Expanded an Older Pocket Oct 22nd

Docia emailed me last week and asked if I was doing anything last weekend, she was sooo ready to return to the secret spot and see what we could find. I had the weekend off and so we decided to meet about mid morning on Saturday and check out the new diggs and the lower spot as well.  We arrived at the new diggs to discover a new road entering the area, which has been leveled off and flattened somewhat….

…we parked and walked up into the area and nosed around, looking for sparkles…Docia was looking for plates for her gem trees and I was looking for smokey quartz druse…

…the pocket I had found a few weeks earlier was completely gone…heavy equipment having moved the wall another fifty feet to the east…so the wall I dug the last plates out of was completely gone…no telling where that pocket wound up.

After a couple of hours of digging some beautiful plates out, we decided to drive on over to the lower area and see what we could find…well I should say I did…Docia decided she was too exhausted to do much pocket digging after walking around looking at a few spots…I tried a couple of spots up front in the floor area….

…however, I didnt find much…..

…so I decided to check out an older pocket and see if I could liberate some of the clusters in front of the pocket….

..there are a few of those older pockets in the next level up, so I decided to try out this one first….

…and closer up….

…you can see the beds of clusters by my hand rake there….here they are closer up….

..the first thing I did though, was to look under the sidewalls and backwall to see if there were any crystals still waiting to be removed, and I saw signs under one sidewall….

…and under the backwall too….

…so I started at the backwall and began chipping some of the backwall off and found a few plates and crystals pretty fast….

Docia left soon after and I kept chipping off the top wall and took the following photo of the crystals and plates under the backwall….

…and closer up….

..the whole time I was chipping away, Missy was patiently waiting nearby….

…sittin pretty and being a very good girl…..

Well I removed that nice plate you saw, placed my glove down below it and then stuck the chisel in the rock and hammered it back into the rock to bring down quite a few pieces of dolomite with the plate…

…allowing the glove to provide a soft landing for the plate and any other crystals that decided to come down….and yes there were still more inside back behind it….

…and yes, more plates and crystals were eventually removed….

with the pocket expanding to this point….

…and here are a few of the nicer plates that I removed from the pocket….

..after removing these guys, it was obvious that there was no more pocket and so I turned my attention to a couple of clusters up in the front of the pocket…and luckily I was able to remove a couple of nice ones….

…this finished up about three hours of chipping and digging and Missy and I headed home for a good home cooked meal after removing these two….and decided to come back the next day for some more. 🙂

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