Directions: Mitchell’s map and directions will get you there, but it gets a little confusing about midway along the powerline road with the gasline road sometimes separating and crossing each other. At one point the gasline road gets lost in a dune. 4WD is mandatory. The 2 mile hike into the quarry is quite moderate, taking us about 45 minutes. When you can see the old cabin, you are nearly there.
Date: February 2010
Notes: With the long drive on gravel roads and the hike, it takes almost 2 hours to get to the site from Ludlow, but it’s worth it. The strawberry onyx is mostly off-white with swirly pink patterns of varying shades. There is a lot of material available in the tailings and it wasn’t hard to dig out some nice sized cutting chunks from the hillside. There are some huge solid boulders, much too solid to try to break up. The main challenge was to avoid overloading our backs with too much nice onyx. There is a large amount of jasper available too, but given the choice of what to pack out, you’ll probably leave the jasper.
Tailings from the quarry - lots of good onyx
The old cabin at the quarry
Huge block of strawberry onyx
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