Massive Site Update Part 1 – German, Turkish and Russian Thundereggs

Thundereggs have been accumulating lately – and I have been sitting here miserably lazy!  However, I have finally started a massive update and many new stones are now on-line.  The first part of this update covers the old world and there are well over 100 new stones that have passed through my hands and a few that have stayed there!

Most exciting perhaps is a new location from Russia, tagged simply as the Ural Mountains.   I have very little info beyond that but the stone is a lovely little thing with waterline agate.  Almost ‘scenic’ of the grey Russian seas and distant Arctic ice . . .

Ural Mountains Thunderegg

Turkey has also yielded a new bed – one of the many tagged as simply Cubuk.  This is a very different stone to anything I have seen before, with a beautiful mottled matrix.  It’s a smaller stone than many from here.

Cubuk Area Thunderegg

However, Germany is the main area for updates.  Here are a few of the best ones.  Several new Spießberg stones are on-line, including this little beauty.  I sold this one and I am now thinking I must have been insane to part with it.  It has some of the best fortification agate I have ever seen from here and also note that strange horizontal line in the agate, which appears to be a very fine band of clear agate within the white.

Spießberg Thunderegg

Here also is a nice Mönchstal geode.  The other half has been on the site for a while but now finally the pair are united.  The colours are somewhat paler and subtler than usual from this location.

Mönchstal Thunderegg

A Hohenstein Ernstthal thunderegg next.  This is a location that has long frustrated me since most I have seen seem to suffer horrible from cracks and damage.  This one though is a pretty nice one with a wonderfully colourful red and green core.

Hohenstein Ernstthal Thunderegg

Not surprisingly it is Nesselhof and Lierbachtal – possibly my two favourite locations (which I have been polishing and selling a lot lately) that are featured most.  Both these galleries are now massive, showcasing these very varied stones.

Lierbachtal Thunderegg Geode

The above is a fantastic showcase of how complex these stones can be.  There are so many details in this stone that it is hard to know where to start!

Lierbachtal Thunderegg

And this is a very small specimen with a simple but curious core.  I am not sure really what is going on in here, save for the sagenite needles.

Moving on to Nesselhof, here is a selection of new stones:

Classic Nesselhof Thunderegg Pair

Nesselhof thunderegg with an unusually well defined core

Nesselhof Thunderegg Pink Agate

This one been in the wars! Battered and fragile to begin with, broken on digging, then shattered again in the post to me. I had to salvage it as best I can. The result is rather sad – like a crippled pet. That agate though is something else, especially in closeup . . .

Nesselhof Thunderegg - Sad Man Dancing

This is one of the great Simulacra, I think! See the little dancing man with the sad eyes? Dancing with his broken heart? I think it is one guy – it is a cut through one rock after all. So this is a stone of Loneliness and woe. I originally planned to sell this one, but when i spotted that, it instantly became a keeper.

Nesselhofs often seem to have a sadness about them, which may merit a special blog post one day . . . .

Look out for updates to US stones fairly soon, including many new locations and some amazing rocks.  I will also be adding some beautiful new Esterel stones soon, and I will do a dedicated showcase here for those!

T&T / TNT Thunderegg Showcase

Resisting any bad puns about explosions of TNT, I was recently able to get a hefty sack-full of uncut stones from this area, which I never did know much about!

T&T or TNT thundereggs are a less well-known location from the Mill Creek Wilderness Area, alongside such stones as Fallen Tree and Stein’s Pillar.  They are usually simple stones with clear brown agate (‘root-beer agate’) and quartz.  They are also one of the locations more prone to Amethyst, as in the example above.

The above is an absolute classic stone in my experience, showing off all the basic characteristics nicely.  It is the elegant shapes that make these stones so appealing, as in the following, where an atoll formation has created a very nice peripheral cave.

The other half:

The agate is so clear and smooth that they were a nightmare to scan, with every speck of dust on the scanner showing up like a firework show.  They took a great polish though.  One or two of the stones surprised me by having white opal cores – and also more complex things like the following, which is a curious muddle of agate, brecciation and what look like tiny dendrites.

The clear agate often allows you to see deeply into the stones, making out the 3d structure inside.  The stone below is a fine example, with a largish cave and very detailed view of the core.

