I worked at the golf course all summer, starting my second year there back in April and did not ask off for vacation time til mid August, then submitted time off requests for my annual Labor Day Weekend trip to Central Kentucky and end of September for Geode Fest, with both approved by my bosses. They kidded me a bit about it at first, but after working with them my second year now, I know when they are joking, even with a serious look on their faces. Four out of five of my bosses like rocks too, so that helps as well, since my trips are mainly about rock and mineral hunting and collecting. 🙂

I called my good friend Gary Griffith about a week out, to check and see what he had in fluorite this year, as many of my rockhound friends who join me down there, like fluorite as much as I do, and always ask me to get some for them too. Gary told me they had a difficult year this time around, the rains and storms we had up here in central Missouri this summer, heavy torrential rains often times, that caused us alot of damage to the golf course at work…also caused Gary and his son alot of problems for the fluorite mining. It mainly created them a lot of mud that they were unable to work in and sometimes some damage to equipment, but mainly just delays in actual mining time. He has also become well known for good quality fluorite and so many dealers who sell fluorite now go to him for southern Illinois fluorite. In the weeks leading up to the Clement Mineral Museum Show, they had four or five dealers trying to buy fluorite from them, they wanted all of it, whatever they had available and were calling on them on a daily basis sometimes, darn near pestering them, not taking no for an answer.

Gary is one of the nicest guys I know, and when he says no, he means it. No means No…I mean, how hard can that be to understand ???   Dealers can sometimes be difficult to deal with, they usually do not understand what NO means and sometimes will try to do some really dumb things if they think you are stretching the truth or trying to avoid them. I have personally been there and experienced it myself, so I can truly understand what Gary was going thru during that time period, let me tell ya, cause I have dealt with some of those dealers from time to time myself.

Gary is also one of the good friends of everyone at the Clement Mineral Museum staff and Board of Directors, and he helps them whenever he can…a couple of years ago, when the digs ran into trouble, he pitched in and provided them with a dump truck load of mine spoils filled with fluorite chips, so that the kids at the Museum`s annual show, had a big pile to dig thru and find pretty stuff in. There may have even been some big kids in that pile from time to time, too. It was much appreciated by everyone there and a real hit with the younguns. Since he likes to help the Museum folks with their show, he was able to hold back some material to take to the show this year, and he had some gorgeous stuff back then…I made sure to get a few pieces, came from a special pocket that they located earlier this year when they had a good run of weather to work in, gorgeous deep purple cubes in a complex array and pattern of cubes, very detailed and very pretty. A couple of friends in my group of rockhound friends, were there as well and they purchased a couple of his fluorites as well. 

This year, despite a not-so good year of mining, he told me he would see what they could find for me, in the week ahead, and asked me to call him back the night before I was going to drive down to central Kentucky. When I called back, they were fortunate to let me know they had some good luck and found a few nice pockets and some good cubes and clusters in their tailing piles too. Onyx and I got up and on the road by 6 am, headed that way…Gary was going to work that morning and Walter would be meeting me at their house by mid morning. I got delayed on the trip down by the construction work on I-57, becoming an annual thing to deal with, must have something to do with job security…but really becoming an aggravation for many more than me, I am sure. Doubt if they will ever get that area between Marion and Mount Vernon completed, sad situation for all of us that travel in that direction. Walter gave me an alternate route in case I ever need it for that stretch of roadway for future reference. 

Onyx and I rolled in there about 10:45 am on Friday morning, August 30th and Walter came out shortly after I arrived. I was looking at the flats of gorgeous stuff they had located for me to look through…

…quickly finding out they had found some nice pieces with big cubes and even more surprising, they got into a pocket of lead, with purple fluorite squeezed in between the lead like grape jelly !! 

I stayed long enough that Gary came home with a few more pieces and we had a good visit, and I bought a few nice yard rocks this time around as well. I purchased quite a few of those grape jelly and lead pieces too, they were NEAT !! Onyx and I got back on the road by noon and soon after, crossed the Ohio River and headed south to Princeton, to pick up some food and access the Western Kentucky Parkway. The only bad thing about this drive across Kentucky, is that it`s at least a 3 hour drive from there and you lose an hour going into the eastern time zone.

