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TeePee Canyon Agates,
 Tee Pee Canyon, Black Hills, South Dakota
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   The TeePee Canyon Agates in form of hard silicificed concretions used to be mined with machinary, but now the agate site is on National Forest that they can be dug up only by hands out of hard limestone. That makes it quite difficult to dug out whole nodules intact and it didn't help that the banded agates tend to take up small porportion of the large nodules. Thus, It is common for diggers to break down the large nodules to obtain the agate pieces and that is why any whole nodules aer somewhat scarce.  The agates came from a hard limestone formation on the west side of the Black Hills, and may have shared the same limestone formation as more famous(or infamous) Fairburn agates but formed under different enviroment conditions. There had been a plenty of tectonic activity in that area that it is common to find calcite filled cracks running through the nodules.
    It appears that the agates' most common colors are red, white, yellow, and lastly white, and some agates came with pink and blue colors. It is my experience that agates in Tee Pee Canyon concretions tend to be narrow, irregular and somewhat unpredictable, meaning that just because you can see a spot of good agate on a nodule won't mean that the agate will widen to take up more space within the nodule, plus that agates are not always centered within the nodules either . That would explain why some people slab up the Tee Pee Canyon concretions. Any agates taking up 35% or more within the concretions are quite scarce.
    It was quite hard for me to find any good roughs that I would have to make slabs out of some nodules in order to add more agates to be available to collectors.

Updated July 2009, new specimen have 2009y in their code names..
Larger pictures of any interested specimens can be provided at request.

Note: All agates contain varying degrees of fractures and cut from broken nodules unless when stated otherwise.
2009yTPCn2008n003-$100, whole half
back grinded to make it stand up, from old collection		 TPC2008n33-$100, contour-polished, almost no fractures!

2009yTPCn001-$150, SLAB, Whole specimen! Single fracture
From old collection