And the other half:

To round off though, here is a larger example that proves that the location can be quite dramatically complex.  This one has been in my gallery for a long time now, but exploring a sackful of its kin only makes me appreciate it more.

Romanian Thundereggs – Cluj Napoca and Gurasada

Only one post ago, I was muttering to myself how hard it was to find and explore thundereggs from Romania.  A few days later though, I received a donation of images that seriously supplemented the gallery, including a new location – finally presenting some representative specimens of this country, which before had the dubious distinction of being one of the most miserable galleries on the Eibonvale website!  Here’s a few of the best picture and you can see the rest by clicking through to the main Romania Gallery.

Thanks to Herman Kas for providing these!  The above and below stones are from Cluj Napoca, while the last one is from the newly discovered location Gurasada.

Nowy Kosciol Thunderegg Showcase – Rarely Seen Polish Splendour

Solely from my experience collecting thundereggs and without much understanding of politics at all, here is one of the possible differences between Europe and the US:  Europe is old – a place that has been digging itself in for thousands of years and, especially now in these days of economic collapse, it seems a stagnant place, wallowing in over-regulation and the scars left by outdated things like class systems and wars and absolute rulers.  While I am certainly not going to defend the US against charges of dark politics and some pretty nasty things going on in the general psyche of the country, it does seem younger – fresher – in some ways.

And weirdly enough, the thundereggs seem to follow the trend.  I have no idea about actual ages, but European thundereggs seem old to me.  And they are old in two ways.  Firstly they seem worn and weathered by millennia of stress.  Cracked.  Shattered.  Squashed and mis-shapen.  Their original forms pounded by a lot of geology.  And in some ways, that can be part of the interest.  The web of cracks that make up a Lierbachtal sea of green or the complete tangled chaos of a Baumgartental geode or my prized amethyst Gottlob specimen.  In a way, it is beautiful, yes?  And you ask yourself just what these stones have been through?

But they are old in another way as well.  Over-collected – extinct – hidden under too much suburban development or lost in a tangle of that over-regulation I mentioned.  Lost in a conglomerate of countries that has stagnated far too much to have much sympathy for people’s passions.  The point of this is that all too often, European stones can just seem like a load of scraps.  A few lingering chunks of battered agate dug out of beds that have long-since seen their day – or a sea of miserable cracked specimens among which just occasionally something promising or even spectacular comes along – or dug furtively and even illegally and lucky to be seen at all.

With all these factors involved, how rare is it for a European thunderegg to be truly and unreservedly beautiful?  For a collector, this is a sadness – but also a reason to persist.  Because every so often something comes along that isn’t a scrap.  Like my three links above maybe.  And this is when you remember that collecting European stones can be worth it!

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Poland’s most famous thunderegg, Nowy Kosciol – or Nowy Kościół to spell it properly (and no I don’t really know how to pronounce it!) – was always one of the worst offenders here.  It was a location I more or less gave up on.  A few scraps passed through my hands – usually sold again pretty quickly.  The page on the Eibonvale gallery was frankly miserable.  It was a location I just couldn’t be bothered with – like the German St Egedien stones, all too often it seemed to just consist of mis-shaped, broken or just plain boring scraps of agate in a dull matrix.  It was a thunderegg – but that was just about all that could be said of it.

So – nothing like this then:

To my eyes the above stone is almost on a par with the famous Baker thundereggs – maybe even more so since the colours are less in your face.

Yes – just as the St Egedien stones eventually proved me wrong with beautiful specimens like this old favourite of mine, it appears that the glory days of Nowy Kościół far outshine what is usually available on the collectors market today – something I really should have guessed.  Make no mistake, stones of a quality illustrated here are not often seen – indeed, when I first saw them, I was amazed.  I just had not realised that the location could produce anything as fine as this.  And of course, these are old stock stones – originating in old collections that fortunately came on the market again.  So, after this long and somewhat political introduction, I am not exaggerating when I say that I am delighted to present here a gallery of Nowy Kościół thundereggs that finally give a hint of what the site is capable of.