Luckily traffic was very light going east and we were able to make good time, but by the time I was about an hour out of Harrodsburg, I received a call from my buddy Jim Bartle, the editor for my local newspaper that I shoot for occasionally…he asked if I was still home or in Kentucky. I let him know I was in the heart of Kentucky and he said that a small tornado had just gone through my hometown, trees were down over on my side of town, and golf ball sized hail had fallen as well across town…he was looking for a photographer to respond to some of those calls and told me the Fire Department was responding to multiple calls as well. I called my neighbors Glenn and Dianne, who live across the street from me, and they told me my two trees were still standing, the one in the front yard is one of the tallest trees up and down my street, if not the tallest..prob around 75 yoa too and very big around at the base. Dianne was at the local grocer when it started hailing, she confirmed the size of the hail and said it lasted 45 minutes. She did say other trees up our street a few blocks away, were down as well and fire trucks were going everywhere. They walked over to check for hail damage to my sunroom, texted me back later to let me know they saw no damage to my house or sunroom. I worry because a hail storm a few yrs ago shredded the lexan plastic panelled roof of my sunroom…it too was golf ball sized hail. The saving grace of this storm, was that it came in from the north, not the southwest as the bad storms normally come from.

Onyx and I rolled into Harrodsburg about 5 pm, stopping at the Baymont Inn to check in and get settled in…have to say the staff there this year were much friendlier and nicer to deal with from our arrival to our departure. Last year was so bad that I had to contact Wyndham Hotels to lodge a complaint against the owner there, in order to get things resolved and money back on a night not spent there, was told this year that the hotel was under new management and many things there were much better…one of the nicer conditions there besides the clean rooms, great design and decorations, is the soundproof rooms there…you don`t even hear doors opening and closing next door to your room, or any noise for that matter, inside or outside the hotel. Great place to stay at !!  I checked in with Slade Harvin, to make sure supper was going to be at 6 pm at the Bright Leaf Hotel Restaurant and then headed that way soon after getting Onyx settled in. 

Slade is the President this year of the Catawba Valley Gem and Mineral Club, the hosting club for this trip…they graciously allowed me to join their club a couple of years ago after I was able to get them access to the local quarry to collect at, and they have allowed my group to join me on this trip the last few years as well. Slade and two other members of their club, are in my group as well. A couple of clubs from New York State have joined us on this trip as well. One of the highlights this year is that the Russell brothers were going to be there again, all three very passionate about rockhounding, safety, knowledge, and experience, and great people to hang with as well !! 

Most of the members were staying at the Bright Leaf Resort Golf Course Hotel, about a mile south of Harrodsburg on Hwy 127, which also has a buffet style restaurant that has great food and service, so we take our breakfast and dinner there daily while there. I walked in to find several members on the far side of the dining room at a table that extends the entire width of the dining hall along the west bank of windows, always reserved for our group. They were already chowing down on the seafood buffet and I joined them very quickly. There were some new folks from New York there this time around and some from north Georgia as well. We had a great dinner and then went out to set up the annual first night of the Tailgate Swap and Sell Event….everyone brings crystals and minerals to sell or swap and it`s a great time to visit with everyone as well…lasts a couple of hours each night. During this time, John O and a few others arrived as well…think John ran into some road construction as well on his way down from northwest Illinois. Others who came in late had been rockhunting along the way, which explained their delays. I headed back to the Baymont around 10 pm, exhausted after the long day, and after taking care of Onyx, we were both asleep soon after…I didn`t even turn the tv on to check the news or weather.  We awoke to a beautiful morning and headed over to Bright Leaf Restaurant for breakfast shortly after 6 am…still dark that time of the day there, and soon after good food and fellowship, we waited in the parking lot to line up and the sun came up behind a big horse farm across the highway from the hotel…

I shot a few stills and then some video as well of the sun rising in the eastern skies…

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…and while waiting for a few stragglers to arrive, one guy I had been talking to by email, that had found my website by searching for fluorites or geodes in Kentucky, and when I invited him to join us for the weekend, said he would drive down this morning from his home in Louisville. Dawson showed up a few minutes later and I introduced him to the group right before we shot a group photo….this first one I am taking the photo….

…and this next one, Dale Russell, front row kneeling on left side in orange shirt with silver stripes, graciously offered to shoot so I could be in the photo…

Incidentally, that is his brother David Russell, standing to my right in the yellow shirt and his younger brother Dean, kneeling next to me in the yellow shirt with silver stripes…Slade, kneeling on the other side of Dean in the blue shirt, is their adopted brother…or son…or something like that, lol. 🙂

Stephanie and her husband Kim arrived as well, they are from North Carolina as well and stayed with us all weekend…she also found me online as Dawson had done and I had been talking to her a while as well. We then loaded up, lined up, and took off to Danville, 8 miles south, to the Caldwell Quarry, to meet Clay, the Quarry Manager, at the gate. We arrived a few minutes before Clay did but we left the middle of the driveway open so he could reach the gate to open it for us. After signing the liability forms and a safety talk, and another group photo by the big beautiful boulder in front of the office…..

