Category Archives: Dogtooth Calcite Crystals

Rock Guiding in Southeast Missouri Now….

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Back in November of 2023 I was laid off for the winter from my golf course job, and like they say, one door closes and another one opens…I began taking groups of rockhounds to privately owned farms and locations in Washington County, Missouri, to collect druse quartz, barite, and galena, for the most part.

Most of the locations have those basic minerals and crystals because most of them are former mines with extra farmland surrounding the mines and mining areas. Some of the locations have a wide variety of material to be collected there and some just have one or two that can be collected….all of them have druse quartz, at least. Here is a list of the places available now in Washington County, that I helped become operational in the last few years and recently, in order. Each one is categorized as public or private, the private mines are the ones I now take groups of rockhounds to collect at. Most of them are only available to collect at through me, at the request of the landowners.

 

HAUNTED RIDGE ROCKS IN CADET, MISSOURI

A friend of mine was retiring from Rock Guiding and asked me to contact a resident of Washington County, who he had talked to a few weeks back, said he had a gold mine of a farm with beautiful druse quartz all over it.

I met with Greg Coleman and his wife Judy about 4 years ago,  in December after a large club outing at his farm and Greg gave me the nickel tour of his 200 acre farm. We then talked about the basics he needed to get started, I helped him with the release forms and helped him set up the groundwork for his collecting operation, now called Haunted Ridge. Once he had everything ready to go, I set up dig events at his farm and began leading clubs and groups of rockhounds there for about six months….until he and Judy became familiar with the operation and opened it to the public on a daily basis. Initially, they had several family members involved in the operation and now have been able to add some friends in as well. He and some of his staff members even go to some local rock shows in and out of state, to sell druse quartz from his farm…including the outdoor venue at Geode Fest in recent years.

He and Judy set the bar on Customer Service so high that very few collecting places anywhere across the USA can come close to meeting the services they run every day there.

Greg has lots of druse quartz in many colors, small to boulder size….like this yard rock my buddy Randy Gentry is showing off, he found it that day in December in the pond bank behind Greg`s house….

…and here are a few nice sized druse`s that my buddy Patty found that day, making her four hour drive from southern Illinois very worthwhile….

….he has a few forms of iron covering some druse including hematite and limonite, and he has a lot of Missouri Lace Agate there as well. Greg and his staff operate side by side UTV`s and can transport rockhounds and their buckets/tools, from the time of their arrival and filling out the paperwork, to any spot on the farm, as well as pick them back up to return them to their vehicle, or take them to another collecting spot on the farm. They will do all the heavy lifting of your filled buckets as well. Greg also has at least one porta pottie on site…during the first year of operation he was placing a porta pottie at each of the popular spots on his farm and thru the summertime, he was placing large foam coolers at each spot, filling them with ice and bottled water, to keep the rockhounds hydrated. Greg hosts events each year there and at times, had an ATM machine on site. He quickly outgrew the small parking lot behind his house, so he then built a huge parking area under the canopy of trees back behind his lake, located 100 yards behind his house and smaller parking lot, and created a road leading to it from the main road leading to his house. That road is lined with huge boulders of druse quartz in every color and form imagineable.

About a year ago, Greg acquired a medium sized trackhoe and began digging on his farm, discovering a whole hillside of root beer druse quartz, he dug out several pits to make it easier on rockhounds to reach the plates of root beer and several large plates have been dug out from those pits now. I remember telling Greg that one day his place would become so popular that he would have to retire from his dayjob of managing a truck company…he thought I was joking, but found out I was right. Haunted Ridge has become their full time daily job now, and that is how they run it, with the help of family and friends, too. You can find them on Facebook with their own page now…Haunted Ridge Rocks.

WEST DRUSE FARM NEAR POTOSI, MISSOURI

That door closed and another one opened…the same retired Guide that asked me to help Greg get going, and then asked me to take over his guiding services, then told me about another Washington County farmer who had druse quartz on his property and was interested in having rockhounds come to his farm to collect. I contacted him and drove out to meet him…after taking a nickel tour of his farm, I saw that he had about 50 acres of druse quartz there, but nothing else. I told him the surface would be clean of any quartz after one or two groups…he wasn`t open to digging to reveal new material nor doing anything that would help rockhounds find more material at all. He did put me in touch with another nearby farm owner tho, so I left his place and drove a few miles to meet Chris, who turned out to be very nice, and open to digging and making things easier for rockhounds.

At that time, Chris had about 400 acres and a working cattle farm, one of three…he has since added another 60 acres to his main farm….and back in the early 1900`s to about 1970, the Arnault Lead and Barium Mine was in operation there on most of his farmland. There was also a milling operation there and when he purchased the land, a large spring fed lake came with it, as well as a major creek running through his property. This is how his lakeside property looked in 2021 when I began helping him get set up…

He showed me the boundaries, completely fenced in and we walked the barren field by the big lake….see photos above… which was pretty much covered in multiple colors, shapes, and sizes of pristine and clean druse quartz…..colors found here include golden brown, honey, white, yellow, green, red, orange, and blue….as well as black, smokey, pink, and purple….for those interested in making jewelry, can find a lot of druse quartz buttons here in many sizes as well as some sugar druse pieces….

