Canadian Rockhound: Ozokerite

Ozokerite: A Hard Soft-Rock on the
Utah Roadside
By Rick Hudson, British Columbia

Most rockhounds are really only interested in hard rocks – soft rocks and sedimentary basins just don't have the same magic that a nice pegmatite does. Let's face it, what's interesting about coal, oil and gas? Not much. Well, not much that you can dig up and put in a display case, anyway.
Years ago I read an article about an oil deposit where the light volatiles had all evaporated off, leaving a very unusual deposit in the form of a layer of bitumous wax. At the time, the report struck me as interesting, but nothing more. I knew, for instance, that oil refineries spend a lot of time and effort removing wax from natural crude, and that those waxes are used in everything from lubricating greases to furniture polish, but could Nature do the same thing by evaporation? According to that reference, there was just such a deposit in Austria, and another in the USA.
That's where the thought stayed, until a recent trip to Utah prompted a sudden interest in that state's geology. Surprise! There was a report about a mineral wax deposit on Highway 6 at Soldier Summit. The article called the material ozokerite, which I couldn't find a reference to in any mineral book I had, but it sounded like the same thing, and, better still, it was on our route to Grand Junction, CO.

At the turn of the century, ozokerite and marble were both mined at Soldier Summit by the American Ozokerite Company. Life must have been pretty tough for those guys, working at 7,400 ft with bitter temperatures and driving winds in the winter months, and scorching heat for the summer ones. But the wax was found to be a very high grade paraffin, with numerous properties that were valued. It had a high melting temperature (70^oC to 90^oC) so that it was useful in hot climates where normal waxes became too soft. It was also prized for making non-dripping candles, and by 1900 most of the best church candles in the world were made from a blend of ozokerite and beeswax. They burned brighter and stayed more erect.
Mining went on for about 50 years, and it's possible that if plastics had not come along during WWII, the demand for this mineral wax might still be considerable. Refining was a simple process of dumping the wax into boiling water, skimming the molten wax off the surface, and casting it in blocks. Most ozokerite was black, but there was reference in the literature to a rarer yellow variety, and even some white material.

With all this in the back of our minds, Phillipa and I pulled off the road at Soldier Summit one cool and stormy September day, and started hunting for the old mine site. One account had a photograph showing the mine right next to the road (Route 6?), while another suggested you could not actually see the mine from the road, but that it was 'in close proximity'.
To complicate the process, ozokerite is black and light, and Soldier Summit has been used as a major coaling depot for the cross-mountain locomotives for many years (highest point on the railroad in Utah), so there are huge areas strewn with chunks of black coal that look deceptively like wax until you pick them up and see the dark streaks on your hands!
After an hour of hunting, we gave up, and pulled off the highway onto an unpaved road, where we sat and ate lunch. An ominously dark bank of clouds were rolling up the valley, with flashes of lightning, and we had just decided it might be smart (as the highest object around for miles) to head down-valley, when we realized we were sitting pretty much exactly where the photo in the article had been taken, and the mine was quite clear, if you knew where to look.
A rapid return to the main road, and we parked at the fork of a dirt road that heads E about 1 km SE of the gas station on Soldier Summit. Through the fence, over the rise, and ... there it was! Less than a hundred metres from the main road, two mounds of what we'd assumed were highway gravel piles turned out to be the mine dumps. Close by, lightning crashed, and thunder roared. We grabbed a collecting bucket apiece, and rapidly scampered over the mounds, picking up pieces of the light, black mineral at almost every step. Pieces as large as baseballs were scratched out of the pale sands.
The sky above had turned almost to night, although it was only early afternoon. Then, a bolt of lightning struck less than a kilometre away, and we sensed we were on borrowed time. Racing back to the RV, we spun out from under the front of the boiling storm, and dropped rapidly down towards the Green River through the most incredible desert scenery, the thunder rolling in behind us, but the rain never quite catching up.

That evening, in the quiet of an uncrowded Utah rangeland, I pulled out our treasured finds, so valiantly snatched from the storm, and washed them in warm soapy water. As the dust and muck fell away, the curiously twisted forms of the wax's formation appeared. As with most waxes, it was very light; light enough to float, in fact, which pleased me. Now I had something other than pumice to show the pebble pups at the science shows!
Along with the ozokerite, there was another unusual material that looked, surprisingly, like ulexite (a mineral formed by evaporation of boron deposits). The jury is still out on this one, although several geologists have been asked.
The real prize for the day was a single sample that had a clearly defined streak of crystalized, golden ozokerite! So, if you are ever travelling Highway 6 from Salt Lake City to such places as Arches National Park, or Grand Junction, you should stop and try your luck. Why not? It's as close as 50 metres from the road, and ozokerite must be one of the rarest of minerals, a hard soft-rock.

Copyright ©1997 Rick Hudson
E-mail: rickhudson@home.com
This article may not be copied, distributed or reprinted in any form without the author's permission. To contact the author, please use the e-mail address provided. If you are unable to contact the author, please contact the Canadian Rockhound. Authorized reprints must acknowledge the author, original source and the Canadian Rockhound, and include the website URL address of the Canadian Rockhound.
The preceding article was first published in 1995 in the newsletter of Victoria Lapidary & Mineral Society (issue number lost). Reprinted in the Canadian Rockhound with permission from the author.
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Document Number: CR9701203

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