Northern Michigan Voices is a series by 9&10 News reporter Olivia Fellows in which she interviews a person in the community about a story or experience from their life. Everyone has an interesting story to tell, and we want to give you a voice, Northern Michigan! To submit your own story pitch, see the bottom of this article for more details.
In this edition, Olivia talks to Alpena resident Rob Abram of Michigan Rocks who has spent years cultivating, mastering and sharing his love of hunting and tumbling some of Northern Michigan’s most famous rocks.
Hear from Abram about some of his favorite rocks, how he shares his knowledge and find out his suggestions for the best places in Northern Michigan to rock hunt.
Q: Tell me a bit about yourself and your background.
ABRAM: I was a junior high math teacher for 30 years, I retired in 2020. I’m actually teaching at a local Catholic school now, just as a volunteer one hour a day so I guess I’m still a math teacher. I’m from the Alpena area and I have two kids, my son Brian, and my daughter Allison. Brian is the one who initially got me interested in rocks and rock tumbling because he liked polished rocks and gift shops. We’d go to get polished rocks from gift shops, he always wanted those little bags of rocks. We decided to get him a rock tumbler for Christmas one year when he was about 12 years old, then he kind of lost interest after a couple of years, but I didn’t, and got all kinds of lapidary equipment in the basement.
Q: What about the hobby kept your interest in rock tumbling alive and what was it like first learning the basics of how to do rock tumbling?
ABRAM: When my son was younger, we just got a two-barrel rock tumbler, with a three-pound barrel and we started with that. Before the first batch was over, I bought a vibratory tumbler, because it’s much quicker to finish the last steps with a vibratory tumbler. A year later, we bought another tumbler. It’s one of those things where you know you just want to do more and more and more.
I think my very first batch was granite, which is not a great rock for tumbling. Over the years, I’ve learned which rocks you can pick up that will tumble well. But we also bought rocks, there are some really cool rocks around the world that, before I did this, I had no idea were rocks that could look like they do. For example, the Crazy Lace Agate from Mexico is just super colorful and, as the name implies, crazy patterns all over the place.
How tumbling works is you put your rocks in a barrel, you put some water in the barrel with them. Then you put in tumble and grit, which there are two different kinds of, there’s silicon carbide and there’s aluminum oxide. Basically, it’s really sharp sand sort of stuff. As the barrel rolls, the rocks roll that stuff gets in between and it grinds them down until they get smaller and smaller and smoother and smoother. Once you get them where you want them in the first stage, you move on to the next stage which is like sanding wood.
Q: What have you learned along the way about Michigan’s stones and is there’s a if there’s a particular type of stone that you really enjoy working with the most?
ABRAM: I’ve never had a geology class in my life, and I don’t really know much about geology. I’ve learned some over the years here, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in geology or identifying rocks at all.
Obviously, we have the Petoskey stone and I love Petoskey stones. I love working with them. A lot of people don’t realize that there are different qualities of Petoskey stones. Some are pretty horrible and some are really awesome. When I’m looking for rocks, I’m usually looking for the best possible specimens at this point. When I first started, I would pick up everything, if it’s a Petoskey stone, it goes in the bucket. Now, 90% or more of them stay on the beach, and I just take home the best ones.
With other rocks, I like picking up are pudding stones. I love going up to Lake Superior looking for agates although they’re usually really tiny and really hard to find, but it’s still just a thrill to find one. There’s a lesser-known stone called banded chert. A pretty common chert stone is flint, and they’re not exactly the same thing, but they’re close. If it had stripes on it, it could look almost as good as an agate except it’s a gray rock instead of the colorful agates up in Lake Superior, but they have similar kinds of bands on them and they can just look amazing when they’re polished.
You can go up to the Upper Peninsula and find copper, and there are other rocks up there to look for. I’m not usually very successful in finding some of them. There’s something called a yooperlite, which I’ve never found. There are green stones which I have found small ones of. Greenstone is our state gemstone, it’s also called chlorastrolite.
Another rock I like that you can find pretty much all along Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Superior is unicyte. It’s always green and either pink, orange or red along with the green. That’s a fun rock to tumble, too. It’s easy to find. It tumbles really nicely. So I like finding that. Any kind of interesting looking rock, if it’s got a nice pattern to it or nice colors, there’s quartzite and quartz and all kinds of fun rocks that tumble well. Those are some of my favorites.
Q: What is your favorite part of seeing people discover a love of rocks through sharing what you’ve learned through tumbling?
ABRAM: There was no rock club around Alpena to join when I started, so I learned from a friend of mine who rock hunts at the deer camp I hunt at. I got started through him a little bit, but then I learned almost everything I know through a website for rock tumbling. I did a lot of reading there, and it was an online course you’re chatting back and forth. I started by asking questions and getting my questions answered.
Later, I started making the YouTube videos. My first videos weren’t really meant to go to anybody except that rock tumbling hobby group, I would show where I found the Petoskey stones and pudding stones that were in my videos and my pictures there all the time.
