Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Obsidian - 1Minute's neck of the woods

I needed a few pieces of obsidian for flint knapping practice, so off I went to Middle-of-Nowhere, USA to collect a bit.

1Minute will know where this is - although it's not exactly a secret spot, but there's probably not a whole lot of 24HCF members ever been there I don't suppose.

Glass Buttes Oregon, formed almost 5 million years ago. I think it's the largest obsidian deposit in the world if I'm not mistaken.

Pretty easy to just pick up a "reasonable amount" off the ground, and it's legal to keep for personal use.

Unreal how many different types / colors of there are.

Besides your basic black, there's mahogany, rainbow, fire, pumpkin, midnight lace, silver sheen, and gold sheen. Might have missed a few.

A few pix:

Cool stuff there.

Wife and I keep threatening to get a permit to go the the mines on the FS land in the Warners. We just don't need 10 gallons of it around the place.

Oh, y'all have Glass Buttes............................



We have a whole mountain!

https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/medicine-lake/glass-mountain-obsidian-flow-medicine-lake-volcano

Actually, we have 2, Glass Mountain and the 1 square mile Little Glass Mountain located about 5 miles southwest of Glass Mountain. Quality obsidian, pure black, knaps beautifully. Many boulders along the road on the north edge about the size of a VW bug. If you are driving a Subaru or Yugo take Fix-a Flat and spare tires...the road is a bitch kitty of glass shards.

Ha!

I had a tag in that unit back in '98. Had never been in the area, lived on the Coast and had a 6 month position in KFalls. Decided to drive up and explore around Medicine Lake, Tionesta and such. Came around a corner and had to drive through a road cut right through a seam of obsidian. Boulders and shards all over and I was driving a.......................................Subaru!

Made it through without any rubber misadventures.

I had it in 4WD part of the time, only to help keep the rear wheels from slipping. Awful easy to shred a tire on that stuff for sure!

I thought obsidian was all black. Thanx for posting. Interesting.

My Dad and his buddy went to glass butte about fifty years ago. They half filled a pickup bed with basketball sized chunks of obsidian in various hues of clear to brown to black.

I could not lay hands on a single piece of it today.

That’s pretty neat.

Tide Change:

Did not know you were a knapper.

Might have been out of town but should have given me yell. We were up on the Steens fishing and just hanging out for a week+, and once out of the house/office, I'm completely out of touch.

Just took some points to a lady that runs a nearby gift shop yesterday. Seems out of towners will pay $15 an inch for knapped points. She wanted 20 to put on her shelves, and I sold two 3" points to a guy while I was there. At $90 for the two, I at least paid for the gas. They look really fine glued into a shadow box, but she wanted free standing striped transparent rock. Might get about a $900 check from her at the end of the summer.

We have several dispersed sources in the region with a variety of color. The largest lumps I'm aware of are in an obsidian flow at Paulina Lake with boulders the size of pickup trucks. One is not supposed to gather there, but it's mostly low-quality stuff I don't care to work anyway. The best material is really fine glass and even though a lot is striped there's no obvious grain when working it up. Have a fair amount of black stuff in the yard and scored some good chunks during our recent septic tank replacement.

Some of my endeavors when I have nothing else to do. I have to hammer these out of cobbles, as I don't own a rock saw. Most folks in the business have saws and cut out nice thin blanks before flaking off the surfaces. A great and challenging hobby requiring total concentration. One has to break off about a thousand pieces without really breaking things entirely. A relaxing way to escape the world's issues but it can get frustrating when one halves a 90% complete piece.











If there's a coin in the pic for scale it's a quarter. Sorry about that Chinese made ruler in the last image.

Have a good one,

Great work 1minute.

Kamenstein..........................what a great Chinese name for a tool company.

Valsdad:

Must come from the Jewish sect up near the Mongolian border.

An aside. That last image was made with the points immersed in water to bring out the striations. I left the container on the deck for several hours and every black mark on that ruler floated to the surface leaving me with a useless strip of stainless steel.

I have several other USA made versions, but don't think I'll expose them to the same treatment.

Beautiful work One Minute. Both you and Cookie are extremely talented

Nice work. The color variations are amazing. Is that transparent one made from natural obsidian?

navlav8r:

No. It's from about a 1/2-inch-thick shard of glass I found trekking along the railroad tracks in the Deschutes Canyon while steelhead angling. A little over 4" long x 1 1/4" wide and presently about 1/8 thick. We do have some Glass Butte obsidian though with almost that same degree of transparency (immediately below).



A few others that came from that same piece of glass. They were supposed to be a second large point, but things sort of came apart about half-way through its fabrication and the scraps got refurbished.


Given material scarcity, knappers will take advantage of all kinds of opportunities. An old broken up porcelain toilet can turn out some nice points.

Tools of the Trade (1 inch grid): Left side if one wants to be historically correct. Antler and bone wear rather quickly, but right-side copper boppers and copper wire last a bit longer with modern efforts. About 90% of the work is accomplished with the boppers. The tines or copper wire are used to true up the edges and flake in the notches.

Interesting about the lettering coming off that rule. Guess it wasn't meant for work in the PNW?

Have seen a number of old glass points come out of some Indian camps. Don't think I've seen a porcelain one though.

Ishi liked working glass.

Beautiful work. I have to order any material for knapping since we don't even have rocks around here unless its an odd piece of sandstone. I've been glad to find a flat bottom wine bottle to knap. Old TV screens, coke bottles, I've bought glass plates that were colored just to bust them up and knap the pieces.

I gave a bunch of various points to a silversmith I met this past Spring in Sonora. I haven't knapped much since last year. I might need to get back after it.

One of mine from last year. Gone now...

Beautiful work 1minute.

I'm just a hack, started out by using bottoms from beer and wine bottles. I do it mainly just as a relaxing past-time when I'm camping, and 98% of the time end up breaking the piece just before I'm finished.

It's still fun though. I'm always amazed how the earlier inhabitants of the continent figured it all out without YouTube.

They didn't even have copper boppers or eye protection!

Mathsr:

Fine work!

Yes. I recall some of your postings a while back and questioned your source of obsidian. Tons of the stuff here in the Pacific Northwest and it's much easier to work than the flints found across the rest of our country.

Stay cool,

Really nice work! Thanks for sharing!