Secret Spot Quarry on my Birthday

My birthday is July 22nd and for the past fifteen years I have always taken my birthday off from work if scheduled and gone rockhunting somewhere…when it falls on a weekend, I always go to one of the quarries, this year it was the Secret Spot Quarry that I decided to go to.  I let all my close rockhound friends know and Al was the only one that could go with me…I took it easy on him and we didn`t leave til around 6 am…we worked several pockets around the walls while Onxy did a lot of swimming in the water holes….

and we noticed the pile nearly removed from this section of the wall, so we worked our way carefully over to that section…as we did, we noticed that someone had been really nice to leave a large beach ball sized poker chip cluster laying next to the edge of the pile…I picked it up later and gave it to Al to take home as his very first yard rock. here it is….

After a few hours of searching and combing thru several pockets, we split up…Al stayed on one side of the pile when he found a large area of pretty white druse plates, he took several home with him…meanwhile I was on the other side and found a nice dogtooth pocket in the wall, and began pulling some clusters big and small out of the pocket. Al came over to assist me, bringing me some extra wraps and buckets, I let him know as soon as I had them cleaned up, I would let him pick some out to take home if he wanted. Here are a few of them all cleaned up with Iron Out a few days later…..

…and the one on the bottom in the image above, looked quite nice all by itself in the image below….

….and here is one of three larger clusters soaking in the Iron Out, has two large calcite crystals on it….

…I cleaned it up along with several pieces of wavellite that I collected back in March, while I had the Iron Out working for me…back to the quarry tho…we got out of there shortly after the dogtooth pocket as the heat was coming on strong..on the way back, despite his need to return home by 5:30 pm…he decided to stop off at Missouri Hick and buy me a late lunch for my birthday…thanks again Al !!