Tumbling River Rocks

When I’m not finding fossils in the river, I’m finding rocks. My husband and I regularly pick up every pretty rock we see, so we can take it home for the tumbler. My rock tumbler is most definitely among my favorite birthday gifts of all time! I keep that little sucker running 24/7! I have to practice patience waiting for the beautiful, shiny rocks that it produces from the random things we throw in it!

Here’s what’s been tumbling for the last several weeks - it’s a mixture of all the rocks we picked up on the Colorado River in the last couple trips on the boat.

Assortment of river rocks from SE Texas in the Colorado River that we tumbled.

I love how they turned out! Here are some of my personal favorites.

I’m always surprised at what the tumbled rocks look like compared to how they look when I find them in the river. Here’s an example of that transformation from a different batch of rocks we tumbled. The first photo on the left is down at the river, and the second one is after the rock has tumbled in the tumbler for several weeks.

We’re definitely not experts at identifying types of rocks. We just pick up ones that look like they’ll be pretty once they are tumbled & sitting in the “candy bowl” on the coffee table. I’d love to start trying to identify some of them!