On Easter we went ultimate Easter Egg hunting at the Dugway Geode Beds! Best Easter Eggs ever.
The geode beds in Utah are out in the West Desert. They are named Dugway due to the nearby Dugway Military Testing Site. They are truly out in the middle of no where! I convinced my Mom and Rob to come with us out to the Dugway Goede Beds on Easter. We woke up super early and packed up our geode hunting tools! We drove out past Tooele and south through the desert to get there. We took the actual Pony Express Trail for 50 miles! We saw many Pony Express stations including Simpson Springs, which is the most in-tact one. If you're planning on going out to the geode beds, be prepared for a 50 mile dirt road and make sure you have a spare tire. It's a really well groomed road, though.
On the Pony Express Trail, you can see wild horses most days! We happened to come across a whole herd that crossed the road all around us! They were so cool. I love seeing the variety of colors of the horses.
After a few hours, we finally made it to the Dugway Geode Beds! The geode beds are so cool. If you head out there, make sure to bring a shovel, glasses to protect your eyes, a pick, a hammer, a chisel, and plenty of necessary things like sunscreen, full tank of gas, water, and snacks. It was pretty hot out there for April. The geodes aren't that deep, and you can continue holes that have already been dug to find some more. We used our picks the most, to break up the ground. If you just want a couple, you can look on the surface and find some without digging!
Geodes are rocks that formed thousands of years ago, when prehistoric Lake Bonneville covered Utah. They were created when gas was trapped in the lakebed beneath the surface. The trapped gas has remained in the geodes ever since, until we opened them, and created really cool crystals like quartz, chalcedony, and sometimes more rare minerals like amethyst. We collected mostly druzy smoky quartz! Smoky quartz is native to Utah. We opened a few there, but brought most home to cut with a diamond blade saw. A lot of people leave fragments all over too, so you can find already opened ones.
There are two main pits at Dugway. Pit A, and Pit B. They are marked by wooden stakes at the intersection to both. You have to drive in a ways past the original sign to get there. There are some smaller pits around them, but we didn't have any luck at those. We spent most of our time at Pit A. We dug just below the surface and found a ton! There were also lots on the surface, and lots of already opened geodes. We headed over to Pit B as well just to see it, and ended up collecting a lot from the surface there. I'd spend more time at Pit B next time. There were lots of people out there with us digging on Easter! We made sure not to take too many, so the resource can be available in the future.
Once we got back home to Cache Valley, we cut open some geodes with our diamond blade tile saw! After a while, it got more complicated to cut them and hard to not break them. So we got a chisel and hammer and cracked them open. We got some really pretty ones! I was hoping to get one with a cluster rose of crystals inside, but that is really rare so I didn't have my hopes up. Until I cracked open a small one and it had it! The most common color is a gray/blue/indigo smoky quartz. We got mostly that. But we were lucky and got some white and pink as well! We still have a few to crack open. I also picked up a couple already broken ones that were caked with dirt hoping to wash them off and find some pretty crystals. They were gorgeous! I just brushed them with water and a nylon brush.
I'll probably eventually grind and polish my favorite ones with my grinder. But for now I love all of them! They're so pretty. So worth the drive, and I'm glad we got enough since a lot we brought home were solid rocks. They're so much prettier in person, too. Dugway rocks!
Thanks for reading! See a reel from our trip and more on my Instagram.
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