Some of the quartz had turtleback barite attached to it….

…..some had cockscomb barite attached to it…..

….some had crystalline barite attached to it…..

…..and later we found a little bladed barite on the west side of the property and then discovered the rare, blue barite on the property….

…the first photo above shows how the blue barite looks in the field, right out of the ground, and the second photo shows it cleaned up. So far we have only found a few pieces of druse with bladed barite attached, here is one I found early on just above the new pond in a wash….

….in a honey root beer color of druse no less.

Missouri Lace Agate is also found here in beautiful colors, we found some galena cubes early on in a wash near the field by the big lake, but nothing since. We also find some barite plates with hematite nails, nailheads, and rods embedded in the plates…some of the rods were as big as huge drill bits, even…..

Here are a few photos of a Cockscomb Barite Plate I found on the back side of the new pond dam, with both short nails and nailheads embedded in the barite of the plate…

It didnt take long to get Chris up and running with his operation and soon I was taking groups to his farm as well, a few groups numbered 50 to 60 rockhounds initially. Chris and his sons provide transportation with their Razor UTV`s and do the lifting on buckets and yard rocks as well, provide rides from one side of the property to the other, too. He also has his bobcat available if you find a landscape rock and need help lifting it into your vehicle.

Chris ran into some problems with the access road from the back of the property line about a year in, so we sat it out a year while he tried to regain the access legally, and then he was able to purchase some additional property that allowed him access to the back of the property once again…one needs another way in when the creek gets six feet high and you cant get across to check on your cattle.

He cut and cleared a road down the hill on the back of the property, then rocked it with limestone road material, and smoothed it out with his bobcat machine. Until the road gets tightly packed down from all the late spring rains and storms we had this year, four wheel drive and all wheel drive are pretty much needed to get back up the hill and out the back gate. Some vehicles with front wheel drive have made it up the hill fine, while others struggled to get through some soft spots. For those that do not have front, four, or all wheel drive vehicles, your vehicles can be locked and parked on top of the hill, and rides can be arranged down to the valley floor for you with your tools and buckets.

The depth of the druse quartz here is at least 30 to 40 feet in most places, there is a pit in the middle of the field next to the big lake, that is at least 40 feet deep and druse was found all the way to the bottom of it before it was filled in four years ago.

I named Chris`s farm West Druse Farm and it remains open for privately arranged group digs through me only,  at his request. Clubs can contact me by PM for more info.

Check out my new FB page and hit the join button, to go with us on group digs to the West Druse Farm and other privately owned locations to collect pretty rocks, dig events are found in the Events Tab at the top of my new FB page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/322253830735906/

 

BLUFF VIEW FARM ROCKS, POTOSI, MISSOURI

This winter while I was laid off from the golf course for the second year in a row, I met another rockhounder who asked me to help him get a friend of his in operation, and he introduced me to Todd, who owns Bluff View Farm north of Potosi on Hwy 185. Todd wanted to start out open to appointment only but soon opened his farm to the public as well.

Todd showed me his property, 300 acres in size, and there are a couple of hillsides on the back of the property line, that are completely dotted with spiderholes…which is what the miners called the hand dug and machine dug holes where the miners explored for galena lead. Around the sides of these holes, one can find calcite crystals, some of them in dogtooth form, some in plates, some in poker chip form, as well as druse quartz in mutiple colors, sometimes 2 and 3 colors combined, galena lead, barite, and hematite nails. Here are some photos of material I have collected at Bluff View….1st two are barite on druse, third is druse, fourth is galena lead on druse and matrix….last one is the farm on west side of the property line…

 

for more information, take a look at Todd`s Facebook page under Bluff View Farm Rocks,  https://www.facebook.com/BVFROCKS  and give him a shout there, be sure to check out the photos of material recently found there, too. He has several areas to collect in and he does provide transportation of rockhounds and their filled buckets / tools with his Side by Side UTV.

You can also check out my new FB page for photos of druse and other minerals found at Todd`s Bluff View Farm at https://www.facebook.com/groups/322253830735906/

 

LANCE`S MINE SITE NEAR CADET, MISSOURI

After working for a very short time at another location where some of my closest local rockhound friends assisted me with many hours of scout time, and I only wound up taking 2 groups to, resulting in a bad experience there,  I stopped taking groups there,  chalking it up to a learning experience and moved on.

Soon after, thanks to another rockhounding friend,  I was able to make contact with a well respected family in the Tiff area of Washington County, and I have been able to help them as well as friends and members of their extended family in the area.

