Thank God for Tylenol !!

Its probably the only reason, besides maybe a combined soak in my hot tub last night, that I was able to get out of bed this morning. What a weekend in Marion, Kentucky !!

We had a good turnout, full house at the group dig on Saturday, April 2nd, great weather, made several new friends and saw several old friends as well, and everyone found some great stuff to take home. I didnt see anyone leave that wasnt happy with what they found there this weekend.

Missy and I left town about 10 am Friday and headed down to Kentucky, opting to travel by interstate all the way down there, so we drove through Illinois once again this trip down and back. I stopped off in Paducah this trip to visit a good friend who is a very talented painter and photographer there, Jeff Spicer, and we yakked for the better part of the afternoon before Missy and I headed on down to Eddyville. First order of business after checking in at the motel was supper at the Oasis Southwest Grill in Kuttawa, one of the best steakhouses I have ever had the pleasure of dining at. Reminds me of a Lone Star Steakhouse but even better atmosphere and much more well lit, and the folks that work there are very friendly and customer service oriented. I have never seen so many managers and assistant managers roam the dining rooms and check on things like they do there. I opted to have the grilled chops dinner this time and boy was it good…two center cut chops marinated and glazed with your choice of honey mustard sauce or their signature barbecue sauce, and I chose the bbq sauce and it was delicious. The chops were large, and you get either one or two with your meal, and grilled to perfection. With the steamed broccoli and Idaho baked potato and their addictive dinner rolls, I was in hog heaven afterward. 🙂

Missy and I rose early the next day, excited to get down to the museum and visit with Tina and Ed and VJ and Bill and see who all showed up to dig…we arrived about 8:15 am and found about ten diggers already there and some touring the museum as well. Talk about a first class rock and mineral museum…words just dont do this place justice at all, and several have tried in years past…but this place is very much worth the five dollar entrance fee and take the walking tour if at all possible, because these people know how to walk you through the pages of history with a view of beautiful fluorite and other crystals and minerals specimens, that will knock your socks off !!

I visited with everyone and met up with Ian Merkel and his friend Marty from upper state New York, and then found Bruce Skubon from the Philly area, just before Ed rounded everyone up outside to further their cause and give his safety talk as well. And what a cause they have there…folks there just arent that many places where a rockhound can go anymore these days, and find a place like this, a group of people with access to great mineral laden locations, that are willing to allow rockhounds access to dig to your hearts content, for a small fee. THIS is a good cause !!

We headed out to the mine and parked, Ed graciously allowed me to park up in the woods again, to provide Missy with some shade, and everyone walked up with their tools and buckets and began checking out the material we had found last week and left for them. Bill had come down earlier and started the pump, but wasnt satisfied with the way it was operating and returned to town to see if he could find a better one. In the meantime, the group filtered around the piles and down in the pit where they could go, and began looking for material.

At the museum, Tina had pointed out a birthday boy to me so I picked out some poker chip calcite crystals I had brought with me and gave it to his dad, they were settled in on the end of the smaller tailing pile and digging in to find fluorite. I walked around and assisted several other rockhounds in finding some nice stuff, surface collecting wise.

Once the water was low enough to work the pit, several rockhounds jammed into the small area and began to work. Here the pit is full of rockhounds at work…

In the next image, Ian is shown washing off the purple crown to check things out…

…while Ethan in the dark blue shirt and Marty in the gray shirt, chisel into the ledge to look for more pockets…

..while Bruce tackled the entire saddle singlehandedly and worked the pockets he found waiting there…

..and boy did he liberate some nice crystals out of those pockets….…in fact he liberated some nice plates from those pockets….

..and while they were working in the pit, several more worked the big pile, some seen here on the front side and some not seen on the backside…

…but the main focus was on the pit and the pockets found there last week that remained for others to work on this week…

…here are some photos of the pockets that greeted Bruce Saturday morning on the saddle…

….deep purple cubes with calcite and smithsonite surrounding them……

…from all those pockets, here are a few plates that Bruce was able to liberate….

..and….

