Hi all
I have been rockhounding on and off for many years, all round the world but mostly in the US in a number of areas, including a fair bit in Colorado at crystal peak and Mount Antero for smokey quartz, amazonite and fluorite. I am a technical geek and at one stage I downloaded all mine locations in US (ok mine locations and hot springs) from the USGS loaded this onto a laptop/GPS combination and spent 6 months driving around rockhounding by day and hot spring by night. (well that was the aim)
I have been starting my research here in Australia now that I am home, but so far we don't have as good data available from government agencies here in Australia, but we do have some including:
layered mineral maps that work well with google earth,
a reasonable gov tool to find out what a particular mine was doing once you know its name,
a number of other data points available from disparate disorganized agencies. (oh from an USGS.gov or even mindat.org here in Australia).
and a mythical gov list of all mines with GPS locations but I have not yet tracked it down.
I have have a good mapping / satellite / GPS setup where I can search an area by map, visually by satellite and by available data sources to add data from multiple sources into a picture of an area.
I enjoy hunting for mineral formations / fossil fields and always travel with a rockpick in my car so I am looking for any information or others in the central coast NSW or any area not too far away that would like to do anything from digging a known area, to walking the streams in a hopeful area to see what we can find, to internet research of an area.
david a
I have been rockhounding on and off for many years, all round the world but mostly in the US in a number of areas, including a fair bit in Colorado at crystal peak and Mount Antero for smokey quartz, amazonite and fluorite. I am a technical geek and at one stage I downloaded all mine locations in US (ok mine locations and hot springs) from the USGS loaded this onto a laptop/GPS combination and spent 6 months driving around rockhounding by day and hot spring by night. (well that was the aim)
I have been starting my research here in Australia now that I am home, but so far we don't have as good data available from government agencies here in Australia, but we do have some including:
layered mineral maps that work well with google earth,
a reasonable gov tool to find out what a particular mine was doing once you know its name,
a number of other data points available from disparate disorganized agencies. (oh from an USGS.gov or even mindat.org here in Australia).
and a mythical gov list of all mines with GPS locations but I have not yet tracked it down.
I have have a good mapping / satellite / GPS setup where I can search an area by map, visually by satellite and by available data sources to add data from multiple sources into a picture of an area.
I enjoy hunting for mineral formations / fossil fields and always travel with a rockpick in my car so I am looking for any information or others in the central coast NSW or any area not too far away that would like to do anything from digging a known area, to walking the streams in a hopeful area to see what we can find, to internet research of an area.
david a
