The Cochise County Rock

Monthly Newsletter of the Sunsites Gem & Mineral Club

www.cochisecountyrock.org

“Finding and Grinding Rocks in Cochise County, Arizona Since 1962”

AUGUST 2005

This issue edited by Paul McKnight

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August Field Trip

Harrison Yocum, an 82-year-old rockhound instructor, plant specialist, and founder of the Tucson Botanical Gardens, gives tours of his half-acre rock and plant collection in downtown Tucson. You may have read about him in the May issue of Arizona Highways. On Saturday, August 20, he will give our club a tour. Everyone who takes the tour get a free geode from the Lazy B ranch, the place where Sandra Day O’Connor grew up.

MEET at the Dragoon Post Office in beautiful downtown Dragoon at 8:45 am Saturday, August 20. We will leave at 9 hoping to arrive at 10 am. The destination is 1628 N. Jefferson Avenue. This is half a block south of Pima and a block east of Craycroft.

July Field Trip Report

About 12 members visited the museum in the Student Services Center at Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher. This museum houses the Mills Collection, a beautiful collection of Native American artifacts from the Sunizona archaeological site known as The Kuykendall Site. (See article in this issue.)

September Meeting

We will kick off our fall activities with a Club meeting at 7 pm on Monday, September 12. The post-meeting public event will be a one-hour concert by member Randy Stewart. Randy was the original lead guitarist for The Carpenters. He will entertain us with songs of the miners and cowboys of the Southwest. Tell your friends about this concert. It will be good!

Club Calendar

August

20 Field Trip to tour Harrison Yocum’s Arizona yard rock and exotic plant collection in Tucson. Meet at 8:45 am at the Dragoon Post Office.

September

10 Board Meeting

12 Regular Meeting at 7, miner and cowboy songs by Randy Stewart at 8 pm. Tell your fiends.

17 Field Trip

October

8 Board Meeting

10 Regular meeting - demo

15 Field Trip

November

12 Board Meeting

14 Regular Meeting – elections, no speaker

19 Field Trip

December

5 or 12 Christmas Party – potluck

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Lapidary Classes!

Anyone who would like to get started with lapidary training should contact Larry Strout at 826-3991

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You're probably a practicing rockhound if…

* You bring a catchers mitt and a hand lens to a rock fight.

* Your son hits his hand with your rock hammer, your wife screams it broken, and you reply that it's a fracture, it has good cleavage, and has produced some unusual streaks in your son's underwear.

* You've been found guilty of trespassing on BLM land. The judge sentences you to 10 years' hard labor breaking rocks. You fall to your knees and beg him, "Please, your honor, let it be at The Commonwealth Mine!"

* Your spouse asks how’s the soup and you reply, "variable color, greasy surface, low specific gravity, texture smooth with bits of ductile material."

Upcoming Regional Events

Sept 30 - Oct. 2 - Annual Show and Sale

Yavapai County Fair Grounds, 10401 N. Hwy. 89A, Prescott Valley, AZ

Fri.10 - 6, Sat.10 - 6, Sun.10- 4; adults $2, children 12 and under free with adult.

Contact Larry Jackson: P.O. Box 345, Chino Valley, AZ 86323, (928) 636-9188.

e-mail: lpjack65@cableone.net

Oct. 15 - Sedona Gem & Mineral Club 4th Annual Rock Sale and Show

Posse Grounds Park, off Hwy 89A, Sedona, AZ

Sat.9 - 4; free admission; rock, mineral, and equipment sales, hourly raffles, hand-made jewelry,

free kid’s rocks and games.

Contact: Pat McMahan, (928) 634-2404.

Oct. 15-16 - 31st Annual Show - Huachuca Mineral & Gem Club

Elks Lodge # 2065, 1 Elks Ln., Sierra Vista, AZ

Sat 9 - 6, Sun 9 - 4; free admission; gems, jewelry, rocks, minerals, lapidary materials and equipment, books, tools, demonstrations, field trips, hourly prizes.

Contact Larry Nelson, P.O. Box 1596, Sierra Vista, AZ 85636, (520) 459-5211

e-mail: lnansv@c2i2.com; or Bill Jaeger, (520) 803-6590; e-mail: billjaeger@hotmail.com.

List of Club Officers for 2005

President Paul McKnight 520 824-4054 paulmc@vtc.net

Vice-President Curt Kelly 520 826-1136

Secretary Don Hammer 520 384-3105 dahammer@vtc.net

Treasurer Larry Edgett

Board Member at large Marie Sherman 520 826-4004

Do You know about this Rock Shop?

Mustang Corners is just north of Huachuca City on Highway 90. If you go west from this intersection a mile or two you will come to a sign on the right announcing the Blue Opal Art Gallery. This rock shop has a great collection of petrified wood and locally mined blue opal and a good selection of lapidary tools and supplies. Mike Anderson is dedicated to providing the best possible service to his customers. The web site is theblueopal .com (remove the space).

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The Kuykendall Site

By Paul McKnight

Along Highway 181 east of Sunizona is the Kuykendall Site, where Jack and Vera Mills of Elfrida spent 10 years in the 1950s excavating a large Salado Indian Village that was approximately 800 years old.

This was a large village consisting of several compounds and many houses. It lay buried beneath 40 acres of desert land that looked like any other land in the Sunizona area. The buildings had adobe walls with no openings and thatched roofs supported by timbers. Access was thru a hole in the roof that also allowed smoke from small fire bowls in the floor to exit. The village was destroyed by fire about the time the early Apaches moved into the area. It was subsequently covered up by those famous Sunizona dust storms.

The Mills dug up a lot of artifacts from the site and for many years after the completion of the dig, they displayed these artifacts in a museum in their Elfrida home. The collection contains many beautiful bowls from the Kuykendall site whose origins have been traced to other Salado-era habitation sites in Arizona. When they grew older the Mills transferred the collection to Eastern Arizona College (EAC) in Thatcher so it could remain in Southeast Arizona.

The Mills kept excellent records of where they dug and what they found, and their 150-page write-up of the dig was published by the El Paso Archaeological Society in 1968. The booklet is now out of print and there are discussions going on between the Sunsites Gem and Mineral Club and the El Paso Archaeological Society (EPAS) about re-publishing it in HTML format on a CD-ROM.

EPAS has been unable to locate the originals of the photographs that appear in the book so those photos will probably be scanned and the images included on the CD-ROM with the text. Eastern Arizona College has expressed interest in participating in this project. They have a set of professional photos of the items in the collection which they said they can make available for the project.

The Board of the Sunsites Gem and Mineral Club at its August 7 meeting approved moving forward with this project. Current thinking is that a master CD would be created for each organization involved in the project so that they could produce copies for sale with a small royalty coming back to the individual who does the typing, scanning, editing, graphics design, and production. This approach allows publication to proceed with no up front money.