Eminence Again…

Well I am late once again in finishing the two part story from mid August…this time I have a semi good excuse though…we had a pretty bad storm roll through here last week that caused some wind damage and some lightning damage to alot of computers in our area. My computer didnt want to work well the next day, kept locking up on me and then would only work in spurts, so I limped along with it til Monday, then had my telephone carrier come out and check all the lines and when it still didnt want to work, I took it down to my computer repair folks at A to Z, and after a couple of hours on the diagnostic table, they found it was a bad spot on my terradriveĀ  instead. Chris was able to fix it and its been fine ever since, but I also found out while there, that terradrives only last about a year, due to their size…he said I would be better off with a 500 gig hard drive instead, even an external drive would be better. If I had known this drive was only good for a year, when I purchased it last year, I def wouldnt have bought it. Food for thought.

Missy and I got up early on Sunday the 12th and headed south to Eminence, stopping off at the Casey`s General Store in Viburnum along the way to fill up on gas…it was twenty cents cheaper per gallon there than it was in Sullivan or Cuba even…and then a few miles south of there, I slowed down to shoot this beautiful sunrise behind the Doe Run Lead Company`s Magmont Mine, on Highway K, south of Hwy 49….

01 Sunrise Over Doe Run Magmont Mine

..its a little fuzzy, which means I didnt slow down enough before snapping the photo, but anyone that has been through there can understand why…there is no shoulder there and not much room to pull over at all, without dropping off into a rocky ditch. We continued on down without seeing anything else worthwhile and arrived about 7 am…to find a cloudy sky instead of a sunny sky…meaning the weather people got the forecast wrong once again, and this time a pleasant mistake instead. I can live with these types of blunders, let me tell ya…65 degrees is much more pleasant to start digging in than a humid 85 dgrees…any day and twice on Sundays. šŸ™‚

02 Arrival Cloudy Skies

This time I drove on over to the middle of the north wall, since it was directly below some of the new upper bench and wanted to see if there were any pockets of dolomite druse or poker chips over there as well…I got out of my truck and snapped the photo above looking south and slightly west, and the photo below looking east along the north wall…

03 Looking South

…and after getting my boots on, I looked west and began to think I had better get a move on or I wouldnt be doing much digging at all…

04 Rain Showers Heading My Way

…at least not staying dry while digging…as it was, it only sprinkled a few times and that was all…I actually wouldnt have minded having to stop and wait out a good rain shower down there, am sure they are in just as much need of moisture as we are up here. I got my boots laced up and grabbed my mini mattox and a bag, and walked over to an area of fall down material, that had some shiny stuff about midway up it….

05 Started Looking Here

I could see some seams of calcite here and there, and after climbing up a bit to the left side, I was able to find just a few poker chips in some matrix, but that was about it. I checked the walls up and down both sides and then went up to the upper bench where I was able to fill yet another bag with some beautiful fall down material in both druse and poker chips. After spending about an hour up there and filling two more bags eventually, I came back down to check out the pocket on the north wall that Docia had pointed out originally to me and that I had already worked on once before…

06 Returned to Pocket

…I wanted to check on it at least once more, when I left it the last time I knew there were more crystals inside but it was gonna take quite a bit to get to them and get them out. I was definitely out of energy the last time I had been there but was ready to tackle the job this time. As I was scoping it out though, I noticed a few signs of crystals on the left side of this hanging ledge, and so I started cleaning off that side and sure enough, I found a pocket of some poker chips and dolomite druse over there as well…

07 Found Some on Left Side

The photo below shows a close up of the pocket that turned out to be fairly shallow and I was able to remove the dolomite druse pieces and few poker chip clusters in about twenty minutes…

08 Pocket Found Here

..and then I moved over to photograph one of the areas of poker chips that I left attached to the interior wall the last time there, and hoped to be able to remove this trip….

10 Poker Chips Embedded

…as I did so, I noticed that the sun had finally come out and was beginning to warm things up. I decided to get a quick water break in and then return with my tools to see what goodies I could remove from inside the main area.

11 Sun Comes Out Finally

As I was walking to the truck, I looked west and noticed Missy had finished her running around and was now chillin out in the shade from the North Wall…..

12 Missy Chills

…I returned with my hammer and chisel and another bag with some wrapping cloths in case I was able to remove some really pretty ones. The photo below shows the area I am about to dig into and explore more,Ā  to get to the pockets of crystals that are inside it.

This is actually the base of a large hanging curtain of rock….

13 Bluff Shelf Pocket

..attached to the main north wall…I say shelf, because its vertical and not horizontal, and this curtain of rock that covers the main pockets inside,Ā  is about six to eight inches thick, three feet wide and about ten to twelve feet high…as you can see in the photo below….

14 Section of Wall

…and you can see in the closer up photo above that I have chiseled off some of the base support in order to create an opening big enough to reach in and remove several pockets of goodies inside…and yes, it worries me each time I have chiseled off more and more base rock. I have removed about seven bags full of goodies from there so far. I`m hoping that curtain of rock comes down on its own before I return there the next time.

Within a few minutes of removing the last crystals, it had warmed up to about 92 degrees and I decided to pack up and head home. I`ll add some photos of the cleaned up crystals and clusters that I found there that day.

On the way home, we spotted these old barn buildings next to a creek on Hwy B that were nice to look at….

15 Barns and Trees

…the trees framing them really set them off well….

16 Barns and Trees

 

 

 

 

 

 

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