Locals Are Obsessed With Hunting These Rare ‘Glowing Rocks’ on the Shores of Michigan

During the day, Michigan’s beaches are just like any other beach in the world. As a cool-warm breeze sweeps the waves, rocks from the seawater are abandoned on the shore where a visitor pays interest in the rock and picks one up to take home. There’s a huge variety: Petoskey stones, pudding stones, Lake Superior agates, and more. But as the night falls, the beaches turn into a jamboree of visitors, who amble around with headlamps, rock scoopers, mesh bags, and glow sticks; all of them eager to get their hands on “Yooperlite,” a seemingly ordinary pebble that transforms into a glowing rock at night.

David and Janine Young have spent years curating a library that brims with dozens of Yooperlites, as they shared with TMJ4. Natives of Sheboygan, the Youngs couple work as teachers by day and rock collectors by night. In the local community, they are known by the moniker Great Lakes Rock Hounds (@greatlakesrockhounds). Despite the exhaustion of the day’s work, they love to spend the evenings relaxing and exploring in nature. “God gave us such beautiful nature,” Janine reflected. “Go outside, go explore—just go look.”

Yooperlites were first discovered in 2017 by Erik Rintamaki. Today, apart from the Young couple, dozens of visitors comb the beaches of the Upper Peninsula (UP) along Lake Superior, the beaches near Grand Marais, as well as in the Keweenaw Peninsula, to collect these prized “glowing rocks” and add to their collections. In a Reddit thread, some users called the rock a version of the “legendary Shankara stones from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” Janine called it the “firefly on the beach.”

The reason, however, why these rocks glow is their composition. “You know a lot of them look like granite,” David explained, “It just looks like a normal rock, but it has sodalite in it.” Sodalite, according to the news outlet, is a fluorescent mineral that glows in the dark when ultraviolet light is flashed on it. Adding to the science behind it, Janine remarked that this light excites the electrons inside the rock. They start bouncing around, spitting this surreal glow in the dark.

These rocks, according to Geology Science, are thought to have originated from magma that cooled slowly beneath the Earth’s surface, triggered by volcanic activity. The process caused these syenite rocks to become crystallized with fluorescent sodalite, also called sodium aluminium silicate, a compound used in making jewelry. In a Facebook post, resident Jen Savage revealed that there are different types of Yooperlites, including glowadites, emberlites, syenite sodalite, and feldspathoid minerals.

On their Instagram page, Janine and David have shared dozens of reels documenting their trip to the beach, where they collected Yooperlites and brought them home to add to the growing collection. “These patterns just fascinate me,” they wrote in the caption of a reel that displayed them flashing a torch on the seabed. The light illuminated an otherworldly rock, shimmering with a pattern of purples, yellows, and oranges. As the camera zoomed in on the rock, it looked like a magical stone in a fantasy movie.

Experts, however, suggest that rock hounds be prepared before venturing on a rock-collecting trip. Carry a UV light, for instance, to detect and distinguish these magical rocks from the others. If you’ve already collected some Yooperlites, be prepared to find little bugs, mossy algae, or slimy carpets sticking to them until you wash them. In another Instagram caption, the Youngs wrote, “Messy, sometimes nature is a bit messy. But, so beautiful.”

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