My buddy Sam Linton was with me when I first met Lance, and he took us to a better place to collect at, instead of the smaller location we met him at. The better place turned out to basically be the supply house for the smaller first location, and the site of an old barite mining operation that dated back to the early 1900`s when National Lead Company started mining there, for their Barium Division. This mine covered hundreds of acres…as far as we know, galena has never been found there, only barite and in a few forms as well.

Lance has burned the leaves off several acres of wooded areas where druse quartz in many colors, including pinks, purples, and blues, are found, small to large in size. He has also cleared out many cedar trees and created alot of walking trails in the popular collecting areas of his property.

 

…the last photo above was the top of a small boulder that Sam removed with his sledge hammer and took home with him. We were there mid February and it began raining, then quickly changed over to snow and then sleet as the temps dropped…Sam and I were the last to leave….Mary and Dee wisely took off before the snow started falling….we left when the second round of sleet hit and got out of there just in time as the roads were starting to get bad. Four wheel drive doesn`t work on ice, but the roads were only slushy so it worked just fine all the way home.

I took the first group in there two weeks later on March 2nd, and it was much warmer that day, and many nice and pretty rocks were taken home that day by many satisfied rockhounds…

…and a lot of barite was found in many forms there too….my retired firefighter friend Gary Jones found a beautiful and unique plate of crystalline barite with huge fingers on it on top of a pile of dirt that contains barites, at the 2nd collecting spot known as the Shack Spot…

At the same time Gary was pulling that one out of tall grass, Tonya discovered some knobs of crystalline barite sticking up out of the dirt on top of the pile…

…and a few minutes later, Gary and Tonya found two nice plates…here they are showing them to me, Gary`s on the right….

..while others were finding some that were much bigger, like clusters of hand grenade barites…

…and then some of the crystalline plates were found mixed with druse quartz…

…and Curtis found a really nice plate of crystalline barite there…

Sam decided to return two weeks later and help me do some more scouting there, as we had not covered but about a quarter of the entire property yet…he brought a new rockhound friend with him on this trip, it was actually Marco`s first field trip in Missouri. While they were checking one area, Onyx and I were checking a series of berms down the hill below the Shack, aka the second collecting spot there…and I came upon this nice plate of soda straws…

and we discovered some of the berms were chock full of clusters of hand grenades and pineapple bladed barites….

Lance`s Mine Site is also known for the many huge piles of Missouri Lace Agates…like this one my buddy Tony found there in May….

…and on the scout trip in February Dee found other nice colors there too…

My buddy Bob Steele located some nice boulders in an area down near the Shack as well, that were covered by what the miners called Tongue Depressors, in clusters….

Lance has brought in machinery and turned over the old piles of rock to make it easier to find pretty druse and barite. In the first collecting area, there are clay dirt piles near a pond that are full of druse quartz in smoky, blue, and green colors and barite in forms of hand grenades, pineapples, crystalline, bladed, and combos…..

Lance`s Mine Site remains open for privately arranged group digs through me only,  at his request. Clubs can contact me by PM for more info.

Check out my new FB page and hit the join button, then once approved, check the Events Tab  at the top of the page to see when we are going next. In order to go with us, all you have to do is click on the event, read the info, make note of the meeting spot and time to be there by, and click Going.

My new FB page is at https://www.facebook.com/groups/322253830735906/

 

RICHWOODS MINE SITE NEAR RICHWOODS, MISSOURI

Another good friend told me about a couple of guys with 400 acres of land in the northern part of Washington County, said it was a former mine site and abounded with bladed barite and druse quartz, especially blue druse quartz. He put me in touch with them and after a few weeks, when their schedule lightened up, I was able to drive down and meet Jesse and Chris at their farm.

It turned out to be part of a huge mining complex called The Big Four that operated in that area for many years, encompassing over ten thousand acres at one time, where two galena mines and two barite mines were in operation within close proximity of each other. This one was one of the barite mines and it had a quarry on the west side of the property at one time as well. The quarry, while no longer there, produced hundreds of piles of rock, which are scattered all over the 400 acres, and contain an enormous amount of druse quartz, from crushed small sizes to big boulders of it, and when the sun is bright and shining on those piles of rock, it becomes Glitter City there.

They took me for a ride around their property, showing me the outside boundaries and then showed me the west side of the property where the quarry had been located, and I was able to take a closer look at many of the piles there, and blue druse quartz was definitely in abundance there, as well as other colors too. The blue here comes in a light blue, medium blue, and dark blue and sometimes bladed barite is attached as well.

I was able to get them started by the first week of April and the first dig event  there numbered about 55 rockhounds. I took my personal rockhounding group in there at 8 am, and then drove over to the meeting spot and picked up about 35 rockhounds from my new FB page group, and led them to the dig event at 9 am. The landowners had several of their friends there to help them with the crowd of rockhounds, several Side by Side UTV`s and Razor UTV`s available to assist with rides and transporting filled buckets back to their vehicles all day long. They also brought a skidsteer with them and were actually using it to make additional parking space as I arrived with my personal group of rockhound friends. It was also put to good use later in the day when a couple of rockhounds found some large landscape rocks to take home with them. Here are some of the finds from that first day there…

Not eight days later, I took a second group there to join up with members of the Nashville, Tennessee Mineral Club,  and many more goodies were located and taken home by more happy rockhounds….

