Location Name: Floy Wash / Pigeon Blood Agate
Materials: Chalcedony with spots and rocks claimed to be gastroliths (see below)
GPS: Floy Wash 38.84588, -109.96503
Pigeon Blood Agate 38.83884, -109.97456
When using GPS coordinates to navigate to locations in the backcountry sites like Google will often make mistakes. Please watch this video before venturing out. https://youtu.be/hQr1l7dnCE4
Tools: Rock hammer, pry bar, and a small bucket
Vehicle: If you want to drive in, you will need a high clearance vehicle and 4WD. We drove into Floy Wash with our lifted Outback with 11.5″ of ground clearance and barely made it, and the road into the pigeon blood agate was washed out as of May 2026, and we walked in, but all of these conditions are subject to change over time.
Date visited: May 2026
Land manager: Bureau of Land Management Moab Field Office
Elevation: 4500′
Best season: Winter, spring, and fall
Additional comments: Despite this being a very well-known and highly touted location, I didn’t find the material to be all that great, as nearly everything we brought back was highly fractured, and the pieces that had no visible fracture on the outside were fractured on the inside when cut.
Any Location Updates Since Visit:
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The subject of gastroliths:
Below are some photos of round rocks found at this locality that many people identify as a gastrolith due to their smooth, round shape and coming from a location known to have dinosaur bones. However, unless these stones are found within the abdomen of a dinosaur skeleton, there is no way they can possibly be identified as such.
The University of California Museum of Paleontology has this to say on the subject: “New research has called the identity of these rocks into question. Oliver Wings found that ostrich gastroliths are rarely polished (i.e., smooth and shiny). Many rounded rocks found in dinosaur-bearing formations are identified as gastroliths specifically because they are highly polished. But if the shiny, rounded rocks are not gastroliths, how did they get polished, and how did they get into the finer-grained sediments? One possibility is that they are remnants of old layers of conglomerate that have weathered away, leaving just a few stream-rounded pebbles sitting on the sandstones and mudstones below them.”
What it comes down to is that there is no possible way to confirm that these are, in fact, gastroliths.