In 2018 or 2019 we had a whole bunch of snow days one year, and we hardly went to school in February. It was the fifth or sixth day off in a row, and I was just sort of getting cabin fever. There was nothing to do, so I decided to make a video on how to polish a Petoskey stone by hand, and that video still does pretty well and it was the first video I made where I was thinking about a video that a lot of people would want to see.
I’m a teacher, so I like teaching about it. The transformation of a rough Petoskey stone to a polished Petoskey stone is just so satisfying. Most people can’t afford or don’t want to buy really expensive lapidary equipment. Showing people how to do it just plain old sandpaper, which you can do with Petoskey stone because it’s so soft, was kind of fun. It’s fun hearing from people who have success.
From there, I started teaching people how to tumble rocks. I have a lot of instructional videos about how to make other stuff out of rocks. I made videos on how I make Christmas ornaments, little heart-shaped pendants, teardrop-shaped pendants and beads that fit on like a bracelet. I‘ve got videos about all kinds of different things, but it is fun hearing from people who tell me that they weren’t having success, and now they’re they’re able to do it
Rock tumbling is kind of frustrating because the directions that come with the tumblers are kind of kind of horrible. They often say you can get stuff done in a much shorter time than you actually can. Once people learn how to do it right, it’s just much more satisfying. It’s really fun to hear from those people who were previously having problems and now have a nice shiny batch of rocks. They’re all excited about it.
Q: Are there any specific items that you really enjoy making and can you tell me about the process of going from the stone to a finished piece?
ABRAM: The thing I make more than anything else is little stone crosses. People just carry them in their pockets, so I make a lot of those. I sell them at a Christian bookstore here in town. like cutting things out and then tumbling them. I make Christmas ornaments that are bells and angels, I also make Michigan mittens using wood and stones.
I have a lap saw, which is a saw where you put a rock in a device inside the saw, and then it automatically goes through the blade and cuts a slice off. Once one slice is cut, you have to kind of move the rock over and make it into another slice. It might take 20 minutes or so to cut one slice through a rock. Then, once you get it all sliced up like that, you take it to a trim saw and cut out the shape and I can cut out any shape I want, pretty much.
I might have to cut a hole in a stone, so I have on the drill press an attachment for the dremel, so you can drill little holes. Then they go in the tumbler, and then I can glue stuff together as needed. Most of the equipment I bought used originally. Now I have companies that are sponsoring me and sending me stuff to review on my channel, so it’s kind of nice.
Q: What pieces of advice do you have to give to somebody who’s either just starting or might be interested in starting rock tumbling?
ABRAM: One of the biggest things for rock tumbling is to find somebody who knows what they’re doing, learn from them and look at what they are doing. There are some groups and there are people who are willing to tell you anything you want to know, so you have to make sure that the person knows what they’re talking about first.
My biggest piece of advice is to have patience. Rock tumbling is about patience. Most people that are having problems have rushed through some steps. They want to make it quicker, and it’s not quick. When you tumble rock, there are different people who have different tastes in tumbling. I like my rocks to be perfectly smooth and have no flaws at all. Other people like them to look more natural. But for the way I do it, the shortest time it can take for a rock is two weeks but a lot of the rocks I tumble take three or four months to get right. It depends on the rock.
I do each rock separately, so when I open up the barrel at the end of the week, I inspect every rock in the barrel and some are ready to go on and some aren’t so those get set aside. Then I just throw some more in and keep doing that each week. The whole batch doesn’t get done at the same time.
Once you’ve done a few of them, it starts to get easier to be patient about it. I found that kids like my son were very patient. I think the parents sometimes have a harder time waiting for this stuff than the kids do so I wouldn’t shy away from having a kid do this hobby because kids can have a lot of patience.
Q: Do you have one or two good places that you go to hunt for rocks in Northern Michigan?
ABRAM: Rockport is a really cool place if you like fossils, which is right by Alpena. It’s an old quarry and there are sinkholes behind it, and then there’s the beach. You could spend a whole day there— or several days— and have a lot of fun, but that’s mostly fossils. Any beach between Grand Marais and White Fish Point up in the eastern UP on Lake Superior, anywhere between those two places is good. I like the Keweenaw Peninsula, there are some mine piles there that are kind of fun to go through.
Cliff mine up there is open to the public to hunt at, and that’s kind of fun to look for copper and there are green stones there. There are also other minerals, but copper and green stones are probably the most fun thing to find there. There are other beaches up on the Keweenaw Gratiot River. I think it’s a county park or a township park, but the mouth of the Gratiot River is a kind of a nice place to go. But my favorite spot is the Eastern UP. There are just really, really pretty rocks in that area, and a lot of variety.
Lake Michigan is nice, but there tend to be beaches that have too many people. I like going places where there are no people because then you get better rocks.
Q: If you could rock hunt with anybody from history of your choice, who would it be and why?
ABRAM: Jesus, because He created them. I could ask what He was thinking when He created different rocks
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