I forgot to complete my story on the weekend of the Park Hills Show, the weekend that David and Janyce Sorrells came up for the show and then went rockhunting with me at MFQ…and my buddy Travis from Tennessee came up to meet us there and rockhunt with us as well as his two sons. David reminded me this morning and so here I am, three months later, completing the story on the weekend, my apologies to all….that was a rough week and a rough month…as my Dad passed away that week as well and I went to the show on Saturday and rockhunting that Sunday to give myself a break…something that I took a bit of heat for later on, and knew would happen, but sometimes you have to listen to your heart and mind and do what is best for you.

Onyx and I met them all nearby and led them to the quarry that morning and we found a huge blast pile waiting for us on the west side, to check out…it didn`t take them long to get their gear on and head up the pile of rocks to do just that….

…if memory serves me correctly, we found some of the deformed dark calcite chunks, they were laying all over the place, and alot of massive calcite as well…I honestly have not been impressed with that side of the quarry since they started blasting over there, much of it plain looking rock and massive calcite layers, very little crystalization like we have seen in the other areas. Here lately tho, we have been finding some of those longer dogtooth crystals, brown and black colored, that I always refer to as not knowing what they wanted to grow up to be, cause they have great form but on the outside, are rough edged and pitted much of the time, but still in a classical dogtooth formation. Whatever David and Janyce were finding, they seemed happy with and filled two buckets pretty fast….below you see David carrying them to the truck while Janyce keeps on digging into a pocket….

I had told them to check out the walls in the coved area, because we find many more nice pockets there, plus in the heat of the day, its cooler there as well, the high walls retain that cooling shade longer and there is a cooling waterfall there too, that you can stand under and get soaked and cooled down fast if needed. So soon after working the western pile, we moved over to the coved area and found Travis and his two boys already there. David found some big boulders there that had some vugs of calcite druse with some poker chips inside and began to work them while the boys were working the small piles to the left side looking for goodies…

…and pretty soon, Travis was up in the cove corner looking for pockets where the waterfall was located…while David continued to work those boulders….

…pretty soon the boys wore out and it was down to Travis, David, Janyce, and I to continue looking for goodies….

I told Travis to check out the wall behind David and Janyce, cause we had found several pockets full of nice dogtooths in there a few weeks earlier…

…and pretty soon he was scrambling all over the pocket wall to look for goodies…

…despite the heat, we had a pretty good time and everyone found some nice crystals…by the time 3 pm rolled around, everyone was done in from the warmth of the day and headed home. It capped off a great weekend of rockhunting, starting out the day before at the Park Hills Show where the old Federal Mine and Mill is located….