…followed by a third outing with members of the Fairfield, Iowa Club and rockhounds from my FB page group….

In addition to the transport and rides available at this site, a porta pottie is also located on site as well as assistance with landscape rocks.

Richwoods Mine Site is open for privately arranged group digs through me only,  at the request of the property owners. Clubs can contact me by PM for more info.

Check out my new FB page and hit the join button, then once approved, check the Events Tab  at the top of the page to see when we are going next. In order to go with us, all you have to do is click on the event, read the info, make note of the meeting spot and time to be there by, and click Going.

My new FB page is at https://www.facebook.com/groups/322253830735906/

 

DRESSER MINE SITE, NEAR TIFF, MISSOURI

In May, Lance told me about one of his cousins, who has a large lake on his property and told me that an old mining operation covered much of his cousin`s land at one time. I made contact with Daniel and drove down to take a look at his place soon after, asked two of my local rockhound friends Mary Chris and Tony to join me there and help me scout it out.

We started at the creek just inside the entrance and below the lake…Daniel and his family members dug the lake out to create a fishing and recreational lake, so it wasn`t a tailings lake like some mine sites have. The dirt they dug out tho, was chock full of beautiful druse quartz and barite in a few interesting forms…like hundreds of soda straw plates with the straws reaching 2 inches in length, many in colors of a vivid blue and purple, yellows, and some were coated with hematite black coloring, some with metal tips extending out the tips of the straws….

The soda straw plates in the photos above, came out of the creek below the lake…I call it Spillway Creek and it carves thru a section of Daniel`s property that is loaded with this material and more…each time it rains, more material is exposed for collecting. I believe this area will last for collecting purposes for quite some time to come…..

Turns out the Dresser Mining Company operated there and in the surrounding area as well, in search of barite, and judging from what I saw that day, the barite they found there was very plentiful, laying all around the property in various forms, including bladed barite, hand grenades, pineapples, and crystalline bladed barite. Many of the pineapples and hand grenades were seen in clusters of them…some of them very large clusters.

One of the very first things Tony found that morning, as we were beginning our search and scout of the property, was several plates with Hematite blades in Rosettes,  on them…they had a yellow coating on them, which led me to believe they were Limonite blades, but Sam believes they are Hematite blades instead, just with a yellow coating on them possibly from weathering. He is probably right as I have never seen Limonite blades that big…..

and this is another one that he gave to Mary….

and some of the soda straw plates Tony found that day there too….

…the second photo above are three that I collected.

I took the first group in there a week later and everyone did very well with their finds…many of the soda straw plates have been found in two locations, Spillway Creek and a large dirt area at the foot of the lake dam, farther down the road past the creek…that collecting area is probably a hundred feet long and 60 feet wide with a couple of shallow washes running through it that provide alot of beautiful material including the plates and some barites too….

you can see the outline of one of the washes in the photo above, about middle of the photo…it runs left to right across the photo, that is the main wash with all the soda straw plates in it. Everyone started collecting over there that morning, it was a little muddy and thankfully, many wore their rubber boots or they might still be there stuck knee deep in the muck. It rained the night before and it was a bit gooey but much easier to pull stuff out of it, too. I got tickled at my retired firefighter friend Gary, who didn`t take a bucket out there with him, so he just piled his finds up on the rear bumper of his truck instead….

and Tonya found a really nice green plate of quartz there….

I walked up to the upper end of Spillway Creek to check out the ground up there and discovered a small pocket of smokey druse quartz plates just under the surface of the creek water….

…and here are some finds that others sent me photos of….a barite by Michael James….

…bubble druse plate and barites from Curtis….


…the three photos above are Mary Chris` finds….so everyone did very well that day too. When Sam was here hounding last week, the creek had run dry of water due to a drought trying to return and it was full of even more barites…

….Daniel is preparing to do some more clearing of the brush around the creek as well as brush hogging the lake dam to make things easier for rockhounds to locate the nicer druse and barites. He plans to create some trails free of brush into the wooded and brushy areas that lead to more mining areas for us as well.

Dresser Mine Site remains open for privately arranged group digs through me only, at Daniel`s request. Clubs can send me a PM for more info.

Check out my new FB page and hit the join button, then once approved, check the Events Tab  at the top of the page to see when we are going next. In order to go with us, all you have to do is click on the event, read the info, make note of the meeting spot and time to be there by, and click Going.