By 4 pm on Saturday, many of the group had departed for home or other adventures…Bruce and his wife along with Ethan and Melissa driving south to see Mammoth Cave on Sunday before heading home with a thirteen hour drive ahead of them. When Bill made his last trip out to check on us, he found five of us left digging, Ian and Marty, Phillip and Shirley from the Danville area, and me. Phillip and Shirley were checking out the tailing piles and I had found a stash of crystals and clusters in one of the pit banks.  We stayed til around 6 pm, vowing to return early the next morning and find some more goodies.

Ian, Marty, and I headed back to Eddyville to clean up and get some dinner…as we approached Hwy 62, we observed about twenty turkeys walking toward the highway through a field of tall brown grass…believe me, I`m still kicking myself for not stopping in the highway to photograph them…sure was a neat sight to see…countless times I`ve seen them feeding in fields or flying or walking through the woods, but never have I seen them walking through a field like that…

We chowed down at the Oasis Grill and I had the same thing once again, it had just been so good the night before and I was very hungry once again. It was just as good tonight too. Despite being in a dry county, Ian and Marty were able to order a few Sam Adams brews and enjoyed their food as well. They took off to wash clothes after and I decided to catch up on emails before hitting the hay for the night.

We headed to the mine about 7 am and arrived to find Bill heading out after starting up the pump for us and leaving some forms for us to sign. Luckily the pit didnt fill as high with water as we thought it might and we were able to get started digging fairly fast.

Marty and Ian began working the fracture vein again and I started in on the banks again, and between the three of us, we began pulling out crystals and clusters right and left. After about an hour, we heard some vehicles coming down the hill and low and behold, some additional rockhounds showed up from Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee, adults and kids alike. I called Bill and told him we needed some more forms and he responded quickly and found several eager rockhounds that had been placed on the waiting list for Saturday, ready to dig today. Pretty soon, the pit had a few more rockhounds working in it…

Jack and his son, Cameron, were two of the first ones to show up and eventually made their way over next to me and since I was only staying til noon, I gave them a few crystals I was finding in the bank and gave them my spot when I wore out and decided to stop digging. I was quite happy with the stuff I found this weekend and only too happy to share it with others. Sorry I didnt get any photos of you and Cameron stretched out in the mud digging for crystals, Jack. 🙂

Ian and Marty had flown into St Louis` Lambert International Airport so they had to leave shortly after I did, to catch their flights back home. Here they are shown checking out some last specimens and wrapping things up…

..and happy with their finds….

…and ready to come back another time to find more goodies…me too guys, will be back down in June for the weekend celebration, hope to see yall there then…

I returned from my Florida trip on Monday, somewhat rested up on Tuesday, tried to catch up by editing up  photos while working around fire calls, then returned to work Wednesday night and Thursday evening, I drove into work and stayed til 2 am, then drove from St Louis to  Marion, Kentucky, as we were scheduled to start the dig at 8 am Friday morning. Since I was leaving from work Thursday night, I opted to leave Missy at home and my parents would pick her up, on their return from Florida Friday morning and take her to spend the weekend with them.  It turned out to be a great decision due to the weather we experienced down there over the two days, rain and lots of muddddd…..the type of mud you get on your boots and cant get off easily…take a step and get a six inch thick glob of mudd on your boots…yeah that kind of icky mudd. Missy would have been a muddy mess and I would have been an unhappy camper.

I arrived about 6 am and drove out to the mine, finding someone had been thoughtful enough to leave the gate open for me,  so I drove on down the hill,  crossed the creek and parked at the mine. I cranked my seat back and took a 45 minute nap, the sun waking me up just short of 7 am….I knew Mike and the guys would be arriving shortly, so I got out and walked around a bit to see if I could find anything and see what changes had occurred since my last visit……

…I saw the pit looked relatively the same as the the last dig that I had been to in October last year…but alot of dirt and mud had fallen down from the walls on the high side and accumulated in the pit,  on the west side especially. This was the high wall that I had dug into, at the base last fall and found some beautiful crystals, next to a couple of nice gentlemen from Indiana. I looked around the edges and located some nice small clusters just sitting on top of the dirt where they had apparently weathered out of the older tailing piles. I snagged a few of them and placed them in my truck…here was one I found hiding in the dirt, I placed it up on top of the high bank for someone to find…

and these two that were just hanging around….

..so if anyone asks me if there is really fluorite that can be found there anytime, I`m going to point them out to this story as living proof that YES, one can definitely find some nice stuff there anytime.

