Last weekend I planned to take off Sunday and return to Eminence to look for more poker chips, but some of my co-workers needed my day off instead, so I re-arranged my schedule and came home late Saturday night, then got up early and drove to Eminence and dug for two hours instead. Missy and I arrived about 9:30 am and found it to be a little overcast, even misted on us for about ten minutes on the way down the valley on B Highway, but it was cooler so I didnt mind at all…this is how it looked when we arrived…..

…wound up working the end of the bank on the left in the photo above…which is where I had been digging at on Memorial Day when Mike and Chrissy were here…and was trying to find a pocket of poker chips nestled in the dolomite druse so Mike could work it and take some nice specimens home with him.  As luck would have it, I hit a pocket of them today and was only about ten inches from where I had been digging that day….I walked up to the bank after we arrived and I changed into my work boots, and found chunks and pieces of clusters of poker chips and dolomite druse, that had rolled down to the bottom of that pile….

…so I knew they had to be rolling down from a pocket up above somewhere…so I started digging to the left side of my pocket on Monday, and sure enough, within about ten minutes, I located a pocket of chips and dolomite druse….

…not knowing how big this pocket would be, compared to the pocket I found there in the same bank back in the late fall last year…and knowing I had only a few hours to dig there…I didnt waste any time getting the pocket opened up to see what all was inside….

…when I was there early December last fall, Ashley and I had found a few pockets of the dolomite druse on the bluff at a higher level up…but back then, there was a dirt bank sloping up to the higher level and this time there was no sloping dirt bank up the bluff at all. In fact, as I stood there and looked on down the bluff where that pocket had been located in December, I was a good ten to twelve feet below it and probably thirty feet to the right of it, good evidence that these pockets can be found anywhere in this bluff wall. That pocket in December, also took a few hours to clean out and filled four of my bags and probable four of Ashley`s bags, too.

I decided to expand this opening so I could reach in and pull out crystals without too much trouble, and the first big piece I removed in so doing, was this one….

…a nice chunk laced with pockets of dolomite druse, that resembles chalcopyrite when held in the sunlight, it just glitters and speckles…and this chunk had two nice poker chips perched on one corner of it. The next one I chipped out, was even bigger and had a double poker chip of a chocolate brown color, nestled in a patch of dolomite crystals, on one end of it….

…and seen closer up here….

…and then I reached into the now expanded pocket and began pulling loose crystals out of it…the first one I pulled out loose was this gray colored poker chip on matrix….

…followed by this nice little round dark gray colored poker chip, the center of which was almost black in color….

…I had to do some more expanding and pretty soon, I came up to the back of the pocket, which was the bluff wall, and the pocket turned to the right and then went down into the rock more, but there was evidence that there were more gray colored poker chips in matrix as well….

…I was just going to have to chip them out of the matrix to free them.

I began hearing some bird noise and I turned around to see buzzards circling above the big wall…and then they all landed in this lone tree at the top of the wall….

…thinking there were more buzzards down here than at the secret spot…last time I was there, I saw three circling and sitting on the top of the bluff wall there.

I went back to chipping out the matrix pieces and this was the next one that came off in my hands…

…and then I pulled a few more loose ones out with color like this….

…by this time, I had two bags full of poker chips and two full of dolomite druse. I pulled one more chunk out of the pocket….

…before the pocket seemed to drop into the ground below…I didnt have the energy to follow it so I concentrated on another pocket opening that I had found earlier. After removing a few big chunks, this is what I saw….

…and up close, this is what it looked like….

…and turned out to be mainly a smaller pocket that ended too soon, of dolomite druse…there were one or two pieces with small poker chips on them, but that was all…so now I had yet another bag full of druse.

I moved up the bank a little higher and discovered even more pockets of druse along the underside of a ledge of rock….

…by this time though, I was out of time and decided to head back so I could get a good nap in before heading to work. I got my nap in and unloaded the crystals and then shot this beautiful sunset before heading to supper…..