My new FB page is at https://www.facebook.com/groups/322253830735906/

 

MARY`S LAKE SITE, TIFF, MISSOURI

I was tipped off to Mary`s Lake Site by Lance a few weeks back, when Mary and her kids stopped by during a dig event at Lance`s Mine Site and I gave her one of Sam`s books at that time. She let me know that mining occurred on her property as well and said she would think it over. Recently she contacted me and told me that I could bring rockhounds to her place as well, and within a week I had it all set up for her. Mary Chris and I scouted the property two days in early May, but we didnt enter the rugged area of the woods, due to the annoying and high pitched cicada`s in that area…they were louder down there than my own county and area. Mary Chris and I discovered alot of druse quartz there with large points on them….

…we also found a few areas with purple druse sitting around….

We walked to the other side of the lake and discovered the road over there was laced with yellow druse quartz, an area about 100 feet long and every bit of 50 feet wide at least, and again, big points on the druse there. There was also a high wall bank that Tony checked out on our second trip there…

…this high bank is what you first see when you cross the dam of the lake to the other side, to get to the road with the yellow druse, you pass by this bank and keep going up the road…there are areas to the left up in the woods and down closer to the bank of the lake where druse is found as well.

The first dig event there was a week later and I combined it with Dresser Mine Site first, then to Mary`s, and last to Lance`s Site…everyone did well but it made for a long day and we had to leave Lance`s sooner than expected, due to a fast moving thunderstorm line that popped up on radar pretty fast with a line of hail embedded in it. The second dig there was June 9th and everyone did quite well there that day…while they were all out hunting and collecting, I did a little extra scouting on the hillside above the lake dam and found a road full of druse and barite both up there…found hand grenades and pretty druse all over the place…

Sam traveled back down from Virginia to do some hounding and I took him to Mary`s Lake Site to check it out on the 21st of June…Tony went with us, enabling us to do some more scouting in areas that we had not been able to check yet. We discovered some beautiful crystalline bladed barite in a couple of areas there that we had previously overlooked…areas that Sam noted, made you think ” WHOA ” when you came upon them and recognized everything in front of you…

Tony and I expanded that search a few days later when I took another group to Mary`s Lake Site and discovered an even broader area for the crystalline bladed barites, which should make it much easier for others to find some now as well. On the most recent trip to Mary`s, a young rockhound named Bo, rode down with his sister Maddie and his Mom Amy, to do some collecting on their 2nd rockhounding trip and they had a great time. Bo and I hit it off pretty quickly and he followed me through the woods as I was trying to help everyone find some great stuff to take back home with them. We started down near the parking area where berms with barites can be found, then moved up to a little mining area with a shallow and dry pit, as well as a few berms surrounding the pit are found…there are a couple of seams of quartz that run thru the pit with colors of green, yellow, and sometimes blue druse found in the seams. Tony was down one of the steep hillsides finding both druse and barite, so Bo and I checked out a few of the washes and then started seeing pile of rocks others had found and then left behind…we rounded one tree and stopped suddenly in our tracks, with a nice big bubble of root beer druse right in front of us…I took a picture of Bo after he picked it up, pretty happy with a shirt tail full of good finds…

They drove down from Central Iowa, where there are no pretty rocks to be found, and left here with 4 or 5 full buckets of beautiful druse and barites, as did many others that morning. The heat ramped up mid morning and most were gone by noon, leaving two gals with Tony and I, so we helped them find some pretty barites before they too decided to head for home. Tony and I scouted another hour before calling it quits ourselves…here are some of the barites we found in that hour…

 

Mary`s Lake Site is privately owned and remains open to collecting by groups through me only, at Mary`s request. Clubs can send me a PM for more info.

Check out my new FB page and hit the join button, then once approved, check the Events Tab  at the top of the page to see when we are going next. In order to go with us, all you have to do is click on the event, read the info, make note of the meeting spot and time to be there by, and click Going.

My new FB page is at https://www.facebook.com/groups/322253830735906/

 

B AND G FARMS, NEAR POTOSI, MISSOURI

The most recent location I am now taking groups to, is B and G Farms near Potosi, where druse quartz is mainly found in many colors, sizes, and shapes. We have seen a few with a smattering of iron on them, but for the most part, many are iron free druse quartz. I took one small group there before the heat became an issue for many and here are some of the finds from that day and my scouting trip there…

After the scout trip, the landowner decided to name it B and G Farms and I took the first group there on the morning of June 15th….the heat ramped up and everyone left within four hours, but they all seemed content with their many finds, too….

 

Once the fall and cooler temps arrive, all of these locations will be much easier to search without the oppressing heat and bugs.

B & G Farms remains largely a privately owned site, you may contact me for further info or join my new FB page and join us there on private group digs.

Clubs can send me a PM for more info.

Check out my new FB page and hit the join button, then once approved, check the Events Tab  at the top of the page to see where we are going next. In order to go with us, all you have to do is click on the event, read the info, make note of the meeting spot and time to be there by, and click Going.

My new FB page is at https://www.facebook.com/groups/322253830735906/

 

I will be checking out a couple of more new sites in the next few weeks hopefully, just waiting on word from the landowners.

