September…Catching Up…

Sorry everyone…I took the latter part of September off to drive my parents out to Colorado so they could see some beautiful fall color and ride the steam train at Durango, as part of their 50th anniversary. They no longer like to make the long drives and after everything they have done for me, I volunteered to do the driving for them. I had taken the last weekend off at work, back in January when we pick our shifts to work, and thought then that I would attend the gem and mineral show in Joplin again….it wasnt held last year due to the catastrophic tornado that ravaged the entire city. My mom and I were talking over dinner one evening and she remarked to me that she and dad would love to travel out to Colorado and see some beautiful fall color and once again ride the train at Durango…it has been 45 years since we rode it…and I only remember bits and pieces of it…but they couldnt handle drives any longer than five hours. I told Mom I had taken that weekend off, giving me a week off, and would love to take them out there instead, so we started planning it out back in August. If interested, you can check out that story and the photos at my other blog site,  http://jwjphotoblog.com

I went rockhunting two times before the Colorado trip and even took a couple of care packages out there with me, one for my second cousin Emmie, who is an aspiring geologist in Denver and just started first grade this year….and one for my geologist buddy Ian Merkel, who is in the Evergreen area and works for the Henderson Mine Company. I took them some Missouri druse, poker chip crystals and clusters, some Arkansas quartz, and some western Kentucky fluorite.

So on this Sunday, I decided to go back to the secret spot and check out an area in the pile that I had a sneaking suspicion that there might be a pocket lurking nearby…I had crisscrossed this particular area a few times and seen some sign, plus there was a huge boulder there that had crystals on it…everything just seemed to add up and I just needed to do some physical researching to see if it truly would add up.

Missy and I took off early that morning to avoid the heat….arriving about sunrise….and what a pretty sunrise it was….

01 Sunrise Above Huzzah

…and a few minutes later, as we were climbing up a hill from a valley floor, we spotted several very pretty deer in a field to the left of the road…I pulled over to photograph them in the early morning light….they stood still for one shot and then….

02 Deer in Field by Huzzah

…their flags came up and off they fled toward the woods and I mean…FAST….

03 Deer Spooked and Flee

..we headed on down the road and arrived soon after…I checked the sloped area I had found the massive chunk of poker chip crystals, and discovered another slide had occurred while I wasnt there and the chunk was apparently buried…

04 Sloped Pocket

 

05 Nothing More Found

..I didnt have the energy required to clean it off to look for more, so I opted to go over to the pile and look at another area that I figured had a pocket as well…another area I had criss crossed several times and always found crystals nearby…mainly at the base of a large boulder covered on one side with crystals.

06 Pile With Big Boulder

and the next photo shows a few of the crystals that I picked up out of the surrounding rocks and dirt after digging down around the base of the boulder above….

07 Few Crystals and Clusters Found

…giving further confirmation that there could potentially be more nice stuff below or around it…so on I dug, in behind the boulder as well as I could. I tried to be as careful as possible with a lot of bigger rocks up above me and this pocket….it could slide down and bury the work I had done so far anytime….

08 Pocket Opens Base of Boulder

….and as soon as I started digging in behind the boulder, this pocket luckily opened up pretty quickly…I was able to pull enough small crystals out to give me hope there was more in there, prob just further back which meant more careful digging. I began removing some of the bigger rocks above and around it, creating a couple of diversionary slide directions for it to go if it decided to…and as the pocket opened up more from above, more crystals started showing up inside….

09 Looking Inside

…as it opened up, a few chunks of matrix with crystals attached, fell out of the back of the pocket….

10 Opening Up Pocket

 

11 Large Crystal Found

Well I kept on digging and this pocket started to go deeper, down and further back…I was pulling out small crystals so that was motivating me to keep on digging….

12 Pocket Goes Deeper

…and pretty soon there was calcite signs everywhere inside the pocket…on the walls and ceiling area and floor of it…

13 More Signs Found

…and within minutes, another pretty pocket opened up….

14 Another Pocket Opens Up

…and since it was so pretty looking, I decided I didnt want to damage it, so I began clearing rocks from above and around the pocket, so I didnt have another controlled, or worse, uncontrolled slide….at any rate, I managed to clear out the pocket and clear out the surrounding area….

15 Cleared Off and Around

 …and as soon as I began digging around the cleared edges, I stumbled upon yet another pretty pocket….

16 Yet Another Pocket Found

and this one started producing some bigger chunks of crystals…I was beginning to think this would be a lot more fun if all the rock hanging up above wasn`t….

17 New Pocket Expands

…and this is one of the druse plates that came out of this pocket as well…

18 Druse Plate Uncovered

…and here is a pile of crystals that came out of these pockets….

19 Crystals Found So Far

 …and then the inevitable occurred….only this one was a controlled slide…I did it to clear it off and hopefully get into more pockets, however….

20 Cave In

…I didn`t plan for the really big one that came down…and it was so heavy I couldnt even move more than one end of it at a time…so that is where I stopped for the day.

 

 

 

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