Owyhee Picture Jasper Slabs

There are sixty known deposits of Picture Jasper in the twenty or so square miles known as "The Owyhee". Many of these deposits were discovered by the famous prospector and minerJake Jacobitz. I had the pleasure of going with Jake this past summer on a tour of the Owyhee and visited many of the deposits

Bruce Markus discovered the first major deposit in this area and named it Owyhee Picture Jasper. That took place back in the fifties when he and a friend were chasing a group of wild horses in a VW bug. They stopped to relieve themselves and found the ground covered with beautiful jasper. This first material is the finest in terms of color, hardness and picture. It is referred to as "The Morrisonite of Picture Jaspers", just as Morrisonite itself is considered "The King of Jaspers".

The original Owyhee Jasper mine is now merely a refilled trench about twenty feet wide and a hundred feet long. Not a scrap of jasper could be found on the surface. The miner Dale Huett recently took a huge excavator and went down to the bottom of the original mine and found more jasper but many people feel that the earlier material was better.