How To Find Agates On The Beach

Whether it'due south forth the shorelines of Lake Superior or on the beaches of the groovy Pacific Northwest, agate hunting is an incredibly pop pastime for many rockhounds. And rightfully then!

Available is such a wide variety of colors, many agates are naturally tumbled and can be plucked from the beach in beautiful gemstone condition, making them the crown jewel of any rockhounds collection.

Agates, yet, tin be very illusive, even to the experienced rockhound. So if y'all're planning on heading out to endeavour your luck at finding a pocket full of natures tumbled gemstones, consider taking a look at some of these agate hunting tips I put together for you.

For Lake Superior Agate Hunters!

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For Northwest Agate Hunters!

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My Best Agate Hunting Tips

1. Look For Beaches That Have Exposed Gravel Beds

My favorite location to look for agates is along the beaches in Oregon. But regardless of where your favorite agate hunting location is, you lot should always go on an middle out for exposed gravel beds.

Many of these gravel beds are completely covered past sand the bulk of the time. Only when the ocean does make up one's mind to remove the sand, these newly exposed gravel beds can exist a hotspot for agates.

2. Use Winter To Your Reward

At that place are a couple reasons why I like to hunt for agates during the winter months.

First, if you're in an area where crowds tend to congregate, you'll often find yourself completely lone during the colder, rainier winter months. This means more agates for you!

Second, some of the largest storms pass through during the winter. These strong storms are what move sand and gravel around. Agates that are typically under h2o or covered by sand are brought to shore and exposed during these storms.

iii. Keep The Sunday Behind Y'all

Effort to hunt for agates with the sun at your back. If it'south non possible to have the sun at your back, then keeping the sun directly in forepart of you also works well. Agates are translucent, and if you can become the bending of the sun merely right, it will announced as if the agates are filled with sunlight, illuminating them and making them much easier to spot.

In improver, agate hunting can be best in the early forenoon or after afternoon and evening hours when the sun is lower in the sky. I've found that this lower angle of the sun helps illuminate the agates causing them to "glow" and make them much easier to find as they stand out from the balance of the surrounding rocks.

4. Use A Sand Scoop

As rockhounds and agate hunters, we spend hours upon hours walking creeks, beaches and shorelines looking for agates and other natural treasures. How many times in a day do nosotros bend down to investigate a possible detect or a pretty rock? Endless times!

That'southward why I started using a beach sand scoop. The i I utilise and recommend is the Sand Dipper.

The Sand Dipper is a stainless steel 'basket' embankment sand scoop that'south attached to the terminate of a telescoping aluminum rod. All you have to do is extend the pole out to your desired length, scoop up your agate and the wire mesh basket strains out the sand and other debris. All that'southward left is your agate, seashell or other treasure y'all wanted to pick upwardly! And you never had to bend over to go it!

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five. Have Patience

"Skillful things come to those who wait". This statement has never been more true than with agate hunting. Speaking from experience, you could be in the middle of i of the all-time agate hunting areas known to human being and even so non observe an agate for a very long time.

Don't think that you'll exist able to walk out to your rock collecting area, spend 15 minutes looking and look to walk out with a pocket full of agates.

Program on spending at least an hour or more looking for agates. Of class you may find some much sooner than that, but don't plan on it. Plan on spending a little bit of time searching before any start jumping out at you.

half-dozen. Don't Walk Too Slow

Hunting agates tin can at times get overwhelming. As nosotros stroll forth the beach or shoreline, we desire to look at every single thing on the ground that catches our heart. As a result, we cease, choice up the item and investigate. Then we continue on, trying to run across everything every bit we walk along.

The problem with this is our brains brainstorm to "shut down" as a result of the visual stimulus overload, which means we can easily over await the agates that are literally right in that location in front end of the states.

To gainsay this, endeavor walking a little faster, keeping your eyes open for only the agates, and aid train your brain to filter out the other "pretty stones".

7. Conviction In Knowing What To Look For

There'due south a story on miningjournal.com that talks about a husband and wife who spent 20 years hunting agates together. While the married man was successful at finding agates during their outings, the wife on the other hand had never found a single agate.

Worried that the wife would surrender, the husband decided to constitute a few agates on the beach for her to observe.

Strangely enough, the wife never found those agates! Somewhen, later passing past them multiple times, she finally found all of the agates the husband had planted. And now she has been successfully spotting agates ever since.

This only goes to bear witness that once she became confident in knowing what she was looking for, she was able to showtime spotting agates successfully.

viii. If All Else Fails, Dig!

Some other successful strategy for finding agates is to spend some time digging. If y'all've got the energy to do so, digging down through the different layers of rock piles can yield really good results if done in the right spot.

Since I adopt to walk along the shoreline looking for agates, I ordinarily reserve this method if I'm really late to the beach and the crowds have already had a hazard to scour the hunting grounds.

9. Avert The Crowds

I've mentioned this before, but I want to reiterate how important information technology is. If you can avoid the crowds and other rock collectors, yous're going to take much improve success. There's a couple things y'all can do to help avert the crowds and ensure that you lot're the first ane to discover the agates.

First, try to go early in the morn when other agate collectors are withal sipping on their coffee and reading the news. The early bird gets the worm has never been more true than for agate hunting.

Second, effort to admission beaches that the crowds generally do non flock to. Some of my well-nigh successful agate hunting trips have been on canoeing trips where we made our mode to beaches that were seldom visited by humans. These beaches are typically littered with not but agates, but jasper, petrified woods and other collectible rocks.

10. Bring An Agate Along With Yous

I read about this agate hunting tip on Reddit.com and really liked it, so I wanted to be sure to include it on this list of agate hunting tips.

If you're hunting in a new area or are just new to hunting for agates in general, bring an agate forth with yous from home. When you get there, drop it on a gravel bar to become a sense of how it looks lying at that place among the other rocks and debris.

Doing this is going to help railroad train your eye to pick the agate out from the balance of the gravel. In one case y'all accept your eye attuned to the look of the agate, yous'll exist able to spot them regardless of their colour or shape.

What Are Agates?

Agates are those translucent banded rocks you find on beaches and gravel bars. Agates are a diverseness of microcrystalline quartz. They're typically used equally a semiprecious stone when it'south a desirable quality and color.

Agates typically form past the deposition of silica from groundwater in the cavities of igneous rocks. This is why sometimes some of the larger agates you lot find have polish, round surfaces. Essentially, the igneous rock the agate formed inside of was a mold for the agate. Fortunately, the country of Oregon is prime for creating incredible looking agates.

How Do Yous Identify Agates On The Beach?

One of the most interesting things I've noticed near agates are their many different colors. You tin detect any color you could imagine, likewise as some that are much more than rare and unusual. Each individual agate has a completely unique appearance too due to the dissimilar minerals in its composition which ultimately creates this astonishing variety of colors!

The all-time way to place an agate on a beach is past looking at its opacity (translucent quality). All agates have translucency when they are held up towards natural calorie-free, but some have a higher degree of transparency than others. Opacity can exist attributed to many factors including mineral content and crystalline form, so it's important non merely for identification but also considering information technology helps tell what kind of agate you've found.

Related: Tin You Utilise Bleach To Make clean Agates?

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