Drop-Bears and Drop-Kicks: 2013

Sometime in January 2013, someone decided that it would be wonderful if we were all to go fossicking out at the gemfields past Emerald. I am not one to pass up a road trip with the chance of finding sapphires, so if course I HAD to go.
It was fun, even if we didn't really find anything, but then again, I didn't really put in that much effort. Too many cool things to see and do!

First stop was in Biloela to get our fossicking licences and assorted paperwork for the trip. There are designated fossicking areas out at the gemfields, with the towns of Sapphire and Rubyvale contained within their own respective fossicking areas. We ended up at the Glenalva fields, a bit out of town, but it meant a shorter dig to find the sapphire bearing wash.

The sapphires lie in beds of gravel and silt, called wash, from long gone waterways. Depending on where you are fossicking the wash can be anywhere from 30cm to 2m underground from the topsoil, and even if you do get down to the wash, the wash varies in thickness. So finding the 'perfect' spot can be a little tricky.

At Glenalva, where we were based, the wash was fairly shallow...

But when we went to the Willows area, the wash was much deeper underground (~1m).

Digging to get to the wash, and even digging around in the wash, is incredible difficult. There is very little soil, the ground is mostly made up of billy cobbles, round smooth, microcrystalline silicic stones, which are lovely and hard and IMPOSSIBLE TO DIG THROUGH.
We ended up folding after going to a service station for fuel and finding that they sold bags of wash (with a free cut stone). The bags from the service station were large, but mostly wash with very few sapphires. Sapphires that were in the bags were very small and just chips and slabs off much larger stones.
Nevertheless, it was better than anything we had found so far.

After we had milked our wash bags of every last sapphire chip, we went back to fossicking ourselves, but gave up not long after. We headed back into town the next day, and had a squiz around a jewellers, where the sold bags of hopper stones, wash that gone through a hopper to separate heavy stones from light stones, so it was guaranteed that we would get some sapphires, as well as zircons.
These bags were WAAAAY better than the ones from the servo, the stones were whole, and much larger.
So, if you're ever out at the gemfields, make sure you get the bags from the jewellers, NOT the servo.

Now for picture spam.

The natural crystal shape of a sapphire is a hexagonal bypyramid, which you can sort of see in the blue chip above (the chip is from the servo bag).

Greeny sapphire from the jeweller bag.

One of the real highlight of the trip for me was the sheer bucketloads of lizards! There were heaps of Carlia running around that I can't be bothered to identify, as well as a couple of dragons.
Cue lizard spam. Shitty pics, I know.

How can you say no to this cutie?

Aforementioned dragon.
And of course, there were the ever ubiquitous Litoria.

Brace yourselves for shitty landscape and sunset pics. My external I keep all my good photos on died, so now I have to use my shitty copies :I

Decayed volcanic ash (I think)

We headed to a place called Washpool one day to sieve our bags of wash. We don't know if this is actually it, but meh, we used it for washing anyway.

The sort of territory we had to set up cap in. It's not smooth at all, it is pockmarked by giant fossicking holes and dotted with piles of rubble. And all that grown on them are spinifex and my favourite thornbush Carissa ovata.

Henry made it to the gemfields!

Yep, there was moss. Weird.

The gully/washout thing on one side of our camp.

These trees surrounded our camp. Pretty sure they are a type of boobialla, genus Myoporum.

Our super organised, tidy campsite.

Michael and Ryan are hard at work at out handmade wash station while I creep.

Blue banded bee! Native, and very cool.

My haul of sapphires at the end of a sort of productive week out west.

Deepwater National is just south of Agnes Water on the Discovery Coast. There are extensive dune systems, with thick coastal vegetation dominated mainly by grevilleas and banksias. Springs Beach and Deepwater are two of my favourite beaches, mainly because the dunes are so huge and there are plenty of game trails winding through them, perfect for exploring. Lots of cool plants and animals too.
Deep water has three camping areas, Flat Rock, Middle Rock, and Wreck Rock.
We headed out to Deepwater on a lovely cloudy rainy day, to have a squiz at the camping sites to decide where we wanted to camp if we ever camped there. And of course we went to splash through the puddles and have a fish.

Once again, I was in Pikey's car.