Monthly Archives: December 2024

Arkansas Quartz 2024

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I made contact with my buddy Mark Lebow this summer and let him know my group and I would like to either return to his Double Phantom Mine on Gardner Mountain or go to his newest mine north of Mount Ida. He told me it would likely be better for us to go to his newest mine as it was likely we would be much happier with what we found there. He also had some alternative areas close by that we could walk to, and dig at, if the weather did not cooperate with our trip schedule. Mark sent me these photos and they basically just whet our appetites….

By the time we were a few weeks out from our November trip, I let him know that due to other circumstances surrounding other mines in the area, we would just like to dig and collect at his newest mine all four days that we planned to be in the area,  and he was fine with that. He calls his mine there, the Rubie Mine and despite it being wet and muddy the entire four days we were there, we found alot of pretty crystals there, including alot of phantoms in single points and clusters, too.

this was the first morning there, it had rained before we got there a day or two, so it was quite muddy in the lowest pit, which is closer to Mark`s red truck in the photo above, and this is the secondary area here in the foreground. Colby and Gabriella are digging on the right side, Ryan Shaffer is below them on the right…he is halfway to the lower pit, and the guy in the yellow shirt is one of Mark`s friends….I think Patty had gone back to her truck to get more tools or buckets or both.

You cannot see the lower pit in the photo above either, for one thing that big knob of rock and dirt is in the way, and the dirt and mud had the water covered over, sliding back down in and covering it from all the rain before we arrived. It was prob 2 feet deep in mud so we never did get to dig into the lower pit at all, while we were there. Here is how it looked in May tho….

One thing the rain was good for while we were there, was how it washed off many of the crystals that were either laying on top of the dirt, or to where you could see a window of the crystal and know to dig in and get it…..

…like this one….and many others…some were working on hammering off plates and clusters from the huge rocks that ringed the parking area….I know Mike and Randy were over there working the boulders, Julie Harris and her daughter were working down near the pit, where you had to really be careful where you put your feet down on each step, because it was super muddy and gooey down there. Valerie and Carl were working the berms trying to find some crystals and yard rocks, and Kirk was working boulders off to my left at the upper end of the parking area…he left around noon, headed down to Atlanta for the night, was driving on down to Florida the next day to play in a baseball tournament there.

And some were surface collecting, while a very few dug in to locate the pockets and pull some beautiful phantom clusters out. Ryan found a really nice big cluster in an area that some other folks had worked long before we arrived.

After awhile the first day, I decided to walk over to an area Mark told me about, where he had located crystals laying all over the ground…it was about a quarter of a mile walk away from the Rubie Mine, and once there, while I didnt see too many crystals on the ground, I did locate some just below ground level in the dirt. Ryan and a few others came over and we dug several places and did pretty good. Here is one that Ryan pulled out of the dirt in one of the holes that a few of us were digging into…

The next morning, right after we arrived, I decided to walk over and check out another area of woods…Mark had told me about a spot that his grandfather dug into and found a lot of nice clusters…one of them wound up in the Smithsonian Museum back then…took Randy and I a little while to find that spot, and we couldn`t get close to it, but even 50 feet away, I started digging down under the leaves and just barely into the dirt, and located some nice crystals…this was the first find in the dirt that morning…

…so I stayed right in that area and dug around some more, filled my bucket about a third full with what I found over there.I also found a few big boulders that were covered with crystals too, in another area on the property….

 

Think it was the third day that it started raining again, so some headed home and some of us sat the morning out at the hotels…when it finally stopped raining, I drove up to Mt Ida to visit with Bill and Faith, at Blue Moon Crystals and Jewelry shop…it is located at their home just east of the turnoff to Mountain Harbor Lake Resort. I hadn`t seen them in a few years so stopped by to visit with them and bought a few crystals from them too, like this big phantom cluster that they had picked up from someone, who found it at an old mine, that used to be called Warden Mine, or something like that…and that mine is now part of Wegner`s Crystal Ranch, but it was collected long ago, prob in the 1950`s or sixties….

…it is one of the nicest big ones I have ever seen that came out of that mine…my group and I have collected a few times at that mine in the last ten years, under Wegner`s management of it, and I have seen some doosies that were mined there by his personnel about five years ago that were quite nice, but looked nothing like this one nor were they as big as this one. They had some other crystal clusters that they were cleaning up, I took a few photos of them…

After that, I drove over to the Rubie to see if anyone was there, and found a few in my group there and we mainly surface collected, but didn`t stay long because there was more rain coming on radar.

I went back on Sunday morning and spent a few hours surface collecting, by that time, most in my group, had headed home, we lost a few each day due to the weather mainly….and this morning, Carl and Valerie were still there and we did a pretty good job finding some great stuff on the surface or slightly under the surface in the muck piles that Mark had dug up out of the pit and placed up near the parking area for us to comb thru…his son in law was there and helped us find some great stuff as well. here are some of my finds Sunday morning….

..and some of these Mark dug out with his pry bar and handed them to me, so I should say here are some that I took home with me instead. He knows how to sling that pointed McGrew bar really well and dig into pockets whether they be shallow pockets or deep pockets…I on the other hand, have no clue how to do that.

