out it was a great decision. About an hour into hunting our reward came as
team member Paul found a beautiful perfectly crusted individual. The rest of the day yielded no more specimens but we have a great place to go and look again. The tradition of The Meteorite Exchange is that the one who finds buys dinner on the way home. So it was dinner on Paul this trip, but the tab may be mine next time.
As it turned out the day before Paul found his I was standing on the side of a mountain and saw at my feet a very meteorite like rock. I picked it up and said that sure could be a fragment of meteorite. So like the well trained hunter I began my normal field identification routine. I got out my diamond file and removed a little corner. Examined the spot with my hand lens and saw no metal grains. I chose not to throw it away however, thinking it was surely the best meteor-wrong I had ever found. Well the months passed and it sat on my dresser. I had never tried a magnet on it trusting the field examination. But, something about it kept calling out meteorite in my mind so finally I did bring a magnet to it and Clack! The following Saturday I put it in the saw and sliced a end piece off. There they were, both metal grains and chondrules. So next vacation I paid my debt and paid for dinner the first night out. We found more meteorites on that trip but that's another story. Paul's -
El Mirage Dry Lake 001 -
H5 S3 W2 1.5gms - New Find |
| Copyright © 1996-2008 The Meteorite Exchange, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
There
under a Joshua Tree we heard a double sonic boom and looked up to see a stealth
bomber and chase fighter passing right overhead. They passed by and then came
streaking back with contrails. 