About twenty minutes later, Mr. Crider and his son showed up and fired up the track hoe and bulldozer, and shortly after that, the rest of my crew drove in as well…Mike, Bill, and Thomas from North Carolina, and Jeff from Georgia…having arrived the day before, they were freshly rested up and ready to explore and free more beautiful fluorite crystals from captivity…in other words, we were
” READY TO ROCK ” !!!!!

Mr. Crider got together with Mike to find out what we needed him to do and then he began his work. ..while his son operated the bulldozer….we widened the pit a little bit, digging out part of the old shaft area, and dug out about twenty feet of dirt and rock in front of the vein area to the north…..resulting in this newer pit at the end of the dig…

..and then just pumping down the remaining water from the pit….

….Jeff worked the pump while Bill assisted in the pit moving the hose around to get as much water as possible out….Mike and Thomas worked at finding some pockets to work while this was going on and liberated a few large chunks of fluorite while waiting for the water level to go down…

and as this was going on, Mr. Crider created some new tailing piles, one huge pile full of goodies behind the pit and one row of piles between the pit and the logging road…

After that I put my camera away and we concentrated on finding pockets of beautiful fluorite crystals, many of them laden with calcite crystals, some with greenockite, and all over the place…pry bars were used and several large plates were liberated from the fractures of limestone…the following photos will give you a good idea of what we found last Friday…

…..here is the floor of one of the fractures we worked Friday and in the next image, I am standing on the floor of that fracture…

…….here is a close up of those pockets at my feet….

….as you can see, pockets of cubes all over….it gets better though….

…. here is  a photo of the bigger of the pockets up close…

Bill is shown working on a pocket off to the side about ten feet away from us here…

..here is one of the nice chunks that Bill found later Friday and liberated….with a large calcite crystal sitting on top, something we rarely see at the Eureka Mine….in fact have never seen before or again since….

…..here is yet another specimen of beautiful deep purple fluorite we found…

..and a close up of it…….

this next one is what Bill found in one of his many pockets Friday….several chunks with galena lead cubes all over them….

…this was a large heavy chunk found with cubes all over one side of it…

Weather wise, we started out with cloudy skies on Friday, but by mid morning it started sleeting but changed over to all rain, all day, as the temps warmed. Saturday was a bit of a repeat, starting out cloudy only, then the rain settled back in about noon…we would have rather had the sleet than the rain…

One of the nicer pockets that Mike found along the way, resulted in this beautiful chunk coming out….

and resulted in this next photo when he brought it up on top of the hill….

and shown here with a few other pieces that came from the same pocket….

all in all, we found a lot of deep purple this year and several encrusted with calcite crystals like these….

..and even large pieces, talking 180 to 200 lbs each, with alot of calcite and galena cubes on them…

We had a great time, despite the weather, and found a lot of nice material, and spread even more of it around the sides of the pit for everyone to find. I received a call Saturday about noon from home, my Mom letting me know that they were getting hit with a major winter storm, thunder sleet and thundersnow falling, two inches of sleet on the ground and now the snow coming down with flakes as big as your hands…and more coming…so I decided I had better get on the road soon…I called one of my meteorologist friends at Channel Five News in St Louis and was told that the storm was due to hit St Louis anytime and that I would likely hit heavy snow and sleet around Mt Vernon, but the roads should remain just wet since we had warmer temps the last few days…

So we split up the finds and I took off about 2 pm and headed north toward Missouri….and sure enough, just west of Mt Vernon I started west into heavy snow and some sleet falling…the farther west I went, the bigger the flakes and the prettier it looked, heavy wet snows always make everything look pretty…

..I crossed the river into St Louis with the snow having moved out of the area and the roads still wet…

..and traffic was so heavy at the turnoff to I-44 that I just continued west to Big Bend and then went south to I-44, crossing the tracks in Webster…. I had to stop on the bridge anyway so just shot the scene down the railroad tracks…

and then I started up the grade at Antire Hill and shot this one…

..and as I got closer to home, I figured I would stop at Shaws Arboretum in Gray Summit, and photograph the neat little lake over there…

Luckily everyone arrived home safe and sound last weekend, and now we are preparing for the weekend and group dig this weekend. I look forward to seeing everyone at the group dig Saturday.