Return to Eminence…….

Early yesterday morning, Missy and I left town at the crack of dawn and headed south to Eminence, Missouri, to meet up with Ashley, a new rockhounding friend from the Rolla area, after corresponding the last couple of weeks on the McRocks Rockhounding Board.There was a gorgeous sunrise as we were getting on Interstate 44 and I pulled over on the ramp to photograph it…

I decided to take a different route than normal, opting to drive down Hwy 72 from Rolla, as it is a much better road than it used to be and the speed limit has been adjusted up on it as well. The only drawback to driving this route, is the extremely curvy section of Hwy 19 that one encounters at the Shannon County Line…as you drive 19 from Salem to the Shannon County Line, the road is fairly nice and straight down through the valleys and there are several passing lanes…but once you hit the Shannon County Line, that all goes out the window fast, leaving you with sharp curves and hills and very few passing lanes. Luckily there are only about 24 miles of it, as well as some beautiful scenery as you pass through the Round Spring Recreation Area and cross the Current River and Sinking Creek over some long bridges.

I arrived at the quarry about 8:30 am and decided to drive on down to the lower area, despite telling Ashley I would wait for him up by entrance, and parked where he would be able to spot my truck as he pulled in. I put my hiking boots on and grabbed a couple of bags and my rock hammer and walked over to the pile on the right, one Docia and I hadn`t checked last week when there. I found some dark colored green crystals on a few boulders while checking out that pile…and quite a few boulders with some calcite druse as well. I was up on top checking out a big boulder with dark colored poker chip crystals and druse when Ashley arrived. After a few minutes of meet and greet chat, we started looking for some pretty stuff. I went back to my truck to get my camera to photograph those crystals and druse I had just found…

I chipped off a few of the crystals, but I can safely say now, that those were nothing compared to what I found about twenty minutes later. Ashley found a small boulder with a nice crystal filled pocket on one end shortly after starting his search at the end of the pile…I walked down to the end and started checking out the bluff at the west end of the south facing wall. Within a few minutes, I had located some pockets along that wall and decided I was going to need more bags, so I returned to the truck to get a couple more. Pretty soon, Ashley joined me up at the base of the wall and found a few pockets himself.…and here are the pockets I started out with….

..if you look close, you can see poker chips in the pocket in the upper right side and those are druse pockets down below to the left…here is a closer look at the poker chip pocket I started out working…

…within minutes, several of them were rolling right out of the pocket and into my hands…some dark green and some chocolate brown and black colored….

..and after cleaning out the bottom of the pocket floor, there were still plenty inside on the walls as well as some beautiful druse….

I was able to use my rock hammer to chip out the crystals on the left side, they came out in two large chunks with several crystals attached….

and then I started pulling some druse plates with crystals attached from the bottom of the pocket that were loose once the side plates were removed. Pretty soon only the crystals on the right wall remained….

…or so I thought at the time. I turned my attention to the druse pockets below….

and pulled out some very pretty druse plates from three pockets, most were a deep red color and there were some areas of chalcopyrite as well. Here is one I pulled out of the upper druse pocket….

…..after cleaning the three druse pockets out, I walked to the left and up to the end of the wall and within a few minutes found yet another pocket, this one full of larger pieces of yellow calcite druse like this one….

I left this pocket in Ashley`s hands and decided to walk over to the east wall and see if I could find more pockets, only finding more druse laced pockets, and filled another bag with even more druse plates. I then decided to walk up to the upper bench and so I grabbed two more bags plus my hammers and chisel, in case I found that huge chunk of chocolate covered crystals up there still.

Once up there, I began checking for more pockets along the wall beginning at the south end this time and working my way west…I didn`t take my camera up there with me this time, but I am sure glad I went up there because I found and removed some very pretty lime green colored poker chip clusters from a few pockets up there, three of them were the size of a grapefruit….

As I made my way over to the west end near the ledge, I almost did a double take when I spotted a cluster of five to six poker chip crystals, all blended together with only their tips separated and the entire cluster appeared to be very thick and very heavy, embedded in a corner of rock….

this was one of those moments that I had to make a choice…you see there was this overhang of rock above them, about nine square feet of it, and only a four inch ledge holding it up…I decided not to chance it and left it alone…I did, however, find a wide crack around to the left side of the corner that enabled me to reach inside and pull out a few hand size clusters of poker chips that were loose and sitting behind this huge cluster, like this one….

..and then I reached back in and found this one as well, just a single crystal but with some beautiful multicolor to it…

It was about then that I heard Ashley yell out from down below…said he had just pulled out some dogtooth crystals on a matrix piece with calcite druse and poker chips.

After that, I got to the task at hand, find the huge chocolate covered poker chip boulder I located last week up there….

…I was able to successfully remove those dark colored bubbles in the photo above and came away with some nice clusters of poker chips of a chocolate color….

..and believe me, with two full bags of clusters from up there, I was quite happy. I returned to the lower level and showed Ashley what I had and told him about the cluster in the wall that I couldn`t remove…he decided to go up and see what he could find.

While he was gone, I checked the pockets again and found a few more smaller plates of druse…within forty minutes he returned with the poker chip cluster that I had left in the wall…he was able to remove a few pieces of rock below it without too much trouble and it rolled out and hit him in the knee….I lifted it up and it was pretty hefty, prob around fifty pounds…and quite pretty…

and the tips of them….

..and here is a photo of my crystals from the upper bench….

…he showed me some of the matrix pieces he found with the dogtooth crystals on them…

I`ll add some more photos tomorrow if I get the chance to photograph some my crystals that I cleaned up today.

I apologize for the delay, been fighting a cold and its been a fight for sure, today is my first day of real rest, but did manage to get the photos taken and edited up today. Here are some more of the crystals with calcite druse attached, that I found last week.