Montana, Rocks, and Cows

I have hundreds of pounds of Montana agate, and it all came from just one rock hunting trip to Montana when I was just a pebble pup. There are two take-away's.

1. About sixty years ago, there were a LOT of Montana Agates that could be found just laying around.

2. My dad was a hard-working, no nonsense rock hunter.

The Yellowstone Valley of Montana is where these agates are found. Today, and back then, most people find them on the gravel bars in the rivers.

(By the way … the Yellowstone River experienced an historic flood in the spring of 2022. It’s the kind of event that can turn over the gravel bars where some of the best Montana agate can be found. We may have some great agate agate hunting in years. If you can confirm – or deny – my guess, let me know.)

Most Montana agate is similar to the piece shown above – milky white agate with brown and black markings. But some is quite different. The thing that makes it “Montana Agate” isn’t what the agate looks like. It’s that all of it has tumbled down the Yellowstone River for hundreds of miles. That makes it all a river rounded agate that usually has a fairly thick coating from the river and that is found in the Yellowstone River valley. Often, the coating stops you from having any idea what the interior is like. My theory is that all of it eroded out of formations that don’t even exist today. And some of those formations had different rocks.

My dad had a different idea about hunting the elusive rock. Aware that the gravel bars in the river had been hunted to a fare-thee-well for fifty years – even fifty years ago when we were there – he decided that we might have better luck in the hills above the river. In the trip we made, we never even got within a rifle shot of the river. Those hills are actually ancient gravel bars and there was a lot of agate up there too.

Back then, the hills were open range. We spent about three weeks slowly traveling down the valley and I can't recall even talking to any locals. I think my dad would visit houses and tell them what he was doing – if there was one within sight. But nobody ever objected to us parking the trailer for a night or two while he jeeped around looking for agates. How times have changed! We would probably get shot the first night these days.

But by the end of our trip, we had the truck loaded with just about as much rock as it would carry.

My dad's good friend Wayne Johnston and his wife and family were with us on this trip. My dad managed to bring back almost twice as much rock as Wayne collected. I spent my time, unsuccessfully, trying to talk Wayne's daughter into giving me a kiss.

One reason Wayne didn't get as many rocks is that he spent a lot of his time making one of the funniest home movies I ever saw. He used the single frame feature on his camera to take pictures of my dad so it looked like he was rocketing around the hills at ninety miles an hour.

Wayne was a funny guy. The movie was the hit of the rock club meeting when we got home again.

My sister was with us on this trip too. Since it was open range, we would occasionally encounter a few cows. My sister first claimed to be horrified. "They have big horns!" My dad told her that he would give her twenty dollars (a LOT of money then) if she could get close enough to a cow to touch it with a rock hammer. She spent the rest of the trip chasing cows up dirt roads. She never got the $20. Wayne got single frame picture videos of her chasing cows too.

That's the way rock hunting was back in the good old days!