My first time rockhounding at Slope Point, the southernmost point in the South Island, happened on Saturday 2 March 2024. I have been to the area before and walked across the paddock to take the standard photo with the sign that indicates you’re at the most southern point of New Zealand. However, I had not ventured down to the actual beach part. The road is no longer gravel plus a large carpark that wasn’t there during my last visit has been added. This place is quite the tourist attraction, and the carpark was quite full!
My fossicking guide, JP from over at TumblestoneBlog has a great blog post with directions for getting down to the beach where we fossicked. If you are down this way and don’t mind a bit of a “hike” it’s definitely worth the effort!
Slope Point Finds
These are the stones that I’ve chosen to tumble first. I think I can identify a few of my finds thanks to a PDF of Jocelyn Thornton’s book Gemstones and of course my fossicking guide JP! I am very happy to be corrected so if you think I’ve got it wrong I’d love to hear from you in the comments below because it’s all a learning curve for me!
Jocelyn Thornton describes Slope Point as having “cliffs that contain layers of conglomerates with pebbles which weather out and collect on the beaches”. Additionally she mentions that the prize is finding petrified punga. Unfortunately I did not find any but I did find a nice piece of black petrified wood. JP told me that collectors take the petrified wood home and dump them in bleach overnight to help the grain of the wood to reveal itself.
Slope Point Rhyolites
Rhyolite is an extrusive igneous rock. The word extrusive means that the rock was formed when hot magma from inside the earth flows out (extrudes) above the surface. The opposite being intrusive rocks formed by magma which cools below the surface.
You can find rhyolites on Gemstone Beach too which polish up quite well but there is more variety in colour to the ones found at Slope Point. I did happen to pick up a number of rhyolite examples during this fossick. In other words, my eyes seem to be drawn immediately to that type of stone!
Stones of Interest
Update: Following a great piece of advice given to me by the amazing JP, I have numbered the images so that if you want to share or comment about one or two in particular you can refer to the number! I am by no means a rock identification expert and would love to be corrected if I’ve labeled something wrong!
I will post the tumbling journey of these stones once they come out of the barrel so that you can see what they look like with hopefully a permanent shine! Until then, happy rock hunting!
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