I received a phone call a couple of weeks ago from a good friend who told me that there had been a blast at the quarry at MFQ a few days before Thanksgiving. I had to work Thanksgiving Eve and Thanksgiving night, but was off that weekend so I made plans to go the day after Thanksgiving. I emailed my friend Ray in St Louis and told him, and he decided to come along with me. I was able to get a good nap in and Ray met me at the house, we loaded up the truck, and headed out shortly after 8 am. After stopping for gas, we headed east and arrived about 11:30 am and osbserved the west corner of the cove wall had been blasted down…..

As we pulled up to the blast pile, we stopped and talked to one of the owners and his wife, for a few minutes, thanked them for allowing rockhounds to come there and rockhunt, and then we began searching to see what we could find after the blast. He told us that he had taken some of the pine cone looking crystals to his wife, occasionally, and they liked them too. 

We immediately started finding some nice crystals in various colors, that had survived the blast and the fifty foot throw to the ground as well…

…within minutes, I had one bag full and returned to the truck for another, as Ray climbed up on the pile in search of boulders with vugs…he found several and was able to remove some nice clusters from them…

I kept walking around the perimeter of the pile and soon found this one just sitting there waiting to go home with me…

…this of course is the cleaned up version of it…and we found a few that had a red crust on them…still haven`t figured that part out yet….

…although I can tell you that it isnt soft like clay, is hard and rough just like it looks, nothing seems to wash it off at all.  I managed to find quite a few dark grey colored crystals, even a nice set of twins like these….

…and quite a few chocolate colored crystals as well….

…and some bigger chunks covered in chocolate brown crystals, too….

…Ray found a big chunk of crystals coated with that red crust and gave to me…he didn`t like that red crust at all….I don`t like it, but found it interesting since we have never seen it there before….

We were there til about 3 pm and then headed home, with a truckbed full of crystals…we didn`t find many pockets but were able to liberate quite a few crystals from the vugs we found.