Since my family celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve, due to my work schedule and my sister`s family schedule, I didnt have anything planned and neither did Docia, so she met Missy and I at the secret spot about 10 am. It was alot colder than it has been, about 27 degrees when we arrived, but hey, a little cold weather doesnt stop the hardiest of rockhounds. I figured we would be sheltered from the wind as well, as we have in the past, but not this time…it was whipping around in there the whole time we were there. Missy and I arrived first and after getting my boots on and laced up, I headed over to a section of older wall where I could see what appeared to be a pocket that I hadnt noticed before. I was up there chipping around with my mini mattox when Docia arrived. I took a break and walked down to get a few dogtooths out of my truck for her from my last trip there, that I had found. She handed me a box that contained a gem tree for my supervisor, Patty….

  …..a christmas gem tree for me…..

….and a pyrite sun on a stand.

After getting on her coveralls, she grabbed a bag and tools and headed over to the older wall near me. We moved up that wall, looking for pockets and then to the east wall where we finally found some pockets and sat down to work them. I decided to take another look at the druse/dogtooth wall I had found last week. After clearing away some more of the rubble, I located what appeared to be another pocket way back in the back section of it, which required me to really reach back to pull stuff out and then later, on the left side as well. Since it was so cold and windy, I left the camera in the truck and didnt take any photos til I got home and cleaned the specimens up.

One of the first few I pulled out of the very back pocket, was a nice double terminated dogtooth crystal stretched across a piece of druse matrix…here it is all cleaned up…

I was also pulling out a lot of pretty druse chunks, bubbly and lots of different colors on a primarily gray druse base….

…and every once in a while I would pull out some smaller dogtooth crystals as well, some wrapped inside a poker chip and exposed either at the tip or down along the body of the dogtooth formation somewhere….many of them in excellent condition…

…some of them were a honey brown color, some an orange color, and a few of them were a darker brown color. I kept on pulling several top and sidewall plates of the bubbly druse out, some of them with poker chips and some of them with dogtooth crystals attached to them, until I reached the back of the pocket. I put my mini mattox in there to make sure it was the back of the pocket, cause I was at the end of my stretch and reach and could no longer reach anything with even the tips of my fingers.

I then turned my attention to the left side wall and the first thing I pulled out after clearing some of the sideall plates there, was this nice single crystal attached to a small piece of gray bubbly druse, that had a very different look to it on both sides….

…above photo shows the pretty side of the crystal on the ugly bottom side of the druse matrix, where the next photo shows the other side of the crystal on that ugly bottom side of the druse, with some of the gray bubbles exposed on the other side….

….and the other side shows the pretty druse bubbles with the dogtooth showing as frosted over and only the tip of it exposed…

…I was also pulling out a few chunks of druse bubbles with some frosted dogtooth crystals attached to them….

…and closer up the dogtooths look like this….

…I filled three bags after wrapping up these and some of the single crystals, and took them to the truck…as I walked back toward the wall, I looked down where I was watching my steps over some loose boulders and saw some poker chip crystals laying at the bottom of the pile slope…so I looked up and spotted what appeared to be a large chunk of poker chips and druse exposed on one end near the top of the pile…so naturally, I climbed up there and started digging in to expose the entire thing, and before you knew it, several dogtooth orange crystals were found in what appeared to be a large pocket blasted down from the wall. I pulled a couple of large plates out and took them back to the truck, and brought back an extra bag with cloth wraps. Its a good thing I did, because an hour later, I had filled both bags and was returning to my truck for yet another one, when Docia came to tell me that she had froze out and had enough of the never ending wind.

Missy and I stuck around another 45 minutes, filled one more bag, and then took off for home too. It was supposed to possibly start snowing around 5 pm, and I decided to get out earlier than that, just in case. By this time I was cold as well and only the hot tub could thaw me out. 🙂