Missy and I returned to MFQ yesterday, driving down early morning to beat the heat, plus the fact that for whatever reason, I couldn`t sleep well the night before, so got up and headed that way. We had a good trip, Missy perked up in the seat when we had three deer come out in front of us ….she was alert and looking for more deer after that…the sun was coming up across fields of fog and it sure was pretty in the farmlands area….

 We arrived at the quarry about 8 am and the cloud cover provided a nice and cool morning shade all over. It was cool enough there, I left my long sleeve blue pullover on til about 9 am. 

I did an all over search at first, located a few nice larger pieces, and then explored the knob that Ray and I had been working on the past few weeks.

Someone had been there since we were last there and rolled out a huge boulder from the beautiful large brown dogtooth pocket halfway up the pile of the knob. I didn`t see much of any thing good on it so I climbed on up to the pocket and saw where they had explored all around and above the boulder…but they missed one spot…I reached back in the space behind where the boulder had been sitting in the pocket and pulled out a beautiful black poker chip with a gorgeous bright golden brown dogtooth on the top of it !!!  EUREKA !!!!!

I pulled out a few more smaller crystals and then moved over to the wall and worked my way around to the pockets I had found near the base of the coved wall and started checking for more crystals to each side.

After a small cave in of rocks and gravel mix from above, and not finding much more than druse plates, I decided to move to the right and look along the wall for more pockets. I moved about fifteen feet over and found three pockets of calcite druse…

….we always check these because they are often associated with poker chips as well. These three were only druse, but it pays to check them. I moved over to yet another knob area…..

…and found a couple of areas where someone had dug into the wall, high and low, looking for pockets…upon looking closer at the lower one, I discovered that whoever had worked it, didn`t do a very good job, cause they left a whole lot of poker chip crystals in the bottom of it…

….so many that I was able to fill three bags full of wrapped specimens and pull out two gorgeous clusters of green and brown poker chips nestled in sparkley calcite and dolomite druse !!!

I spent a good two hours cleaning this pocket out…I took out all the crystals that were left in plain site, then reaching back, discovered two more pockets behind this one, one going left and one going right…both of them chock full of small green poker chip clusters and some with some golden calcite druse all over them as well. I had to move some small boulders out of the way to get to them but believe me, the small amount of effort was well worth it !!

It was 10:30 am before I finished cleaning it out and by then I was not only tired but famished as well, not having had any breakfast other than a can of Arizona green tea on the way down. I drank some more tea and then decided to check the pile on the right of the cove, where the machinery had been removing some of the base of the pile, and I started finding black poker chip singles, and small clusters all over the place, most with very little damage, some with some matrix attached. I filled my shirt up, as I hadn`t brought a bag with me, and then carried them to the truck, wrapped them up, and headed home. 

We got home about 3 pm and after unloading my goodies, Missy and I collapsed and had a great three hour nap. Another good ending to a great day of collecting. 

here are some of my finds that day….