NATIONAL BOOK NETWRK 9780762748129 Rockhounding Idaho

This lifelong rock hound can not recommend this book. Maybe it's okay for beginners, but as a guide to good collecting spots in Idaho, I found the Idaho edition of the Falcon Rockhounding series to be a grave disappointment. Problems specific to the kindle version: on a small screen, the maps are unreadable. One a large screen, they are barely readable. General critique Good: The geodetic coordinates I have checked or used have been accurate. The 34;when to visit34; listings are mostly accurate. Not Good: Yes, it's cheaper and more profitable to print in greyscale. Personally, I'd pay more just to get better colored maps and colored photos. Especially in places where the rocks are really colorful like Idaho. The maps: They are too general. I like a guide book to be grab-and-go, with decent enough directions and maps that I don't have to spend the day before downloading topos. In these days of openstreetmap.org, the Idaho Digital atlas, digital geology sites at ISU, and lots of free GIS, there's little excuse not to produce maps with hill shade and good road detail. Also, it's easy to obtain and display public vs. private land boundaries, which can save a collector from violating rock hounding etiquette by trespassing. Make the maps with type big enough to be read on a tablet screen. Mentioning the name of the topo quad for a locale would be a big plus, by the way, since topos are free for the downloading. The text reads like a travelogue, not like a guide book to collecting rocks. The author did a little too much driving around and not enough real time looking for rocks and minerals. There's an overall feel of 34;I drove here, I looked around, I noticed some stuff, and here's what some locals said...34; Frankly, that ruined this book for me. There are frequent mentions of sites the author didn't bother to visit. FOR EXAMPLE: in the Mackay section, the author mentions the Chilly calcite that obviously some local told him about. But he didn't go there, even though it was just 30 minutes up the road. He would have found one of the easiest places to see great cubic-habit calcite, both white and hemetite-red that you can drive right up to without being exposed to the hazards of a roadside outcrop. That's annoying especially since it's such an easy site to access. I've been taking newbie collectors there for years. FOR EXAMPLE: the author mentions the obsidian site at Big Southern Butte but didn't bother to do the hike, so he couldn't report on what a punishing hike it is and that there's not a lot of obsidian left to collect. It's not your grandma's collecting site. It's brutal to get to and not very rewarding for the effort - but he was in too much of a hurry to drive by all the sites on his shopping list to bother. I consider this sort of thing crucial info that is missing throughout this book. Yes, the author has a section titled 34;Big Southern Butte34; but didn't actually check out the only rock worth collecting there. He did survey the North Robbers cinder cone in the same section, but that's not actually Big Southern Butte... He also completely neglected the cool alkaline volcanics almost next door at Cedar Butte and the lovely 1/2 to 1 cm by 2 mm to 4 mm plagioclase crystals almost next door at Table Legs Butte. Both these collecting spots are known to locals and are on the road he took to get to North Robbers. FOR EXAMPLE : in the Little Flat article, he tosses off that 34;Ream mentions a fluorescent rhyolite locale up at China Cap.34; What the foop? He fails to note that China Cap is around 30 miles of driving away, in the next valley over. Why even mention a site more than an hour away that wasn't even visited? It would have been better to put these annoying 34;I didn't go there34; spots in an appendix of other potential places to check out that he didn't have room to include. Next, why even bother to include non-collecting sites, no matter how geologically interesting? Rock hounding is collecting. I bought the book to investigate new collecting spots. So stick with the primary purpose that the book title is selling the reader - rock hounding. If it's not a site to collect at, then it's filler. If I wanted a book on geo-site seeing, I would have bought one on that instead. About the directions: better descriptions and consistent reporting of trip odometer readings would be an improvement. Let's pick on Mackay again, since it's a good example of how this book let me down. First, there is no place in text that the author says 34;zero your odometer here34; in Mackay - even though he mentions an intersection 4.4 miles up the road from Mackay. So is that 4.4 miles from US 93? The beginning of Smelter Road? The big sign for the Mackay Mine Road tour sign and parking lot? Now at that interection at 4.4 miles, the author doesn't mention the guidepost signs with numbers that correspond to a map put out jointly by BLM and the City of Mackay for the mine access road. If he had bothered to include them, it would make it easier to know which left turn to take, since there are more than one left turn four to five miles up the road. Next, the author notes an out crop around a mile up that left turn with a green outcrop. First, it's not really an out crop - it's an open cut at a sharp left turn in the road, and there's one of those sign posts there with a number nine on it. None of this was mentioned by the author. And he got the mineralogy wrong too. There's very little malachite but a lot of cornwallite, some melanterite and heaps and heaps of crysocolla that he didn't property identify. I'm also wondering how he missed all the massive to gemmy garnet in the skarn at this location, because it's all over the tailings pile... And there is also really lovely tumble-worthy and polished-slab worthy leucocitic porphyry all over that stop. And If he had done his research, he might have mentioned the two adits there in the cut into the old Copper Bullion workings that you shouldn't enter because they are caved and unsafe. The author also misses minerals. At Mackay, he didn't spot the quartz druse, the garnets, the galena, the sphaelerite, the magnetite, and the cuprite which I picked up out of the tailings piles plus the HUGE orthoclase inclusions in the dikes cut by the road up to the big open cut above Cliff Creek. I spent three hours at Mackay and it was my first visit. How much time did the author spend to miss what I spotted so easily in my short afternoon there? It's not just Mackay where minerals get missed. For example, the author missed the lovely cubic thoriatites just up the hill from the Sacagawea momument at the top of Lemhi Pass and he didn't bother to check out the other rare earth element veins that are all over the place along the ridge crest along the ID-MT border line. And I'm rather flattened that all he found at Gilmore was quartz since I've brought home all kinds of fun stuff off the tailings there.

great book

color pics would have been nice

All good

Highly instructive, a good read and worth the money.

Perfect, easy install. Look great!