…one of his employees led us down into the quarry…

…to this area of the quarry, ground level, which is where we found most of the nice stuff we found last year and the year before that too…sometimes fossils can be found higher up but they are sporadic…

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…the basement level has a nice pond across part of it…that became a playground and go to spot for Onyx right off the bat…luckily for me, he found another cleaner body of water to wash off before he got back into my truck…

Soon everyone had spread out to three levels, one above ground level and the basement level and were actively searching for beautiful stuff…soon after that saws could be heard running and sawing as well as hammering and the musical tones of chisels and wedges…

…we truely could not have picked a prettier day to go rock collecting at the Caldwell Quarry, we had the whole morning to dig and hammer and saw and collect there…

…my buddy David Bruce, soon had his saw running…

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…he was cobbing down a small boulder that David Russell found with a vug of dogtooth calcite crystals inside…but a lot of heavy matrix included…

I looked across the ground level and found Dean Russell and Dawson up on pile of boulders looking at something special, so I walked over to take a look at the find by Dawson…

they were trying to figure out what it really was…I was as perplexed as they were…it looked like oil covering crystals…John later confirmed that is exactly what it was….oil on calcites….and completely natural too….

About 11:30 am…as we were wrapping up and getting ready to head out of the quarry, I came across Dale Russell who had found some nice plates of barites…gave me some…and some with calcites attached as well as what looked like Millerite hairs included…so I took some photos of his find that he really liked…

…he cut this from a huge boulder with his saw…keep that in mind…Patty Hermann came up and looked at it too while I was photographing it…

From the quarry, most of us headed to one of our favorite geode hunting locations south of Danville, took us about 30 minutes to get there, but it`s a cool creek in many ways, to hunt at. Last year they had a good heavy rainfall before we arrived, which helped to raise the water level and wash many big geodes out of the banks..this year was a dry and hot summer for them,not much rainfall, so even though we didn`t find as many nice big ones, we find some nice ones and it was a good side location for us as well. Most of us were there a few hours before heading back to our hotels to clean up and rest before dinner. 

…here is one of the nicer ones I found and cracked open…filled with sunshine quartz…my favorites in Kentucky….

After another good supper at the Bright Leaf, we returned to the parking lot and set up for the second night of the Tailgate Mineral Sales and Swap Event….

the photo above is John Oostenryk, a good buddy of mine from northwest Illinois, totally surrounded by folks interested in the gorgeous barites and calcites that he brings with him from the Linwood Quarry in Iowa, he is one of the dealers to buy from if you are as appreciative of their beauty and bedazzle as I am…he is one of those rare dealers that will always be honest with you on pricing and quality of material, the kind of dealer you hope you find each and every time. John is also quite knowledgeable about Iowa and Northwest/Western Illinois Minerals as well. He is one of those go to guys during Geode Fest, too.

After another good night, I headed back to the hotel about 9 pm, again exhausted, for another good night of rest. We were slated to  leave at 7 am in the morning, headed to Liter`s Quarry near Fort Knox…not for gold exploration, but more crystals and minerals found in vugs of boulders…it`s a two hour drive over there and we were scheduled to meet the Quarry Manager there at 9 am. Some of us went there last year and in four hours time, found some great stuff, were looking forward to a return trip with even more folks this time around. Breakfast came a little earlier on Sunday morning, and the sunrise was again, nothing short of beautiful….with a little fog thrown in for special effect….

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We arrived a little after 9 am, slowed down by some more road construction in the Elizabethtown area on local roads, and found the gate shut and locked, no one waiting for us. Unfortunately, the number I had for the Manager was his office number, not his cell number…I found out his address wasn`t located too far away, so Mary took me over to his house and I was able to leave a note on his wife`s suv in the driveway…after a couple of hours had passed, some of our folks decided to return to Harrodsburg and drive out to a road cut to look for goodies, not knowing how long it might take us to get in. Fortunately tho, we had some locals stop by that knew him and tried to contact him for us. Eventually someone with his cell number stopped and provided it to me, and I was able to reach him pretty fast…he thought we were coming on Monday morning,  but he drove right over and let us inside, then showed me three areas that they had been working heavily on, let us know the rules and turned us loose to look for the good stuff. We started in the first spot we were at last year…back then it was a small spot but they had expanded it to three times bigger than before….

…and everyone hit the boulder piles pretty quickly, finding a lot of good stuff…everyone telling me that the wait to get in was definitely worth it….I texted Harry to let him know we were inside the quarry, but never did hear back from him til much later in the evening. 

 

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In the photo above, on the next level up from that red suv on the left side, I found a seam of orange calcite in ball form, from golf ball size to pea sized…pretty tho, so brought a few home with me. Dawson found some purple fluorite on some rocks in a druse fashion, on one side of this pit. we weren`t sure if it had rolled down from the level above or out of a pocket above.