I took off about 10:30 am, headed up to Scott County where my Mom and Dad were both raised on farms, not far from the Oklahoma state line and a few miles west of Waldron. The farmhouse where Mom was raised is still there and my cousins own it now, they host a family reunion, with dinner at noon there,  each year on the first Sunday of Firearms Deer Season. So Onyx and I drove up to have dinner with several of my cousins, and my Aunt Dorcas, Aunt Raye, and Uncle Harold were there too. We were missing quite a few, in years past, it was no surprise to get there and find about 200 in attendance. I took this photo of the farm back in 2009, on my way there, coming up Ross Creek Road from Hwy 71….

 

…that black spot in the photo above is a big crow that was flying across as I fired off about five camera shots in a row…he wound up in everyone of them. 🙂  Here is a different angle from down by my Uncle Joe`s barn in the pasture across the road….

..and the gathering there in 2010….

…after a few hours of visiting with my kinfolk, Onyx and I headed up to Fort Smith for the night…prob the worst hotel stay at a La Quinta hotel no less…their fire alarm sounded about 3 am…that system rolled everyone right out of their rooms, let me tell ya…many of us outside in the cold air with our dogs on leashes…and we were out there a good thirty minutes…the desk clerk unable to figure out how to shut the noisy thing off. This hotel sits in a residential area and you could see house lights coming on all around us…bet they were as ticked off as we were. Found out the next morning from the morning clerk, that little fiasco had been happening a few times a week lately and management didn`t seem to care about it, they were not notifying the alarm company to come fix it. I wrote a nice little review on it after I got home, after they contacted me and asked me write one, and I was contacted the next day by La Quinta Corporation and advised that the Manager at the Fort Smith LQ had read my review and contacted the Alarm Company to come and fix it ASAP. No worries I told them, I did not plan to stay at that LQ hotel, ever again.

Drove over to visit with my buddy Adam Lageveen near Sallisaw, shortly after we checked out and had breakfast at the IHOP, a few blocks east on Rogers Avenue. He showed me the rest of his crystal collection, has decided to sell it so he can make more room for his knapping material. After visiting with him for about 90 minutes, Onyx and I hit the road and headed home, another good trip in the books.

 

 

Geode Fest Sept 2024

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I feel like I am so far behind on my stories that I cant remember them, and certainly the details of them, gonna have to do a better job of keeping up on the stories here.

After missing out on Geode Fest last year, due to being too busy, I decided to take a few days off and make the trip there this year. Ryan Shaffer was going as well and spent the weekend digging with me at Josh and Jennifer`s Railroad Creek Farm. I stayed at the Super 8 Motel again and not sure I will next time around, as they invented some new charges this time, fees that were not explained at the time of booking, either. That type of business does not set well with me, there are definitely other hotels up there to stay at. Ryan booked his hotel late and wound up staying in Fort Madison, 15 minute drive to the north. I think the only other problem we had was finding a place to eat at on Saturday evening, Keokuk High School was having their prom that night and the restaurants were booked pretty solid, think we wound up eating  at PIzza Hut.

I remember getting up there to Keokuk to the venue about 2 pm Thursday, and saw that Charity and Jamie had their booth tent set up, so I visited with them a bit and then walked over to where Ken Vaisivil was set up with his geode booth…I purchased a few from him and admired several, this was one that I admired, he was selling it out of his personal collection….

…a frosted calcite attached to the front of this basketball sized geode half…I didn`t buy this one but he had a good price on it, and it was gone by the next morning. I have purchased several similar geodes from him in the past few years, some with poker chip shaped calcites inside the geodes. He also had this neat pair for sale, only fifty dollars for the pair, with a big yellow barite crystal inside…

 

I bought several smaller ones from him and we visited a bit, then I walked up and talked to Greg Coleman, who was setting up his tables for his Haunted Ridge booth…he was working the booth alone this year, and then after that I drove over to the Super 8 and got checked in, and made sure Onyx was comfy and settled in before I headed back. Ryan was at the venue by the time I got back and I introduced him to everyone I knew there…even Mike Messer and Dennis Kossow were there by that time. Mike is the President of the Fairfield, Iowa Club and some other clubs as well, and Dennis is a semi retired Stonemason in the Fairfield area, who stays quite busy in his retirement years, but also finds time to rockhound in certain select areas, like Hallelujah Junction for smokey quartz scepters and crystals. He always has some nice crystal specimens from out west that I like to add to my collection, this year it was an azurite specimen that was very gemmy. Also talked to Marv, who is either the President or Past President of the Cedar Rapids Club, he was setting up his booth next to Dennis and Mike, and has those beautiful Mexican Troya geodes that I like…. and I have met all of these guys thru my buddy, John Oostenryk, who as usual, was late getting to the venue, and I think it was either late that night or early the next morning, before he arrived.

I think Ryan and I stuck around there til about 4:30 pm and then headed down to the Italian Restaurant Angelini`s Ristorante on Main Street for dinner. Great atmosphere and food there, love their lasagne and spaghetti both.

