I decided not to go to New Mexico this year, due to planning problems and I kept in touch with my group by email, so they are aware of what happened. The brutal winter weather broke about a week from the end of February and enabled me to create some dig events in Washington County here locally, once again.

My local team and I have been busy scouting some new private properties as well lately, we looked at one in the Tiff Community area last week and it looks promising, has alot of beautiful bubble Druse Quartz in many colors, saw a lot of red, blue, yellow, and root beer colors, and a lot of spider holes, or tiff cuts as the locals like to call them…the miners came up with the term spider holes, but they are the shallow holes that the tiff miners dug out by hand, looking for tiff to collect and sell to the mills. We found some normal Barite there, most of it combined with some stunning blue Quartz on one side of the property. The owner plans to do some burning of leaves soon and then I will start taking groups there.

We looked at another private farm right after that one, at a location on the north side of Ebo, off Hwy 185, smaller place with 140 acres, but they have 3 creeks running thru the property and 2 of them are chock full of beautiful Druse Quartz…we found a little bit of Barite here and there as well, most of it attached to the Quartz and in the Pudding form. There were also a lot of big boulders of Coral there, especially in the creekbed that was further back, we plan to help them do some burning back there on a day with a lot less wind than we have been experiencing lately, and maybe some more Coral and Druse will be exposed. We are returning there this afternoon to look at the 3rd creek that runs thru the front of the property.

Today we will also be scouting a thousand acre farm north of Potosi, the owner has spotted Druse Quartz there, but doesn`t know if he has anything else there or not. Next week we will be looking at another private farm in the Cadet area that shows alot of promise so far, going by what the locals have told us about the property. I am also waiting for word from a landowner with a large old mine on his land in the Tiff Community area, too.

Also have a large cattle farm near Bonne Terre to look at soon, we were set to go check it out 3 times in the past 2 months and each time we approached the date, old man winter returned and prevented us from doing so. Now we are just waiting for the contact person to get a day off so we can go down there and walk the property, she told us that one hillside is sparkle city.

We looked at a few smaller places last fall, but they were thick with layers of leaves, making it nearly impossible to find any Druse and the owners did not want to do any burning, most likely due to concern of the fire getting over on their neighbor`s property.

I will post some photos soon of what each property has to offer rockhounds.