Nowy Kościół thundereggs are characterised by their warm opaque light orange agate – a unique colour that is familiar enough from the smaller specimens seen before.  I have to say though, the appearance of blue was a bit of a surprise:

The above is one of the oddest I encountered in this Nowy Kościół revelation – it’s a big stone at 14cm and there’s a lot of features in that agate.  And this is possibly the most beautiful:

This is an exquisite European style thunderegg geode with some gorgeous quartz.  Sometimes, it seems, Nowy Kosciol thundereggs stray over into amethyst  as well, as in this simple and almost agateless specimen:

With a simple core, the above is a quite classic stone, made more interesting by it’s cute purple colour.  The following on the other hand, is just weird:

Yes – a Polish pseudomorph thunderegg, spelt out rather delightfully in the classic Nowy Kościół hot and neat orange agate.  And finally a small but utterly charming banded thunderegg:

All in all, it gives me a nice warm feeling to finally realise how much I mis-judged this location.

Now, if I could just find something similar for the infamous Romanian thundereggs from Cluj Napoca . . .

Taking No Chances . . .

This was my friend’s fault!

Stone cutting session + camera + Photoshop + sense of the macabre = the Post-Apocalyptic Thunderegg Man!   I’ll be seeing you down your next dark alley!  Heheheh!

Some Nice New Specimens

Just a few new stones on the gallery – these are not new locations, but updates of sufficient quality to merit sharing them I think! I have to say, the first one is the first specimen from White Rock Springs to really blow me away.  This is a gorgeous location, but for some reason all the stones I have encountered so far have rather left me somewhat unsatisfied.  This one though – it’s big at 12cm, beautifully shaped and has some lovely moss.

Click here for the White Rock Gallery.

The next is a Secret Ridge Stone with an unusually well-formed shape.  Secret Ridge stones are not often see with such a neat structure.

Click here for the rather chaotic Secret Ridge Gallery.

The next one is a massive Skull Springs stone – the biggest I have seen from one of my all-time favorite locations.  And, disproving Jason Hinkle’s truism that “there are good thundereggs, and then there are large thundereggs”, this one is bloody beautiful!

Click here for the full Skull Springs gallery - one of the best pages on the site in my opinion!

New Location: Opal Creek

A new location launched in the gallery – Opal Creek from Oregon.  This nice 8cm specimen is the first Opal Creek I have polished, and very nice too. Barely visible in the picture (and indeed in real life) is an unusual glitter of pyrite in the boundary between the agate and matrix.  I have a second one that I will hopefully get to soon.

New Location in Utah – Etna Thundereggs

This is a curious new specimen.  It came from Utah and is only the second location from that state that I know of (after the famous Dugway Geodes).  Edit: The finder christened these stones Etna Thundereggs and the exact location is, I am told, secret.  All i know is that it came from somewhere in the northwest near the Nevada border.  It’s a nice stone, I think, with an absolute classic structure and a width of about 9cm.  For some reason, a neat curve has been ground into the edge – looks good actually!

I got this stone from escalanterockshop.com

Click here to jump to the Utah gallery.

Welcome to Queens Point!

Here’s a nice new Queens Point thunderegg from Oregon, just arrived in the post – one of the beautiful green thundereggs of the world.  While not exactly rare, it’s a location that is not seen that often, especially in any quality, so I am very pleased to add a nice stone like this to the gallery!

To celebrate, I took a nice new scan of my beloved triangle stone – I’ve had it for years and its still one of my favorites:

Click here to see all the Queens Point stones (though there aren’t many more!!)

Edit: Jason Hinkle has provided a pic of the location where these come from.  Interesting to see some context to these rocks for once.

Yet Another Lierbachtal – But a Decidedly Strange One

I was planning to give you a rest from Lierbachtal thundereggs, honest!  But I just cut this today and I couldn’t resist sharing it, it is such a strange one.  I have NO IDEA what is going on inside it!  Lierbachtals are a weird stone that often leaves me confused, but in this case that massive curved stream of orange stretching right across the core takes it to a new level still.  Lierbachtals are relatively prone to pseudomorphs and that is definitely involved here in this stone, but more than that, I am honestly not sure.  I have never seen anything quite like it.  It looks like – I dunno, a tendon or something!

If anyone has some interesting info on how these insane structures formed, I would be very interested to hear it!

Edit: Here’s the other half!