Striking mix of vivid brown and orange brecciated coloring on this chunky piece of Lavic Jaspagate. A great piece for cabbing, slabbing, tumbling, and jewelry making.
4” x 3” x 2” 1 Lbs, 1.5 Oz.
Jasper DescriptionJasper, an aggregate of microgranular quartz and/or cryptocrystalline chalcedony and other mineral phases, is an opaque, impure variety of silica, usually red, yellow, brown or green in color; and rarely blue. The common red color is due to iron inclusions.
Lavic Siding Jasper* If you ask any rockhound where the Mojave's most colorful jasper can be found, Lavic Siding will be on the short list. For decades, rockhounds have driven down Lavic Lake Road 30 miles east of Barstow to access this remarkable location. Red, yellow, and orange jasper with blue and white quartz stringers is still found in profusion as float in this spot.
The Lavic Jasper beds are old alluvial deposits that have washed down from the South Cady Mountains. The deposits are sort a conglomerate of volcanic rocks like basalt, a decomposed ash sediment, and of course, the harder quartz minerals. In places, the untouched deposit looks almost like cement with included jasper and agate. It is a natural in situ alluvial deposit of volcanic origin.
Lavic Siding is one of many old railroad stops that used to feature buildings, eateries, and motels until about the 1940's or so, as determined by some dump digging conducted at the site. No buildings are left, just the dumps, a mess of old junk, and of course, the place name. Some of the sidings were just places to park RR cars.
The Lavic Lake basaltic volcanic field was considered to contain four Holocene cinder cones, three in the Lavic Lake area and a fourth in the Rodman Mountains 20 km to the west (Miller, 1989), but later work by USGS scientists revised that evaluation to late-Pleistocene.
Pisgah Crater, a 100-m-high cinder cone, is the most prominent feature of the field. Nearby vents were the source of dominantly pahoehoe lava flows that traveled 8 km SE to Lavic Lake and in a narrow lobe over that traveled over alluvial-fan and playa-lake deposits as far as 18 km W of the vent. More recent work indicates a convergence of dates for Pisgah Crater from paleomagnetic, Ar-Ar, and cosmogenic helium at about 25,000 years BP (Reid 2002, pers. comm.). Another very youthful looking, but undated cinder cone and lava field is located in the Sunshine Peak area of the Lava Beds Mountains, south of Pisgah Crater.
Much of the jasper in the Lavic area washed down from the South Cady Mountains to the north.
* SpiritBearRocks description from their Etsy site.
Jasper CompositionCategory Mineral
Formula(repeating unit) SiO2 (with varying impurities)Crystal system HexagonalCrystal class Quartz (Chalcedony)
IdentificationColor Most commonly red, but may be yellow, brown, green or (rarely) blueCleavage IndiscernibleMohs hardness 6.5–7Luster VitreousDiaphaneity OpaqueSpecific gravity 2.5–2.9Refractive index 1.54–2.65Birefringence 0.009
Jasper in the BibleAccording to legend, when Jesus hung on the cross, his blood dripped on the deep green jasper below his feet, staining it with telltale deep red spots. By the late second and early third centuries, scenes of the crucifixion, sometimes with a written inscription, were carved into bloodstone amulets.
Jasper is mentioned throughout the Bible. In the Book of Revelation, the Apostle John describes the New Jerusalem as anything but a drab, dull, boring city, because it radiates God's glory. It is bright and beautiful like a rare jewel that shines brilliantly. Perhaps the word jasper describes a quartz with shades of green, blue, and red; literal jasper, of course, is opaque rather than translucent. The jasper stone is mentioned in Revelation 4:3 as one of the jewels that describe God's appearance. In this part of Revelation, one can see that John is struggling to explain what he sees in terms others can understand, using the most relevant images he can think of. Comparing the shining beauty of this new city to gemstones is an attempt to describe the indescribable.
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