One new site a few of us looked at mid June this year, will be doing some excavation work and some brush hogging, possibly some land clearing to improve their site this fall, so it wont be ready til then, but it is smack dab in the middle of an old mine site, so should be a great place to go to as well.

Stay tuned for more new site info.

 

SSQ Right Before Kentucky Trip

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Onyx and I drove down to the SSQ again on August 19th, turned out to be pocket city that morning…we returned to try and clean out the huge pocket in the corner that I found the week before….I didn`t write about that one either at the time, due to my work schedule, was putting in several days in a row at work without a break, so by the time I would get home from work, I was too exhausted to do anything but take an hour nap, go to supper, watch a little tv, and then hit the hay to get up and repeat the next day…after about six to nine days in a row of that. you are ready for a break, believe me. As I age, that type of routine gets old fast, so am thinking next year I am going to have to get a different schedule at work cause I don`t like working that many days in a row without a break. Since both visits were in August, hottest month of the summer, and since I am now used to getting up each morning around 4 am for work, I know that we arrived both days around 6 am and collected during the cool early hours of the morning while there…this is how the quarry looked when we arrived the week before….

…and I remember walking over to the right side wall to re-check the big pocket in the wall that I found two weeks before when Abbi came to visit, to see if I missed anything….and discovered that either Abbi or I had failed to remove a couple of small clusters from the rocky floor below the pocket…so I put those in my bucket and then climbed up to peer inside the pocket again, pulled out a few smaller crystals and a few baseball sized clusters, then grabbed ahold of some crystals in the bottom, midway back in the pocket floor…low and behold, they moved…the cluster was loose, so I was able to pull it free from the floor of the pocket !!  and here it is on my tailgate a few min later surrounded by some of the loose smaller ones I pulled free….

…from there, I ventured over to the left along the main wall and decided to walk over to the left hand wall corner, to see if I could find anything worth taking home or a new pocket…that is a very vuggy area sometimes but requires a closer inspection because it can also be unstable looking from afar. As I approached it, I started seeing poker chips laying on the ground under a large rock sticking out from the wall about six inches…I kneeled down to take a closer look and discovered a very large area of poker chips spilling out of yet another pocket opening up under that ledge of rock…flabbergasted would be an understatement for me. For one thing, standing where I parked, and looking over to that corner, you could not see anything due to a large pile of rock blocking your view from there..I literally had to walk over to it to see it, but then again, this was going to turn out to be yet another huge pocket and the last few weeks had been several huge pockets, one after another, so flabbergasted was very appropriate. 🙂  I do not have any photos of that pocket from the get go nor to the finish, but I can show you what the initial finds were that I pulled from it ….

…and these along the ledge of my sink came from a black dogtooth pocket along the main wall not far from the corner pocket….

…I was working the black dogtooth pocket when I looked to the left the week before and spotted that pocket at the foot of the wall in the corner, then walked over to check it out. It took me about ten minutes to clean out the opening of that pocket under the ledge rock sticking out from the wall…that ledge rock turned out to be a roof plate…I decided to leave it in place til I was able to clean out the opening and once I was about a foot inside, and had everything cleaned out under that front roof plate, I removed it and turned it over…big bubbles of shimmery gray druse with poker chips attached…it was gorgeous…I set it aside and out of my way and continued pulling poker chip after poker chip from the opening of the pocket, some were singles, some were doubles, some were triples, some were combos, and many I was pulling from the left wall inside the pocket were dogtooths. The further back in the pocket that I went, the more dogtooths came out of there…pretty soon I was in there to my shoulder and within 30 minutes I had two buckets completely filled with wrapped crystals. By then it was about 11 am and beginning to get quite warm so we decided to head home, quite happy with my finds. 🙂

So a week later, I returned to see about cleaning out the last pocket…the corner pocket, see how far back it went into the wall and see what else was there. Onyx and I arrived about 6 am and it was a bit foggy on the way down there, so we waited about twenty minutes for the quarry to lighten up…..

 

As soon as the light improved, I started walking over to the corner pocket I had found last week, but as I was making my way over there, I came across an area at the base of the wall where many poker chip crystals were laying around, so I stopped to check for a pocket and began digging at the base of the wall…can see where I stopped in the photo below, where my bucket and rags are located…

…to the right in the corner, you can see what appears to be a rockslide of sorts…the last pocket from last week is under that pile of rocks and I was going to have to dig it out first…I spent about 2 hours digging around where the bucket and rags are above…and found several poker chip and druse combo pockets, as well as several smaller shallow pockets…

 

…and the first pocket I found along that wall was a pretty good sized one and deep inside…triangular shaped opening as well…

…and here are some of my crystals from this big pocket…

 

 

As the videos show, it was pocket city on the wall there, many were shallow and full of a few small pieces of shimmering gray druse only, some had some dogtooth crystals inside, and some had combo pieces of druse and poker chips, but it provided me about 3 hours of work and fun. I finally did get on over to the corner pocket, and liberated it from the rockslide tho…