From this pit we went over to the large older pit that we found some great geodes in the walls at, last year…well as with the first pit, they had re-worked this older pit and it was hard to find the old walls we had seen last year…maybe 100 feet of it remained and it was empty of goodies, so we spread out and searched the boulder piles and let me tell ya, no one left there unhappy at all…

It didn`t take my buddy David Bruce very long to find some suitable boulders to cob down with his saw…after looking around myself, I could see why, many of them were loaded with vugs full of gorgeous crystals…many of them pink dolomites with bright yellow calcite crystals inside them, some with sphalerites inside the crystals…great stuff for us rockhounds…

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here are some of the vugs I saw in boulders as I was walking around…

…and in this photo below…Don is the guy waving to me on the right, he is a good friend of the Russell brothers and in the same club in New York with Dale Russell…he is waving at me here to get Dean, on the left, to look at me.  good job Don !! 🙂

I found a nice yellow calcite vug in a boulder and pointed it out to Dale….

….he liked it so much he decided to see if he could pop it out with his hammer and chisels instead of his saw since he was pretty tired…

…unfortunately he hit his thumb with his hammer and had to take a little break, but he did finally liberate it and was happy with it…

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In the meantime, Mary from Ohio, had driven over to join us for the day and she wasted no time in finding a few buckets worth of crystals from the other side of that quarry pit….

…here is one I found under a couple of boulders, David Bruce was able to help me liberate it so I could bring it home….

Dorsey, the Quarry Manager, let us know we were welcome to return the next day if we wanted to so we drove back the next morning for a few hours again…some like John O had to head home right then and there, as did Mary and others headed back to Harrodsburg sooner than the rest of us did. We did so well, we stayed til 7 pm and then after I gave Dorsey a few dozen winter socks for his work crew, which he told me that his people really appreciated, I led Slade, Dean, and David Bruce back to Harrodsburg, we got in around 9 pm and drove down to Cheddars at Danville for dinner. 

After breakfast at Mc Donalds in Harrodsburg, a few of us did make the trip back on Monday morning to give it another shot…Stephie and Kim were part of the crew that returned that morning so they met us at the gate, as did Dawson and his girlfriend, joining Slade, Dean, David Bruce, and Onyx and I.

I only took a few photos on Monday morning…here you see Slade and Dean going back to the boulder pile we were working in Sunday evening…a pile we had been directed to by one of the New Yorkers and his son who were finding a lot of great vugs in the boulders there…

….we found more boulders with vugs of pink dolomite and yellow calcite crystals nestled in the pink dolomite crystals and went to work on extracting those vugs…I looked around for corner vugs that I could chisel off or loose ones around and under those boulders….found quite a few actually and with help from Slade and David Bruce, was able to take quite a few home with me, like these…I looked up about an hour in and spotted David Bruce walking around another boulder pile next to the one we were working, turns out he was shopping for more vug laced boulders to work over with his saw…

 

…a couple of my finds included the pink dolomites, yellow calcites, and some purple fluorite druse that we were finding alot of this morning…beautiful stuff up close….

I also found a medium sized chunk of limestone with a nice calcite rectangular shaped crystal in a bed of pink dolomite crystals…Slade kindly came over and used his saw to knock some of the weight off for me…

After a few hours, we all headed for home…Dean and Slade returning to Harrodsburg and then traveling south through Danville, with instructions to stop off at the roadcut and use their saws to extract some nice plates that Harry found there on Sunday afternoon. Onyx and I decided to drive south to Leitchfield and then take the Blue Grass Parkway and Western Kentucky Parkway back to I-24 and then on home through Southern Illinois, pretty much the same route we took down there. We were doing just fine, til we got within ten miles of I-57 and then northbound I-24 traffic came to a stop…we crawled along sporadically moving, took us an hour and 45 minutes to cover those ten miles, then found out there was an accident 2 miles north of the 24/57 interchange that had traffic backed up not only on I-24 but I-57 as well…I decided to go south on I-57 and exited on Hwy 146 west to Anna, Illinois and then over to Cape Girardeau, where after filling the fuel tank and hitting McDonald`s for some food, we headed north on I-55 and home by 10:30 pm. Only later did I find out it was a semi driver that struck the columns of the Hwy 148 Overpass, but refused medical treatment at the scene, and for whatever reason, Illinois State Police could not figure out how to move two lanes of traffic past a non-injury accident…plus Illinois`s DOT does not have messageboards along their interstates like MODOT does, to let you know of traffic backups like that so one can take an alternate route wayyyyy before they even get close to something like that. Guess that makes too much sense.

Other than that, had another great trip with good friends, good food, and great rock and mineral finds. Next week is Geode Fest in Hamilton, Illinois, across the river from Keokuk, Iowa and a few of my friends will be up there next weekend with me as well.  🙂