Igneous Rock Gallery is a premier distributor of unique stone products - ours included. Their core specialty is custom designed natural rock water features but they are also out-front innovators in the development of new interior and exterior stone applications of all sorts. Robert Wertz’s passion for stone coupled with his extraordinary feel for color and the proper presentation of natural beauty make Igneous Rock Gallery designs superior in all regards. If you are looking for someone to entrust a special project Robert will certainly earn your admiration.

Greg Precott - Geologist

Please click on pictures to enlarge.

Basalt is typically monochrome brown, charcoal or black in color, but our Washington State source is mining high quality randomly colored basalt (more technically, andesite -- see video below) columns from a relatively small deposit in the Okanogan Highlands. While columnar shaped lava rock is plentiful all over the world, this is the only known source on the planet where such slender forming and color rich columns are known to exist.  The columns range in color from rust to champagne yellow, from eggplant purple to charcoal grey. There are even hints of salmon pink and flecks of pearl blue. The distinct coloration is the result of mineral rich sediment that leeched into the micro fractures between each column over the past 40 millions years.  It is now a colorfast part of the rock and will never wear or wash off.

So why aren't these colors more apparent in the pictures of the quarry on this page?  Dirt, plain and simple. There is a film of dusty sediment which is not permanently attached to the rock that needs to be washed off in order to get down to the solid, mineral infused, color rich rock.

What Is Igneous Rock?

Igneous rock is formed when molten or partially molten material, called magma, cools and solidifies. Igneous rocks are one of the three main types of rocks; the other types are sedimentary rocks and metamorphic rocks.  Of the three types of rocks, only igneous rocks are formed from melted material.   The word "igneous" is derived from the Latin ignis, meaning "fire", from which we also get the word “ignite”.

Greg Prescott Explains...
 
Clad in dungarees, Washington State geologist Greg Prescott offers a fascinating explanation of how the Okanogan Highland columns are likely to have formed.  During a recent visit he started telling us about the Okanogan Highland columnar shaped igneous rock.  He got a few minutes into it before we asked him to start all over again, this time for the camera!  Greg graciously obliged.  Please excuse the audio quality.  It gets better a minute or so into this footage.

 Click to play video:

Digging Deeper
 
Anyone can see at a glance that our igneous rock is beautiful and distinctive looking.  For those who like to dig a little deeper and learn more about the general origin and geologic history of our rocks, we asked Greg Prescott to provide additional information.  For the sake of clarification, what we have referred to as our "Okanogan Highland" columns, Greg calls "Beaver Canyon" columns. While we also deal with rock from other parts of the world, Greg has limited his comments below to our rocks of Washington State origin.

BEAVER CANYON SMALL COLUMN  ORIGINS:

At the end of the Cretaceous time about sixty five million years ago,
while the dinosaurs were dying out across the Earth, in North Central
Washington a major episode of mountain building had begun.   Driven
by the intrusion of massive igneous bodies the overlying crust
buckled, warped, fractured, and rose into emerging highlands.  Over
the course of many tens of millions of years swarms of these molten
igneous masses invaded the country rock and rose toward the surface
creating volcanic activity whenever these magmas breached the crust.

By the time of the Eocene about fifty five million years ago the
Okanogan Highlands had emerged in place of former Cretaceous lowlands
and swamps.  Lava had begun to pour forth in earnest as magma
chambers now vented their contents into the sky and onto the
land.  Some areas of the newly formed highlands sank as long swaths
of crust collapsed into mammoth voids created by the emptying magma
chambers and other processes related to this long and violent period
of crustal development.

In the vicinity of what is now Toroda Creek one of these collapsing
swaths of countryside formed what is known as the Toroda Creek
Graben.  As the land settled the volcanic eruptions filled in the
resulting low area, mitigating to an extent the degree of
collapse.  As this process waned about forty five million years ago
the nature of the volcanic eruptions changed and a series of rather
thin minor flows poured out here and there as a last memento of a
horrendous period of great eruptions.

In the Beaver Canyon locality some of these final flows erupted out
onto an irregular surface, one atop the other in a sequence of thin,
dark, glassy porphyritic (a texture of small crystals in a fine
groundmass) lavas.  This steamy molten mass settled and slowly
cooled.  When the lavas finally solidified the resulting solid rock
cracked from internal stresses related to a change of volume created
during the process of crystallization.  These stress fractures - or
joints - formed a repetitive hexagonal (six sided) pattern much like
the mud cracks one can observe in the thin layer of mud on a dry lake bottom.