 

 

….it`s a good thing I cleaned it out when I did, two weeks later it was completely gone with a new blast. 🙂

Abigail Comes to Visit

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I received word that drilling activity was happening during the last week of July and that blasting could take place by the end of that week, and after letting all my nearby rockhound friends know, I started hearing from those that were interested in going…namely Chuck Reed, Nathaniel Reid, and even Abigail Evans from Nashville. Abbi believed she was healed up enough from her serious back injury that occurred back in December, and decided to drive up on Saturday morning, July 28th to visit and go rockhunting with us. Chuck and Nathaniel could not go on Saturday, so we decided to meet at MFQ on Sunday morning early…and I took Abbi to the Secret Spot Quarry on Saturday morning. She and I had a late breakfast at Cracker Barrel and then headed out…..by the time we headed that way, she wasn`t feeling very well, possibly due to eating food not approved for her diet. I told her just take it easy and if she needed to leave for a bathroom break, that would be fine.

We arrived about 2 pm and once out of my truck and looking across the water hole at the wall, I noticed even more rock pulled out from the base of the wall since the week before. I also noticed what appeared to be several openings in the wall near the base of it, and all along the length of it…

 

….what appeared to be several pockets including one potentially large one in the middle of the wall at the base…seen above in the lower left hand corner…below in the middle of the wall…. just staring back at me….

….and I began to get excited about what type of day it was going to be. I had my boots on and all I had to get was my apron on as well as grab my mini mattox, wraps and bucket and start that direction…I took the right side along the edge of the water, and as I neared the area of the wall where I found a nice pocket a few weeks before, I nearly stepped on this cluster….

…let me rephrase that…this beautiful cluster…and since I am in the habit of looking around when I find something this nice in amongst a lot of ugly rock, I did exactly that, made a 360 degree turn and look movement, and immediately spotted two more large clusters like this as well as multiple single crystals and some twins and triples too…EUREKA !!!!  I looked around for Abbi and spotted her heading my way but slowly and surely, but once there, she didn`t stay long, as her stomach was not doing well so she headed for the nearest bathroom spot. She left me her bucket and I began to fill it with many crystals just in case. I looked up on the wall above the area of crystal filled debris and spotted what looked like a potential pocket to me…top of the next photo where the hole in the wall is located…sure looked like a pocket to me…and crystals outside it and just below it really just cemented the idea for me…

…in fact, there were crystals dangling along the rock wall all the way down to the debris pile below, that I was standing in the middle of….you can be sure I was very careful where I stepped and how little I moved around then….I stepped back to the edge of the water figuring it would be safer there, but then looked down and spotted several small clusters in the water, pulling them free and placing them in our buckets for safekeeping. 

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I also dug down into the debris pile and rescued several small clusters and combos for about 20 minutes, then began to work my way up the pile and along the wall to the base of the potential pocket….

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…notice the druse on the left side in and around those big rocks on the left side ?  make note of that and in a few minutes, those will be come clear to you as well as it was to me….I climbed up on that debris pile after setting a few pieces of the dolomite up there to stabilize my footing, and then began to dissect the opening of the pocket…

As soon as I opened up the entrance to the pocket, after picking up all those loose crystals at the base of the opening, I knew I was going to have my hands full. There were gorgeous poker chips attached to beautiful bubbley gray druse that was in turn, attached to the walls and ceiling of the pocket….

…and then there is that pile of loose crystals inside the pocket along the floor of it…I knew I would have to carefully pick thru that to fully collect this pocket the correct way…time consuming, but it`s a good thing I did it that way, as there were several small dogtooths in amongst that pile of crystals and pieces of the roof plates that apparently came down during the blasting. Here is the second video I shot soon after this….

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BTW, here are the two entrance rocks that were guarding the pocket opening, note the gray bubbles of druse that match up with the druse you saw a few photos back….

…it was a while before Abbi returned from her bathroom break and when she did, she stayed close to her suv and wandered along the edges of the piles surface collecting only.

…and she photographed me and Onyx a few times as well….

I remained and collected the pocket and continued to wrap and put some in her bucket as well as mine…here is another look inside the pocket…you can see I had sorted thru and cleaned out the initial pile of crystals at the front of the pocket interior, now I was back to a second pile and once I sorted through it, I was barely able to reach the third pile at the very back of the pocket…down to my fingertips on the reach, so I decided to take a break, go back to my truck for another bucket and more wraps, some gatorade, and get my handrake which would give me an extra foot of reach….

 

Soon after I had my bucket filled, so I took it back to my truck, and took a photo of the pocket from there…Abbi`s bucket remaining below the pocket….

This large crystal in the image below, was nearly at the very back of the pocket, I wrapped it up after pulling it out with the aid of my hand rake, and put it in Abbi`s bucket…I have so many large crystals like this, I figured she would prob love to have it for her collection….

