Collector Vows to Keep New Quartz Vein Secret; Accidentally Posts GPS Coordinates to Facebook

A member of the Ridgeline Lapidary Club swore he would keep a new quartz vein off every map, then posted a photograph of it, with coordinates attached, to a private Facebook group eleven hours later, according to the group's own join log.

The vein is milky quartz with iron staining, fist-sized specimens wedged in a roadcut face that Teddy Osgood found in March while pulling over for a flat. He logged it in his field notebook, drove back twice without collecting, and stood up at the April meeting to announce that he would not be disclosing the location. "Two years I've been beaten to a spot," he said. "This one stays in the truck." The club applauded. Inez Fenn wrote "locality withheld at collector's request" in the monthly update, which is why the group now believes the locality was never published anywhere.

The photograph went up to a forty-member group Osgood described as private. The phone's location services were on. One member saved the file. By Friday the coordinates had traveled through a group chat into a club group chat that Osgood is also in, and he watched them arrive without recognizing his own numbers.

"A private group is a private conversation," said Otis Vale of the standards board, who was asked to rule and ruled. "What a member does inside four walls of a group is between that member and the walls." Asked whether a wall can be screenshot, Vale said the board would take it up in June.

Harold Loomis, who lives with a devotee of the hobby and has become an accidental expert in what not to say, offered the only procedural note that has held up: "I told him the coordinates were on his phone. He said the phone was with him, not with forty other people."

The reversal came with the land status. The roadcut sits inside state forest boundary, where removing specimens is prohibited and the collecting permit covers nothing larger than a pocket. The vow, the breach, and the nine-day trickle of visitors to the pullout have all been conducted in service of a place where nobody may legally take anything home. A man from two counties over arrived with a rock hammer and left with photographs.

The expected thread reply arrived beneath the photo: "Have you streaked it?" It has forty-one likes and no answer, since quartz streaks white and the question was never about the quartz.

Osgood has asked the group to delete the post, which two members have and forty have not. He kept one chunk, a milky piece with an iron-stained heel, and it sits on the shelf above his notebook under a card that reads "Site: withheld." The card is correct. The card is the only thing in the room that is.