The heat wave that has dominated much of our summer weather this year, finally relented a bit and we were able to go rock hunting mid afternoon without encountering sweltering and dangerously hot temps for once.  I met my parents and my sisters family at Red Lobster last Saturday for lunch, to take my Dad out for his birthday, and then drove back to pick up Missy and go rock hunting…Docia was confined to mowing acres of grass while it was dry, so we went by ourselves, set to meet there the next morning cause it would be wet and she couldnt mow then.

Missy and I arrived around 2 pm and I immediately went up into the pile area to discover that the remaining pile was gone and they had cleaned if up right up to the wall on both sides, even scraping down into the floor a little bit…

…and I looked to the left and the rest of the windrow on that side was gone too…the only thing left behind were the big boulders we couldn`t do anything with.

I walked up to the corner and began looking around the newly cleared area for left behinds,  and not seeing anything definitive, I checked the floor and saw what appeared to be some seams and decided to start digging there…

..it didn`t take long to find a shallow pocket of chips, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were covered in what appeared to be limonite…I wasn`t sure at first, cause it looked like clay, but it was solid rock and spotty in places and solid masses in other places, but the crystals themselves were gray or a yellowish green color and in clusters or combos…found out most of this later at home when I cleaned them up and was quite happy with them. I decided then to look for more the next morning when I returned to meet up with Docia…here is the pocket expanding and you can see more crystals in the bottom of the pocket…

..and here are some of them piled up…at this point you can see how they look coming out of the pocket and can prob understand why I wasn`t sure what exactly I had at this point, but I was clearly interested….

..and when you see this next one, you`ll prob really understand why I got excited when I pulled it out and looked close at it…

…through the muck covering it I can see I have a small cluster or triple at the very least and the crystals are a nice dark color…here is the other view of it…

 

After getting what I could out, I moved over to the wall and located another pocket fairly quickly…

..and the first thing I pulled out of the pocket after clearing the loose stuff away, was this nice gray druse with a poker chip attached to one end of it…..

…and that left this hole in the pocket….

..with a nice poker chip crystal front and slightly to the right of center, lol….I started clearing away the roll down material in front of me and came upon this small cluster in the rocks….

….and after cleaning all the loose material around the pocket away from it, here is now it looked….

…..and the next one that came out of the pocket was this nice combo….

…after that I removed a few small plates of druse and a few single crystals and that cleaned out the small pocket, so I moved on down the wall looking for more pockets…after ten minutes of further digging, the only discovery I made was this guy looking for a cool spot out of the heat….

…yes I admit, I jumped back a bit when the rocks uncovered him…it startled me because we have been rockhunting at this location for going  on a few years now and just in the past week, we have come across two small snakes. I dug a few more minutes at that location, a little farther away, and then moved to another location to search for more pockets. I found what appeared to be a promising seam of calcite about twenty feet away in the floor….

…but only found a few crystals here and decided to call it a wrap…as Missy and I were leaving, we spotted this nice cloudy view….

…I got home and cleaned up a few of those crystals from the limonite pocket and really liked what I found…

…this is that pretty one that was covered in muck above….it sure cleaned up real pretty….here are a few more….

Docia met me over there the next day and we both found a couple of pockets apiece…she found a couple in the wall that I missed the day before, and I found a couple in the floor above and below…the floor below was in one of those depression areas again and this one had some large poker chips….

….and then off to the side of this pocket, I hit a spot of hematite attached to the poker chips and calcite…never have hit anything like that before…