In many thousands of such localities lavas poured out, solidified and
cracked into jointed outcrops known as columnar basalt. Throughout
much of Western Washington, Oregon and Idaho and in many other
localities in the world these types of basalt outcrop expressions
are commonplace.   However, in the Beaver Canyon area something
unusual happened, something which in fact we really can't fully
explain.  The stone columns that resulted from the jointing were both
extraordinarily well formed and surprisingly small in diameter - only
about four inches in diameter - whereas typically one expects such
columns to be massive stone pillars twenty or more inches in diameter.

Though the size of the Beaver Canyon columns was certainly unusual,
nature wasn't quite finished making this stone unique.  As the eons
passed the Beaver Canyon lavas were impacted once more by the dying
gasps of the igneous evolution of this terrain.  Beneath the canyon
molten rock still filled the underlying magma chambers.  The great
bodies of melted material had ceased to press upwards and now began
to cool and slowly crystallize. As this process occurred fluids
fractionated from the solidifying magma and accumulated in the ever
shrinking space of the chambers.  As cooling progressed cracks in the
rocks capping the chambers and channels were created for these fluids
to ascend.  Many places in the Highlands became landscapes of
steaming geysers and hot springs marking the areas where such fluids
made it to the surface.   Some of these fluids passed through the
Beaver Canyon stone depositing silica, sulfide minerals and a variety
of oxides upon the joints previously described.

Still nature wasn't finished.  In time the Beaver Canyon rocks were
lifted to the surface again and exposed to erosion.  The great ice
sheets came and went and with them groundwater circulated through the
joints in the stone further oxidizing the deposited minerals.

Now it was done.

Today we quarry these small, slender perfectly formed highly colored
basalt columns (although the correct lithology is closer to andesite)
and we bring to light a beautiful example of the capacity of nature
to create a myriad of extraordinary forms from ordinary stock.  In my
forty years of tramping about the globe I have never seen an occurrence similar
to the Beaver Canyon columns, nor have I met any other geologist who
claims to.  I do believe they are one of kind.

Pertinent Data:

Age:  Eocene,  41.3 (plus or minus 2.0 Ma) to 48 (plus or minus 1.9
Ma) Ma (million years) K-Ar hornblende ages
Formation: Klondike Mountain Formation.
Lithology: Dark grey andesite porphyry with lighter colored
plagioclase and pyroxene phenocrysts.

JOHNSON CREEK SERPENTINE (BLACK AND GREEN):

The stones currently being quarried along Johnson Creek near
Omak Washington are varieties of serpentine, which
is typically a low temperature hydrated alteration product of basic,
ultrabasic, and ultramafic igneous rocks.  In this case the parent
rock from which this serpentine was derived was dunite - a very dark
magnesium rich ultramafic igneous rock.

This body of magma  rose to the surface during the Jurassic about 150
million years ago.  It spread out into a great sheet several thousand
feet thick that domed the overlying rocks.  When the stone cooled and
crystallized blades and long spiny crystals of olivine were set in a
fine grained black ground mass.  This magma is of origin from deep in
the crust and is very unstable at the surface.  Consequently, upon
cooling it altered almost at once into other more stable rocks -
serpentines.  Also of note in the Johnson Creek pluton is the fact
that it is one of the largest known sulfide nickle resources in the
United States.  Nickle occurs as tiny disseminated blebs of sulfide
minerals distributed throughout the great mass of rock.

The serpentines being quarried are of two primary colors.  A
beautiful variegated jade green and a translucent deep black.  Both
varieties take a fine polish and may be easily fabricated into
various forms by cutting and drilling.  The green variety is
significantly harder than the black and takes a higher and more
enduring polish.



JOHNSON CREEK SOAPSTONE
 
In addition to the serpentines soapstone is also available from the
Johnson Creek quarries.  Soapstone is also an alteration product derived
from the dunite by the process of carbonation (known as
steatization).  It is of some interest these days that highly
magnesium rich rocks will absorb carbon dioxide in this natural
process leading to the creation of soapstone - potentially a means of
permanently locking up the carbon dioxide our politicians assure us
is leading to global warming.

Be that as it may, the Johnson Creek soapstone is a beautiful
landscape and fountain product.  It can be cut, drilled, polished, or
simply pressure washed into amazingly beautiful forms.  The texture
is a grained marble of magnesite, talc, and magnetitie.  The pieces
that may be quarried range from a few hundred pounds to boulders of
many tons as is the case with both the green and black serpentine varieties.

Thia serpentine has been utilized for a number of years as both a
crushed product suitable a colored aggregate and decorative gravel
and as boulders used for placement and fabrication into monumental
stone features wet or dry.

Pertinent data:

Age:  Jurassic
Lithology:  Serpentine and soapstone from a dunite protolith.

My Best,

Greg Prescott
Geologist