Docia emailed me earlier in the week and asked if I was doing anything the morning of Thanksgiving. I told her no, my family wasnt celebrating til supper and I was free til then, so we decided to meet at the secret spot about 10 am and see if we could harvest some more dogtooth crystals from the Holie Cow pocket and see what else we could find there. We arrived to find a huge trackhoe sitting there, signs that more material had likely been removed since Missy and I had been there a few days before. No matter though, that just means more material could be readily found.

Docia was up on top when Missy and I arrived,  looking for rainbow druse plates she had found up there before…she came walking down the hill with a long face on and I knew that could only mean bad news for the rainbow plates..she confirmed it saying apparently the last blast had penetrated that pocket and there were no more to be found. After I handed her some clusters of Arkansas Quartz Crystals, she grabbed another bag and some tools and we headed up to the Holie Cow Pocket…

…and found that it had weathered the storm just fine, was still there…

…. Docia decided she really didnt want to climb up to where the dogtooth crystals were located in the pocket to dig them out, so she walked on up above me and sat down on a big rock and started looking for another pocket…finding one within about thirty minutes…

…being a vuggy looking wall, it was soon apparent to us that there were small pockets of druse and calcite all over it…even seams of calcite in some areas…soon she was pulling some nice stuff from this pocket…

…and there was even evidence of a pocket or two above this one in the wall….

..…I returned to the Holie Cow pocket and began liberating a few clusters on the sides of the pocket and even found a few up above it in another pocket….here are some of the goodies I found in the first hour there….

 

….deciding to leave the back wall as intact as I could for Ian`s visit this week, some of them were just too complicated looking to try and remove….

 

…I moved over to the right and found a few small pockets of gray druse and poker chips….and some sparkly gold colored stuff, too….

…..they would have looked alot better had the sun been shining so they could sparkle though….

…and here is a nice poker chip combo from one of those pockets….

I had to pry this big piece out of the way to access this next pocket

and as I did…. …this beautiful small poker chip was just perched there, waiting for me to come along and find it….

..I had just removed this plate, covering up yet another small pocket…covered in druse on the interior side in two colors….

…when Docia yelled at me to come see what she had just found on the opposite side…we had been working on the north wall and she had walked over to the south wall to look around...so I grabbed my camera and walked over to see what she had found….

…spotting her canvas bag full of poker chip crystals first…some of them very big ones…and then this pocket of soda straw druse plates hanging from the ceiling….she was going to try and remove them without breaking them next….

 

…even prettier up close….

 

…and one of the plates she had already removed….

…and sitting there holding one as well….

…and several she had already pulled out of the pocket….

 

 …including these large single crystals, that we rarely see in one pocket…come across them occasionally, but not much. I began looking around the pocket she had pulled them out of, and saw several vuggy pockets nearby, including this one full of yellow colored druse….

 

…I decided to walk back over and clean out what I could from the pockets I was working on and then come back up here, climb up and see what I could find in this pocket as well. As I was walking back across to the north wall, I looked up and saw Docia even higher up, pecking away at another possible pocket….

 

 

I walked back up to the spot where Docia had last worked on a pocket, that started extending upward inside the wall….

…and set my camera inside the pocket looking upward toward that extension so you could see what all was inside that she was unable to reach…..

…pay close attention to the knobby looking rock on your left in that photo above…its going to look a whole lot better in a couple of seconds…I decided to try and remove it to get better access to this pocket, so I was hammering on the back of it, the side facing me, with my four pound hammer, when I heard something detach inside the pocket…I reached inside and pulled this beautiful cluster out of the pocket that had been attached to this knobby chunk as the facepiece….

…I carefully wrapped it up and the others as well, and took them to my truck…it required a couple of trips, I had so many of them…and then grabbed two more bags with wrapping cloths inside and headed over to the south wall….this was the view from up there…

…I then climbed up to the druse pocket I had seen up above Docia`s last pocket and pulled out the druse pieces I could see from below…

…when I finished cleaning out what I could, Docia called to me from above and told me to come up and look at yet another pocket she found, this one filled with druse and large fat poker chip crystals….so I climbed up another twenty feet and found the pocket she had been working on while I was climbing around on the wall….

….and I bent down to see these crystals and druse plates in the entrance to that pocket opening on the right side above….

…..she was walking away and down the top of the pile to see if she could find some plates of druse and tells me, you can have anything there that you want….so I set down and started pulling more crystals and druse plates out of this pocket, and soon had both of my bags completely full….she came back with a very long plate of druse soda straws in her hand, turned upside down and two smaller plates sitting on top of the back of that very big plate in her hands…said it was one of those plates she has been looking for all her life…and where was Floyd or Ed when she needed them to carry those down to the truck for her….told her to take her time and lots of rest stops in order to get it down there safely…which she did…and then I started carrying my two bags down as well, and I had to make a few rest stops along the way as well…coming upon a couple of nice druse plates along the way down and setting my bag next to them, then carrying the one bag and tools on over to the truck, and returning four times for the druse plates I found and the other bag….no one said rockhounding is easy all the time….and some of my rockhound friends have told me if you dont sweat or bleed, its not worth it….I was doing both at the moment, so guess it was totally worth it.

Here is a photo showing Docia with her thirty inch long plate of druse soda straws that she found up on top.