After that, we returned to the venue to get registered for Geode Fest, so we didn`t have to do that the next morning. While waiting for registraton to open, I had Jamie show Ryan the huge geode he found at Cooper`s Fox River location last year….

There were no long lines at pre-registration, because most of the folks there early, were next door at the Orientation for Geode Fest, usually Kirk, the Director of Tourism welcomes everyone and then turns the microphone over to Marv, who tells everyone how the Keokuk Geodes formed and what the many variations of them there are in that area.

Afterward, Ryan headed to his hotel to check in, and I stopped by Dairy Queen to get a blizzard and a pup cup for Onyx, then back to the Super 8 for the evening. The next morning, Ryan and I got to the venue fairly early and he was able to briefly, and I mean briefly, meet John O, as we all call him…we might have talked to him for five minutes, maybe less, and that was the extent of our conversation with him all weekend…for whatever reason…and I am just going to leave it at that. We drove over to Josh and Jennifer`s farm…was told that Jennifer`s son Payton, would be there helping this weekend. We saw his truck, but didn`t see him til later in the day.

We gathered a bucket and tools and walked to the creek, and I showed Ryan the creek in the area of the bank where we pulled some geodes out two years ago that were believed to have purple irridescence and then walked down to the dirt bank on the point of the hillside and began digging in. We found a few geodes there, but not as many as two years before when Pete Hahn and I were digging there. Here is one that Ryan found, cannonball sized….

…and then he popped it open….

…he was pretty happy with that pair…liked the multiple chambers on the left side….

…after digging a few hours, I had to get up and stretch my legs…found this one not far behind us in the leaves on the ground…

…and Payton came walking up the trail soon after and stopped to talk…he had no clue we were down there, let him know we arrived earlier than the group and were good friends of Jennifer and Josh, had dug at that spot two years ago too and did well.

Before the afternoon group arrived, we moved to the bank where the purple irridescent geodes are located and began digging in…soon found them to be in a certain layer there…Payton showed us a couple of broken halves, that a guy dug there that morning, and they had purple inside them, so he joined us for a few minutes and dug into the bank where the guy told him he dug those from….

There was a good crowd there on Friday, both morning and afternoon groups were pretty good sized. Josh always rents a mini trackhoe for Geode Fest and does a lot of digging with it, digs into the creek banks to make it easier for rockhounds to find geodes to take home…he has done this 3 years in a row now and his site gains in popularity each year. Dan, one of John O`s buddies, he is a retired steelworker, and in my personal rockhounding group, he is usually John`s chauffeur as well on my trips…he was there this year to operate the mini trackhoe for Josh, during Geode Fest. 

Ryan and I headed back to the venue after digging for several hours Friday, and there was a guy lined up at Charity and Jamie`s booth to get a big geode popped open with one of their hydraulic soil pipe cutters. He had been to one of the Amish farms on the Fox River, and had this extra one, much smaller, that he had found with one foot when he stumbled into it…it was full of mud, sand, and silt, but when I looked down into the opening, it was lavendar colored crystals……

We had dinner at Angelini`s again, this time I had the spaghetti and it was just as good as the lagagna there, followed by another trip to Dairy Queen afterward.

The next morning we again grabbed some donuts for breakfast, and then drove over to Josh and Jennifer`s farm, but set up at the purple irridescence bank and began digging in. There were some folks that joined us when they arrived in the morning group and began digging upstream along the bank, then moved down closer to us. Ryan and I were pulling alot of geodes out of the bank where we had started the day before. Mike Maher called me to figure out where we were digging at today, he and his son Ryan…. both in my personal group of rockhound friends…. were on the way over in the first group as well, and had a young lady with them named Chandler, it was her first geode rockhounding trip, and her Mom was along too. She came pretty well prepared for it, wearing safety glasses and tall rubber boots, and gloves on…she was ready for anything and she had a great attitude, too.

The group that morning, again, included a huge number of rockhounds….

This was the area of creek right below us.

Mike, Ryan, and Chandler made their way over to where we were at by the big tree and I allowed Ryan M to take over my digging spot next to  Ryan S, digging into the bank…and did quite well there, accidentally broke the top half of this geode as he was digging it out of the bank,  which was gorgeous inside….

…and the pieces above are what was left of the top of it….I don`t think Chandler was given that one, but she cleaned up pretty nicely with several other nice geodes handed to her….

…and Mike stayed pretty busy finding fossils and geode halves in the creek bed for her….

Ryan found another multiple chambered geode in the bank there by the big tree….

Saturday evening, we had to settle for Pizza Hut for dinner as every restaurant, including our favorite one, were booked solid with Prom Goers. Hopefully next year, they give us some notice on that if it`s going to happen again.

Sunday morning, I didn`t do much digging, went back to Josh and Jennifer`s farm, but was pretty tired and sore from the previous two days of digging, so I took it easy, but we started out at the purple irridescent spot again. I wound up helping a young man named Jax, who was there with his grandmother and her friends, and he was trying to find some nice geodes to take home. I had some druse quartz and Washco Q material with me, and gave him some of those to take home with him too. His grandmother asked if she could take a photo of Jax and I….