Open-Space Odyssey -- Meteorite Hunt In Eastern Washington Introduces New Vistas, New Friends

As we set out on a Saturday morning, I was mildly amused by the idea of hunting meteorites - willing to go along, but not enthused enough to pop for the $15-per-day rental for a metal detector.

Serious seekers of fallen space junk use metal detectors. So do people who hunt lost change on public beaches. Maybe in some other lifetime, I said.

However, an outing to Eastern Washington seemed like a good excuse to go camping in the sunshine.

The friend who'd invited us promised that the University of Washington geology professor leading the outing was talented in the singing of bawdy drinking songs around a campfire. Say no more; we signed on.

But as we prepared to rendezvous with our fellow meteorite hunters that morning, my interest was fanned. Over breakfast, I read a Smithsonian magazine article, "Mining for meteorites" (March 1999), which our friend had passed along.

I learned about professional meteorite hunters who show up, wads of cash in hand, whenever meteorites have thumped to earth in someone's back yard.

There is a voracious market for these things, not only among scientists, but from wealthy New Age trendoids eager to acquire their own extraterrestrial pet rock.

"The most valuable type, a dislodged piece of the moon, sells for $25,000 a gram - 2,500 times the price of gold," Smithsonian reported.

My eyes widened.

This hunt would be near where two of Washington's five known meteorites had been found. This wasn't just a whimsical wander in the sagebrush - we were going to a virtual Sutter's Mill!

So who needs Lotto tickets? We drove eastward. The edge of the ice

That afternoon, our string of cars lined the narrow shoulder of a lonely two-lane blacktop in Douglas County farm country. My wife, our 7-year-old daughter and I were among the 20 eager hunters gathered at road's edge around a wiry, mustachioed man in tan dungarees. He waved an arm back down toward the base of the small rise on which we stood.

"Down there, where that first house is, that's where the edge of the ice was 15,000 years ago," said our leader, professor Tony Irving.

We looked out on a broad plateau. Pillowy, sculpted fields of green wheat rippled in the breeze. On the far horizon, patches of snow spangled purple mountains. We'd driven 20 minutes northeast of Waterville, the county seat, after a stop at the county museum to inspect the two meteorites found in nearby farm fields earlier this century.

"Where we're standing," Irving said, "we'd be embedded in ice, and there would be more than a mile of ice above us." He paused for impact, then spoke again with the conviction of a prophet.

"This is where the meteorites are going to be: from here - " he chopped his hand downward to mark where he stood " - and northward."

We were there to test his theory: that the glacier from the last ice age would have concentrated meteorites in its moraine.

The sagebrush-dotted hummock where we stood, pocked with boulders the size of espresso stands, contrasted sharply with the wheat fields. It was easy to believe that some awesome force had changed this land.

We drove to a fallow field on which we had the landowner's permission to search - on condition that any meteorites we found would go to a museum. Quick results - of a sort

Within 6 feet of their parked car, Jay Charleston of Issaquah and his 7-year-old son, Scott, heard a strong beep from their rented metal detector. They quickly stooped to dig with a trowel.

Two minutes of work and they came up with -

"A combine tooth," said Carl Thomsen, the farmer whose land we stood on. "Probably from the 1920s or so, from the looks of it," he added, eying the rusty, clawlike piece of metal the size of a man's thumb.

We fanned out. Abandoning dignity, one searcher trolled a hefty magnet behind him on a rope tied around his waist. For the next few hours, the gently sloping field of shin-high grass and blue lupine was disturbed only by occasional excited digging with small garden tools; the wind's sigh and meadowlark's trill yielded only to intermittent "meep, meep, meeps" from excited metal detectors.

"Oh, we got a big hit, we got a big hit!" red-headed Scott yelled to his father as their detector shrilled again.

A few minutes' digging yielded only a few dusty stones - good for lobbing at crows, but not much more.

"We need to keep the detector scanning," Jay Charleston told his son. "We've only covered one billionth of the Earth's surface today, and that ain't going to do it!"

We learned you don't just stroll out in a field and pick up the first meteorite you come across. There's lots of walking and digging and sifting - and countless dry holes.

A few minutes later, young Scott unearthed more rusty metal - more of that combine?

"That thing must have been a rust bucket," his father said with a laugh.

"We're going to have a whole combine by the time we're done," suggested my wife, Barbara.

"Yeah, we're going to put it together and drive it home!" quipped Tony Irving, the merest hint of frustration in his voice.

We found no meteorites that day, or the next.

"There are meteorites out here," Irving said, his jaw set, as we loaded into our cars to head home. "Of course, we had to leave some."

We were no richer, except for the experience. We got a taste of Washington's wide-open spaces. They don't get much wider, or opener, than Douglas County. And we made some new friends: people with metal detectors.

Maybe we'll meet them on a beach sometime.