{"id":6094,"date":"2014-03-04T20:01:47","date_gmt":"2014-03-04T20:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/?p=6094"},"modified":"2022-04-27T03:54:43","modified_gmt":"2022-04-27T03:54:43","slug":"eminence-in-february","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/?p=6094","title":{"rendered":"MFQ in February"},"content":{"rendered":"

Boy after the winter we have had this year, with the extremely cold temps and snow\/ice, one would probably think a trip to My Favorite Quarry was impossible to pull off, but no one was more surprised than me to see about five days of beautiful warm weather and sunny skies, pop up into the calendar three weeks into the snowiest month of the year. Missy and I loaded up early Saturday morning, the 22nd and headed out to see what we could find. My buddy had called me a few days before to let me know that very little work was going on at the quarry, but they were slowly and surely removing the blast pile. I figured everywhere else the ground would remain frozen and with work going on there, we could prob find some looser material to work with. We arrived at the quarry about 8:30 am, and I pulled up on the east wall and saw what appeared to be some fractured areas in the wall that may have occurred as a result of freezing and thawing…I parked here to check them out…I soon had my bags parked next to a few pockets along the wall and began working them….<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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….I was working the smaller pockets when my buddy Jim showed up and stopped by to visit briefly, taking a break from working on his house. I had worked my way down from where I parked the truck and found several smaller pockets…could see the wall was fractured in several areas, although some of them were way up high too….<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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…my bags are about four feet up from the ground level, and footing up there was slip and slide, so those pockets higher than four feet were hard to reach, cause I was constantly sliding down in the loose gravel and dirt. I had filled my apron up with the smaller pocket goodies and then finally reached this area of the wall about thirty yards west of where I started and when I found this pocket, I knew I would need the bags, it was that nice looking up close….<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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…some of the first few pieces I pulled from this pocket, were these nice chunks of calcite druse…<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u00a0A few minutes later, a white car entered the quarry and drove over to my truck and parked, and a guy got out and said he hoped I would be there when he arrived…came over and introduced himself as Kurt and told me that he had been reading my blog site on rockhunting for the past year. Turns out he is a teacher in Lebanon, Missouri and new to rockhunting…he had dropped his wife off at a seminar in Rolla that morning and then decided to drive down and see if he could find anything, and was hoping to find me there as well. We talked for a few minutes and then I showed him what I was finding that morning and he decided to go further east along the wall and see what he could find. About thirty minutes later I looked up and he was over in the area of the original wall, which is still a very good producing area to work….<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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….I continued to work the bigger pocket, which was positioned under some heavy rocks, that seemed very attached to the base rock, so one less thing to worry about…..<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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….I started cleaning out the pocket, pulling out several smaller pieces of druse, enough to fill a bag by itself, and then started coming across smaller poker chip crystals mixed in. Soon I was able to look down into the gaps and see some darker poker chip crystals lurking in the shadows so to speak….<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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…and so far, I had a pretty respectable pile of keepers….<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\"12<\/a><\/p>\n

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…I kept digging in and cleaning and pretty soon the pocket started burrowing in and more crystals started showing up in the dirt at the bottom of the pocket….<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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…and pretty soon, it had expanded a bit more and I came upon this….<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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…plus the bottom of the pocket started producing some very pretty poker chips, some of them quite big, some triples blended together like this one…\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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…and here is the bottom of the pocket, where you can see yet another nice poker chip hiding in the dirt….what you cant see here yet, are the many other crystals that were hiding in cluster form, mainly because I haven`t yet dug them out and exposed them, but believe me, they were there, and I was able to chip them out a few minutes later….<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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…and here is the one that was hiding on the right in the last photo…..<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"20<\/a><\/p>\n

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Kurt left about 3 pm that afternoon, he had a little longer drive home than I did…Missy and I took off about an hour later, exhausted and very happy with my finds that day….sure was a nice day, as the temps got up to about 65 that day….<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Boy after the winter we have had this year, with the extremely cold temps and snow\/ice, one would probably think a trip to My Favorite Quarry was impossible to pull off, but no one was more surprised than me to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dogtooth-calcite-crystals","category-dolomite-druse-and-poker-chips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6094"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13219,"href":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6094\/revisions\/13219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jwjrocks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}