sammer510 [none/use name]

George Carlin

It’s good when you do it right but pretty much everyone does it wrong

A little of both. I do research online and find like old maps and directions from forum posts and stuff like that to find specific spots that are already known to others. Once you go out to a few spots and know what the desirable stuff looks like you’ll start to notice it when you see it even when you’re not in an area specifically known for having the material. I collect a lot of agate nodules that grew in amygdaloidal basalt and they have a very distinct look on the outside. So once I went to a few places that have tons of them all over now I notice them when I’m walking around in the hills and stuff. Luckily for me I live near the greater Los Angeles area which has lots of relatively accessible areas where you could spend all day digging up bloodstones and geodes and selenite and howlite and opal and even fossils

Yeah I like dig up rocks and cut and polish them. Mostly agate and jasper

Lapidary art

The fucking ridiculous natural beauty everywhere? I live in the most soulless of the soulless suburbs of Los Angeles and if I left my house right now and didn’t stop for anything I could be standing beneath the biggest tree in the world in just 4 hours. Or if I want to see the oldest trees in the world I can go roughly the same distance and do that instead. I could be at the trailhead to climb the highest peak in the contiguous US in 3 hours and on my way there I would see an ancient basalt waterfall where obsidian litters the ground, the Grand Canyon of the Mojave where semiprecious gems flow out of the mountains, lakes, rivers, the Sierra Nevadas, Death Valley, it’s ridiculous. Every fucking state has traffic and suburbs but I’ll go to my grave arguing that we can’t be beat for scenery.