Two weekends in a row, I was down at MFQ…once on my own in my new truck and the second time with my buddy Ian and my new buddy Onyx. The first trip down there, I had received a call from my buddy Jim that some blasting had taken place a day or two before, turned out to be the coved wall again but taking out more of the center wall too….

….so I was able to find some nice pockets along the wall, including some filled with green poker chips, and some filled with nestle chocolate brown dogtooths and black dogtooths, so I re-positioned my truck closer to those pockets in case I started filling bag after bag with spretty crystals….

….in fact, I was up along the wall and working on cleaning out the third pocket when my buddy Ian called me from Denver, to see what I was up to…and I told him what I was up to…he reminded me that he was going to be stopping off a week later to rockhunt with me on his way back home from New York state…I promised him that I would leave him some material there. A few minutes later tho, I had located a pocket up higher on the wall than I could reach…..center of the photo below….it was about ten feet up from the pile….

…..so I returned to my truck and got my extendable handle rake, then returned to the wall, climbed up on four rocks I stacked up…had forgotten to bring my ladder that day with me…and then reached up to the pocket with my rake and gently moved it around, pulling down a few small black colored poker chip crystals, as well as raining down a few small pebbles on me too…

….luckily my hard hat deflected many of those from me..and soon I was bumping up against something more substantial in the pocket with the rake…I pulled it to the edge ot the pocket so I could look at it, and liking what I saw, very carefully snagged it in the jaws of the rake turned upside down, and lowered to my waiting gloved hands…

 

….the photos of the pocket above were taken after the fact…i was unable to see what was above me nor in the pocket itself, had to feel around with the rake and hope for the best…luckily I was able to pull out the best without any harm coming to it or me…

 

…I also found what looked like a few bat caves along the wall near the base of the pile…but Ian later determined they were prob bird nests inside them cause he was pulling out straw and bits of debris and twigs from them….

 

…later in the afternoon, storm clouds started rolling in, so I decided to pack my bags and vamoose back toward home….

..no doubt that it had been a pretty nice day for collecting there and I was happy with what I found….

…the following week, Ian met me down at MFQ and we decided to tackle that one pocket again…my buddy Jim brought us a nice ladder and we were able to climb right up to the pocket…since I had pulled the nice cluster out the week before, I let Ian cleanout the pocket and take home whatever he wanted to….

…while he was chipping out some black dogtooth crystals from the pocket, I looked down below and saw my new buddy dog Onyx, strolling around the base of the pile…he never did stray too far, which was fine with me…since this was his first official rockhunting trip….

…and while Ian was chipping out a few for himself, I discovered some nice ones in the pile itself…like this big one that I dug out right below Ian a few feet….

..and while it didn`t go home with me, there were a lot of little ones underneath and around it in the loose dirt that did go home with me. After working on the black dogtooth pocket, Ian made his way down to the bat caves next and worked on them for awhile…

…I headed home about noon, stopping off to see my miner friend Dave and Ian headed home to Denver from there at the same time…getting into Denver around midnight.