I grew up in the small town of Petoskey, MI. You can indeed just walk down the shores of Lake Michigan and find these. People at local camps come and gather them one day and then spend the rest of their vacation polishing them in rock polishing stations and fashioning them into jewelry and stuff. All the gift shops sell Petoskey stone paper weights, knives, boxes, necklaces, Michigan-shaped Petoskey stones, you name it!
About 45 years ago from TC, before they redid the lakefront area (? wasn't there a concrete/gravel plant? or was that Charlevoix), I found so many I couldn't carry them home. Is it still that way? Also, back when Consumer's energy was trying to make nuclear your friend, the Big Rock nuclear plant used to have a a very cool visitor's center with dioramas of the core and a cool cartoon movie theater IIRC. I got the comic book!
("TIL A Michigan rock collector found an impressive 93 lb. Petoskey stone in Lake Michigan in 2015, only to have it promptly confiscated by authorities. The stone violated a Michigan law that states no more than 25 pounds of rocks or minerals can be taken from the Great Lakes per year.")
I'm guessing that someone reading that reddit post found the phenomenon interesting and submitted its Wikipedia page to news.ycombinator.
I was there and found a few on Saturday. I try to make it to Petoskey at least once per year. Looking for these is one of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon.
We always used to go up to Torch Lake during summer when I was a kid. Collected a bunch of these. The easiest way to find them is to bring some water with you and go for a walk on a rocky road, and pour the water on likely rocks. The water makes the pattern much clearer and fewer people look for them on the roads.
Well this was a serendipitous post! My wedding anniversary is coming up and I wasn't sure what to get my wife. Thanks to this, I looked up 'Petoskey stone' on Amazon and found a pretty necklace for sale. Someday I'd love to visit Michigan and buy matching earrings/bracelet in person.
All the way from Traverse City to Charlevoix is, indeed, very good and never crowded. Storms are good for stirring up the aluvial deposits to reveal new finds. Rubber boots will help if the temperature is significantly below freezing. Otherwise, I prefer barefoot with some local microbrews. The biggest one I found, about the size of an american football, was the one I stepped on. :)
Fun fact: Claude Shannon, father of information theory, was born in Petoskey, MI [0]. He grew up not far away in Gaylord, MI, where you can now visit Claude Shannon park [1].
I've always found it fascinating collecting fossils.
Of course the rock is millions of years old, but the fact that it has the shape of a shell embedded in it from millions of years ago just makes the fact so much more real.
Serendipity! Just looking at a large one last night, here at my wife's parents house in Boyne City, found decades ago. (My mother in law grew up here.)
The craft fair in Boyne over the 4th of July is a good place to buy trinkets made with Petoskey stones like the ones in the shape of the state that someone else mentioned. We didn't make it there this summer, but stop by Kilwin's and Lake Street Deli for me!
The even cooler part of these stones is that they often look totally plain when dried out, because the white coral pattern blends into the light gray of the stone. If you're walking the beach looking for them, you might have to pick up likely looking candidates and dip them in the water to darken the gray parts of the stone; every time is like a little lottery that you might win.
By brother collected these as a kid living in Charlevoix and threw a bunch into Lake Champlain, nearly a thousand miles away, in the hopes of trolling some future geologist.
My grandparents retired on the eastern shore of the Leelanau peninsula, very near the town where the recently discovered 93 pound stone was found. We would walk the shoreline after a fresh rain to find these. They kept buckets full of them that they would give away to whomever wanted them.
I never realized how unique the stones were until I was in my 20s and discovered most people know nothing about them. The buckets are long gone and one of my biggest regrets is not having claimed any before my grandparents moved back down to southeast MI.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 87.3 ms ] thread[1] https://www.themoleholeonline.com/history/
Wikipedia pages about predictable things are not interesting, but when the topic is uncorrelated with anything else, they're fine.
("TIL A Michigan rock collector found an impressive 93 lb. Petoskey stone in Lake Michigan in 2015, only to have it promptly confiscated by authorities. The stone violated a Michigan law that states no more than 25 pounds of rocks or minerals can be taken from the Great Lakes per year.")
I'm guessing that someone reading that reddit post found the phenomenon interesting and submitted its Wikipedia page to news.ycombinator.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
[1]: http://www.gaylordmichigan.net/member-37/claude-shannon-park...
Of course the rock is millions of years old, but the fact that it has the shape of a shell embedded in it from millions of years ago just makes the fact so much more real.
My brother does stuff like that.
Here's a blurry image of one that she gave me (after I wore down the polish a bit). http://i.imgur.com/IhvgT.jpg
I never realized how unique the stones were until I was in my 20s and discovered most people know nothing about them. The buckets are long gone and one of my biggest regrets is not having claimed any before my grandparents moved back down to southeast MI.