Apr 2 • Personal stories⛰️
🌲Cool Rocks We Found in the East Kootenays! (by [sheldon evans] and my brother Robert)
Hey everyone! My brother Robert and I went exploring in the East Kootenays of British Columbia and brought home some awesome rocks. We thought they looked like sandstone and quartzite — and we were right!
We would like to bring the story to you with a live video one day.📙🎥
this is kind of a mix of a story and a geology lesson. 💻
Here’s what we learned👇
The orange and purple striped ones
These started as regular sandstone — basically sand from ancient beaches or rivers that got squished and cemented into rock.💦💧
Over a long time, rainwater and groundwater moved through the tiny holes in the rock. The water carried tiny bits of iron and dropped it in wavy stripes (called Liesegang banding).
Orange stripes = iron that rusted yellow-brown.
Purple/red stripes = iron that turned a different
shade of rust.
The orange parts feel gritty and sandy (they scrape off easily), while the lighter bands are harder because extra quartz (a super-tough mineral) glued them together.
The white hard one
This is mostly quartzite — sandstone that got baked and squeezed deep in the Earth until the sand grains fused into a super-hard, sugary-looking rock.
The little pockets inside are even tougher bits of quartz or similar minerals. Quartzite is so hard you can barely scratch it with a knife!
These rocks show how water and time can “paint” beautiful patterns inside ordinary stone. The East Kootenays have tons of ancient sandstone and quartzite from old seas and rivers — some over a billion years old!🪨
We had a blast and we’re definitely going back to make a geology video. If you want to see the close-up photos or try simple tests at home (like scratching with a knife or looking at the gritty bits), let us know!👈
What do you think — have you found cool banded rocks before? Drop a comment or come join us next time! When we do a live video. 👍
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🌲Cool Rocks We Found in the East Kootenays! (by [sheldon evans] and my brother Robert)
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