Oregon -- `Addictive' Agates Get Rockhounds Digging

MADRAS, Ore. - After a few minutes of digging, Bev Eustice unearthed her first thunderegg. Then another . . . and another . . . and another.

"I'm going panning for gold tomorrow," Eustice said with a smile during a summertime family outing that has become a central Oregon tradition - digging for 60 million-year-old rocks in the Priday agate beds at Richardson's Recreational Ranch, 14 miles northeast of Madras, (about 85 miles southeast of Portland).

"I'm getting the hang of this now," she said. "It's kind of fun and addicting."

Eustice and her husband, Steve, of Milwaukie, Ore., spent the day introducing their sons - Chris, 8, and Ben, 6 - to the pleasures of rockhounding.

Once their mother began unearthing rocks with regularity, the boys quit playing on the piles of rubble and started hammering out their own supply from the ranch's blue agate bed.

"You never know what you're going to come up with," Chris said.

Ben let his rock hammer talk for him. When the family was ready to leave, he had to be pried away from the agate beds where he was working to dig thundereggs formed during the Eocene Age.

Richardson's Recreational Ranch is one of those landmarks that refuses to change. It looks pretty much as it did when the most recent addition was made to the famous rock shop nearly a quarter-century ago.

Piles of uncut rock, purchased and delivered from around the world, cover the ground outside the store. Shoppers carry five-gallon buckets to make their purchases - $3 a pound for Mexican crazy lace, $3 a pound for Smokey Valley petrified wood, 50 cents a pound for simple black obsidian. A pile called Digger's Heaven goes for 30 cents a pound.

The inside of the store offers an exceptional display of polished rocks and gemstones.

"We're the largest business of its type in the world, considering the size of the area for digging, our sales shop and the specialty rock-working machines we build," said Johnnie Richardson, at 70 the patriarch of the family-run business.

Richardson gives tours of his rock shop to a steady flow of visitors from around the world, numbering 40,000 to 50,000 a year. He likes to point out the quirks, such as the bass mounted on the wall wearing a set of human teeth.

"It's so dry around here that our water doesn't have any moisture in it," Richardson said. "The fish grind down their teeth when they eat, so they have to get false teeth."

Richardson opened the door to the back room.

"We hatched one of them thundereggs and this is what we got," he said. Out ran a 6-week-old emu chick, already 18 inches tall and big enough to give the children a scare.

Of course, thundereggs aren't really capable of hatching anything but a good yarn.

Usually about the size of an orange, a thunderegg is an agate-filled nodule found mostly in western North America. When cut and polished, a thunderegg can rise to the quality of semi-precious jewelry. Some of the most productive beds are in Oregon's Jefferson and Crook counties.

A rancher named Leslie Priday discovered thundereggs lying on the ground of his ranch in 1928, thus giving the local agate its name. Commercial digging began soon afterward. Surrounding lands were consolidated into the Richardson Ranch 24 years ago, and the rock shop opened in its present form.

A piece of Priday plume agate, unearthed in the 1950s, once was valued at $5,000, but rocks dug nowadays are valued at 50 cents a pound. They sell for whatever the market will bear after they have been cut and polished.

One of the most unusual had a dark blue background with a white shape that resembled the space shuttle. A photo of the rock is on the store's wall.

"It's one thing to go to a store . . . to buy rocks," Bev Eustice said, "but to come here and dig them teaches him where they come from. They don't come out of the ground all cut and polished."

Said Chris, "It's a lot more fun to dig them out of the ground than to buy them at a store." ------------------------------- More information: Oregon Tourism, 775 Summer St. N.E., Salem, OR 97301-1282. Phone, 800-547-7842. www.traveloregon.com