For my second day in Cedar City we had a chill morning after our late night collecting UV minerals, plus I had a meeting and a proposal to get out of the way. After lunch we set off to the southwest of Cedar City, stopping at a minor trailhead along our dirt backroad for the short quarter-mile jaunt to Lion's Mouth, a broad alcove set into a knoll of tuff. The alcove was framed by juniper and had a far-reaching view over the scrubby grasslands beyond. It could easily protect a hundred people from rain. Along the back wall of the Lion's Mouth is why we stopped- a hundred-odd pictographs in multiple colors and motifs recognizable, abstract, or indecipherable. The arrangement was quite interesting and deliberate with a central large magical figure emitting beam-like lines in two directions, seeming to either ensnare or create all the other glyphs. It was an interesting spot. Were it not for the marring modern graffiti and the distant strip of road I can imagine the view has been unchanged for centuries. After a time enjoying the quiet and solitude of the spot we returned to the car and carried on down the lonely road towards Holt Canyon.
Through a small place called Pinto and onto a maze of roads of decreasing quality, we finally made it to the scrubby rolling hills of the Holt Canyon jasper and agate collecting area. I'll admit I was only mildly interested in jasper before we started collecting. Ryan had been here before and explored a bit. Apparently there was some prospecting done with a bulldozer looking for gold associated with the jasper which accounted for the roads and random scrapes. I've looked for jasper in California before- always requiring extensive walking and a low collection rate because the sites are so picked over. Here it was everywhere! Nearly every rock was jasper or agate; half were perfectly good; in an attempt to be selective I probably picked up every 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 rocks to put in my bucket. More efficient than carrying a water sprayer, Ryan and I probably licked hundreds of rocks to see their colors and patterns, which were impressively variable from straight up blue agates to banded red/orange jaspers to green/red mossy jasp-agate and everything in between. At the first site I did all my collecting in an area less than 1 acre, turning up buckets of material. Two notable things occurred. First I noticed a very small juvenile cottontail bunny that I managed to catch- cute and fragile. Also I spotted a nice grapefruit-sized piece of jasper that I proceeded to dig out of the ground; by the time I finished it was a 114lb boulder worth keeping, requiring a team effort of me rolling it, driving the car closer, and Ryan doing the final haul into the car.
We drove a few minutes further up the road to check out a second area. Amazing there were even better and more variable jasper and agates here. Our goal was to hike down a slope and check out diggings on the opposite side of the wash but we barely made it 300ft from the car because we couldn't walk past such neat pieces! We could see the storm approaching us from the horizon and the hazy atmosphere and virga telling us it may soon turn torrential on us. When we felt the blast of cold wind we hurriedly made our way back to the car, calling the collecting done for the day. Somehow it did not rain on us but it was a moody drive back.
Somehow I managed to collect 280 lbs of jasper and agate! Another fun day with neat sights and spoiled unpicked over rock collecting. We had a nice chill evening as the weather came in. It snowed lightly as I went to bed. In the morning we found a winter wonderland in mid-May!
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