It took me another hour to reach the back of the pocket and pull out the remaining loose crystals that were inside, using the hand rake to reach and pull many of them out…there was one huge cluster of bright yellow poker chips attached to a big and heavy plate of large bubble of pretty gray druse, here it is all cleaned up…

…and this next small plate with dogtooths attached at both ends of it, came out of the second pile of loose crystals inside the pocket….

many of the dogtooths found in the pocket as well….

here is a flat of the combos I pulled out of the pocket when I was sorting thru the second pile inside the pocket….many attached to that bright gray sparkley druse….

 

…and several others attached to a yellow druse….

….here is the pocket emptied out…it only took me a few hours to clean it out….

Abbi wandered over about the time I finished cleaning out the pocket to see what was inside her bucket…I photographed her from the truck as I was putting some yard rocks in the bed of my truck….

we got out of there shortly after, and headed back to town…after checking into the hotel, she decided to drive over to CB and get a light salad for her supper. I headed home to clean up and then went to our Mexican Restaurant for a late supper, and then bed…we were going to be getting up early to drive to MFQ and would need all the rest we could get…I could only hope she did the same. Here are some of her beautiful photos from that day….

Great Photos Abbi !!

The next morning, after I got up and was nearly ready to go, I looked out front and saw Abbi parked in front of my house, dome light on and she appeared ready to go as well. I got my truck packed, Onyx inside and away we went, stopping only for gas at the Phillips 66. We made good time getting down there, arriving just ahead of Nathaniel and Chuck, they were 10 to 15 minutes behind us. As we pulled in, I parked to the right of the new blast pile on the east side of the quarry….

We all spread out and began searching the pile for pretty crystals…Chuck and Nathaniel wandered over to the west side of the pile, which stopped on top of the little hill behind the main rock crusher…Chuck found some huge boulders over there full of green and brown poker chip vugs and was able to harvest some for his collection. Nathaniel worked his way over to and down the wall to the west side of the coved area, where he found a new dogtooth pocket, he came and borrowed my ladder so he could get to it more safely. I found a nice vug half way up the pile on the east side near the wall with a nice set of black dogtooths inside, called it to Abbi`s attention but after awhile she did not think she could get up there to it, so I let Nathaniel know and he never came back to even look at it. I should have just taken it out, but I wanted to go up to the second level on the west side and see if there were any new pockets up there instead. On my way up there, I found Chuck over by the big boulder pile working on extracting some large brown dogtooth calcite crystals attached to the side of a large boulder….

Nathaniel discovered the boulder and dogtooths attached, pointed it out to Chuck, who wasted no time in trying to remove some, while talking to Abbi about rockhunting….here is Nathaniel showing me a couple of small ones that he was able to remove from a vug in that same boulder…

…and here is the pocket of calcites Chuck is working on up close…

…and one of the vugs on the left side of the boulder, that Chuck said eventually tied in with the pocket he was working on…

Chuck sharing a dogtooth cluster with Abbi above….and then he hammered on….

…while Abbi admired the cluster…

When I got up to the next level, Nathaniel was up there looking for pockets already…he wasn`t having much luck tho, he said…most were up higher, so I asked Chuck to bring my ladder up when he could and we looked higher along the wall, finding mostly shallow pockets up there…

..he did manage tho, to find some very pretty druse pieces….

I went further down the wall from him and found a few small pockets like this one…

We took off soon after, Chuck and Nathaniel headed back to St Louis area, while Abbi and I drove back to the Secret Spot Quarry for another round up there…here is what the west side of MFQ looks like now all cleaned up…

and Chuck was hammering that boulder pocket and talking to Abbi at the same time…he was multi-tasking…

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Abbi and I headed up the road to the SSQ to take a look at that again, since she was feeling much better today,  as we left Chuck and Nathaniel working that boulder field full of dogtooths.

Abbi and I started taking a look at the pockets along the base of the far wall on the other side of the big water hole, I told her to check out the bigger pocket that I had worked at the end of the day before, and take home some of those big bubbly druse clusters that resembled the grape agate clusters you see for sale from Indonesia…the gray in the pocket resembled the purple color of the grape agate…so she was checking out that pocket and I was working the pocket where the yellow rain jacket is sitting to her right…it was raining when we arrived so we wore our rain gear for maybe ten minutes, then it became so humid we had to take it off…I left my camera in the truck due to the rain…

…so you can`t see all five of the dogtooth pockets I found to the right of her….but they were definitely there and possibly more.

Soon after we jumped on 44 at Rolla but stopped off at Missouri Hick for some great BBQ, Abbi felt her stomach had returned to normal by then and then we hit the hay, completely drained of all energy by the time we got back to town. Abbi headed for her home in Nashville the next morning after a good night of rest…she decided she was going to check into the KETO diet that I have been on and lost 30 lbs from in the past year, it`s alot easier to maintain and go by. Good luck Abbi, think you will love the results as much as I did and do !!

Secret Spot Quarry on my Birthday

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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 !!