Jimmy E and I drove down to Mt Ida last week, and spent a few days on Lake Ouachita at Mountain Harbor Resort during the evenings and quartz crystal mining during the days. We both arrived about 4 pm Thursday at the Harbor, Jimmy driving down the western side of the state and I drove down thru the center of the state. We both left nice temps in our respective states and as we drove into Arkansas it became noticeably hotter, arriving to find mid nineties and humidity awaiting us with open arms. Yikes…well at least dinner was nice at Mountain Harbor Lodge, with a nice view of Lake Ouachita below us.

The next morning after a sumptuous breakfast of banannas and water for me, we checked the weather forecast and forecasters were indicating a rain front moving in about midmorning, so we drove over to Fiddlers Ridge Rock Shop and registered for digging at Bear Mountain Mine, intending to get there as soon as possible and get some digging in before the rain arrived.  After talking with Judy for a few minutes and paying our daily fee, we  drove on down to the mine, arriving ahead of Bobby, the mine operator. We opened the gate and drove on up to the mine and found a nice view waiting for us from the top near the back of the mine and pit….

and this was our view of the pit on our left as we drove in, you can see the track hoe in the top of the photo on the other side of the pit from where we drove in…

We began looking for quartz in the tailing piles on the south side of the pit on either side of the roadway that led to the pit…the pile on the left, while looking like fresher material, also had a thick layer of red clay dirt covering it and was hard to see anything, plus we didn`t have any sunshine this morning to see glints of crystal with. I was looking around in the pile on the opposite side of the fresher material and told Jimmy I was beginning to find some nice smaller crystals but also seeing evidence of some larger boulders with quartz crystals on them as well. He decided to walk over to the base of the pile I was on and began digging into the side of the material. He told me he was finding a lot of single crystals, but was quite content so far.

The pile on the left here is the fresher material pile that Jimmy started on and the pile behind the track hoe bucket on the right is where I started looking…I walked along the left edge right behind the perimeter cable and found a few good sized chunks with crystals all over one face and found a few smaller ones as well…pretty soon we heard a truck pull up on the far side and a dog barking…I walked up to the top of the pile I was on and saw Bobby, the Mine Operator, checking his trackhoe before starting it up. We exchanged a few greetings loudly and he invited us over to the north side of the pit where he was at to search there, but told us to stay over where we were to search as long as we wanted to.

We stayed a little longer and then decided to load up what we had and go over to the north side and look around. Jimmy had found a large boulder and needed to knock some host rock off, and I had found a large boulder with crystals on three sides and so we both brought our vehicles down closer to load up. I walked my boulder up to the top of the bench I was on and then carefully bent down and lifted with my legs and carried it down to my truck.  While I didn`t get any photos of it there, here is one of it cleaned up….

 

Jimmy relocated his van and got his sledge out and began removing base rock from his crystal face treasures as Bobby walked over to show me the pit and explained where the pockets have been worked in the past year for the clusters of gorgeous crystals, like this 8 pound cluster found there recently….

 

and this 28 pound cluster found there….

 

and for those of you that like the single crystals, specially those that look like scepters, this one was found there recently too….

…all three of these were found recently there by a buddy of mine who recommended that we go there, it was his referral that brought us there this weekend. Bobby pointed out the area where they had been finding them and said he was going to drive his trackhoe up to the top and take off some of the dangerous overhang rock and make things safer that morning while we continued to search the tailing piles. Hopefully after that he hoped he could get back into the pocket area and perhaps find us a nice pocket with some nice clusters like the ones shown above.

Bobby said they had opened a pocket Monday, earlier in the week, and there were a couple of women there from Florida that wanted a few buckets of clusters like that…he said they were able to fill twenty five gallon buckets full of clusters removed from that one pocket find…

Bobby soon moved up to the top of the pit and began removing overhang rock as Jimmy and I relocated our truck and van to the top of the mine and walked over to the north side of the pit and began searching for more crystals. It soon became obvious to us both that there were far more crystals to be found on the north side in the fresher yet tailing piles on that side…

Like this set of extremely large boulders next to the pit drop off area…the lowest area were were allowed access to due to safety concerns…

…we found several smaller chunks of the boulders broken off and laying at the base and around them, most covered with crystals on one face….

….and then we took a closer look at the larger boulders and discovered pockets of clay on top of them that contained loose crystals themselves, so we began chipping out the clay pockets from the tops of the boulders…..and here is the photo of the top of the boulder with the crystals imbedded in the clay….

….and here is Jimmy holding one of the clay pockets we removed from the top of the boulder….

….then we took a closer look at the boulder that was leaning up against the boulder in front…the back boulder had crystals along the underside face of the edge….

..including this close up of some very pretty tiny but beautiful crystals….

….and so Jimmy got out his trusty sledge and we knocked off the ledge, it came off in a couple of pieces so we were able to get a chunk each…in the meantime we noticed that the rain apparently wasn`t going to fall and in fact the skies were beginning to clear up….my buddy Mike and his wife showed up shortly after and told us it had rained hard down by them, the Arkadelphia area, and they had heard it was raining cats and dogs over in the Mena area, which is about 40 miles west of Bear Mountain….but not even a trace of rain on us that day….

Bobby took a break from working the overhang and came down to chat with us….

….and gave us the bad news, he had knocked off too much overhang to get back down into the pocket that day to find more clusters, but truth be told, we were quite happy with what we had found on our own that day so we told him that was fine, we would catch a pocket later on another trip. Before we left, he gave us both a couple of nice plates that he had dug out the day before,  similar to what we had found that day but bigger crystals.

 

Parting shot of Jimmy at Bear Mountain Mine….