Rock Collecting at Night

​By Brian Bondy
Images courtesy of Jim J and BD Bondy
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Why, you might ask, would you want to go rock collecting in the dark. Because we were looking for rocks that fluoresce.

Last night Carol and I and our friends Jim & Nada went for a pic-nic dinner past La Madera, towards Petaca. We stopped at the side of the road and had dinner, waited for the sun to set, and then went down the hillside to look for rocks. Some rocks you can see in the light are interesting, small geodes with crystals inside, or a banded quartz rock that is pretty.

Some rocks though, don’t look particularly interesting during the day, but under UV light, they fluoresce brightly, fiery reds, yellows and purples. Some can be quite beautiful, spectacular even, under the right light.

We had special black light flashlights, and we walked around in the dark shining our UV lights on the ground. Some rocks really light up well, and Jim’s light was a different wavelength than mine. Jim’s light was fantastic and lit up some of the rocks as if they had a fire inside them. We spent about about 45 minutes looking around that area before moving to another hillside along the road.

This time the hillside went up. Shining the flashlights on the hillside lit up some bright veins of calcite in the wall. On the ground were some wonderfully bright pieces that lit up yellow, white and blue. While walking along the road something different lit up brightly.

Scorpion Picture

It looks ominous, but it was pretty small, only about an inch long, but plain as can be. I knew scorpions fluoresced as I was in an Ace Hardware in Phoenix several years back and they were selling UV flashlight for that purpose. They even had a tank with a couple of scorpions inside that you could try the flashlights out.
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After about a half hour at this site it was time to go home. On the way back we wondered at every hillside and road cut, what a UV flashlight would show. I can’t wait to go out again.