I wish I could say I found yet another blue poker chip pocket for two days in a row, but I cant, cause I didnt.  I did find yet another pocket the very next day after the blue hole though and on the other side of the lower level.  As we were driving down there we came across this nice scene in a valley nearby….

…and once we  arrived, the clouds were once again very noticeable…and even though it was a little warm, there was a nice breeze blowing through thanks to the clouds.

…I had decided to try and dig down into that pocket and see just how deep it would go and if anything was in it…I stopped in Steelville at Casey`s,  and purchased a cheap flashlight, having gone off and left my really good one at home again. As it was, I didnt need it for this pocket, cause after digging down a little ways with the mini mattox, I bottomed out real quickly….

…so I backed off and tried a different route, thinking maybe there was a deeper pocket there nearby and I just wasnt sitting in the right spot for it. I dug down into every hole I could see and never did find a deep pocket anywhere, just lots of little shallow pockets and a few crystals.

 

..so I took a break after digging there for a couple of hours and drank some water, as it was starting to heat up again, and then decided to move about ten feet north and try my luck again….

…and as luck would have it, after scratching around and finding some signs of calcite….

…I soon had another pocket scouted out and quickly taking shape…

…and I no sooner had a small pile of crystals growing than  the pocket started moving in that direction and I had to move them to the right about three feet…as it was, I had to move them twice to the right….

…this pocket formed up fairly fast, with a large and extensive base plate that had a couple of clusters on it, but each one was about six inches thick and then attached to a thick shelf of rock underneath. I tried chipping out the clusters just to make it easier to access the holes leading to what I figured was a deeper pocket underneath the clusters, but the rock and calcite the clusters were attached to, wore me out fast. I finally decided to just go on and dig out around the edges more and see where that might lead to…

…holes were opening up all over the place when I was digging and scratching around. you can see a hole above, this one only led down to the side of the cluster there, but then when I got down to the side of the cluster, another hole opened up, leading me to think there was either a pocket underneath the cluster or off to the side into the rock….

…so on and on I dug…sometimes stopping to pull out a plate of druse or a poker chip….

…and pretty soon, more holes along with ledges, were opening up so I was exploring more and more, thinking eventually I might find a big pocket somewhere nearby that was chock full of crystals.

…I wish now I had had my little paint brush with me to sweep away the loose dirt and gravel, that would have made things much easier, something else to put on my list of things to bring along…in the next few minutes, a huge cluster revealed itself to me and a large hole opened up next to it….

…I reached down into this hole, it was pretty big…and I pulled out a couple of nice crystals…so I naturally continued to dig some more...it would have been nice to remove this huge cluster, but as I said before, it was firmly rooted to the base of the pocket with thick calcite. I hear so much about calcite not being very tough, only having a hardness of four, but let me tell you, when you start driving a chisel into it, you would swear it was more like a hardness of eight ! Wears you out real quickly.

I took another water break and then started trying to dig this cluster out, see how big it was, and in the process I discovered yet another pocket to the right of it, under a ledge of rock….

…and yet another hole opened up on the left side, right by that cluster of crystals…

…by this time, I was starting to wear down from the heat and the digging….I had tried to break into the clusters and chip them out and that alone wore me down…and I was going from hole to hole exploring and trying to find a way down into what I assumed was a pocket off to the side of those clusters, but I wasnt having much luck getting into any pockets yet. I started scratching around again and low and behold, an even bigger hole opened up right in front of me and not near the cluster either…

…I went back to the truck and grabbed my new flashlight and aimed it into the hole and it appeared the hole was fairly deep….

…so I started digging out the pocket on the left side and making my way toward the hole in the pocket to the right….

…and as I did, more ledges and holes appeared. I started pulling more crystals and druse plates out right and left….

…including one very nice large twin….

…the pocket finally joined up with the other pocket, and sure enough, it was a deep one….

…I kept pulling large crystals out of it and chipping off the roof to move it back…prob moved it back at least two feet before I ran out of gas….

…I laid down on my side and set the camera down on the floor of the pocket and using the flash, shot this photo of the interior of the pocket….

..it was jammed full of large poker chip crystals…no I did not leave those inside the pocket intentionally…yes I ran out of energy, but if at all possible, I still would have reached in and removed them…had Mother Nature let me…they were firmly rooted to the bottom of the pocket like superglue…so that is how I left them….for another day.

On the way out, I shot some beautiful sunsets of the thunderheads overhead in the sky….