Quality, not quantity…..Oct 16th

I took Sunday off from work to replace the day off earlier in the week that I sacrificed for training at work, got in from work Saturday night and napped four hours, then Missy and I headed south to the secret spot to see what we could find. I had made my normal request about finding something pretty, but truth be told, I would have been just as happy to just get away and look around, even if I didnt find anything. I was hoping Docia would be able to join us, but she was still down with a pinched nerve in her back and didnt make it Sunday.

The wind was nice and breezy and it was going to be a nice warm day, a high of 83, which was just perfect for rock hunting….as we drove down to the lower spot, I noticed a new road leading into the new diggs area…

I didnt even stop to look up in the new area, wanted to get on down and see if I could find another pocket or two first…and once down there, we got out and stretched our legs, Missy setting off to get a big drink of water from one of the watering holes and I grabbed my rake and gloves and digging tools and started walking around to see if I could locate some goodies. I first took a look at a spot Docia had dug into two weeks earlier….she had told me she didnt find anything there, but it looked like such a prime area, that I thought I would look around it and see if anything else was nearby. I started raking about three feet to the right and immediately hit some buckskin colored dirt, that looked similar to the limonite pocket I hit by the wall a few weeks prior…so I started digging down and sure enough, a few nice poker chips started appearing…

I pulled about a dozen single chips out and a couple of small clusters as well, which you can see above on my blue bag.

It was a small pocket, and I didnt find anything else nearby, so gathered up my tools and headed back to the area where I had found the nice pocket two weeks earlier and decided to see if I could scrape around and find another nice one. I spent about an hour scraping and raking around without any luck, and then decided to stretch my legs and walked over to the bluff and see if I could locate any pockets there….looked up and down high and low and didnt find anything there either, so returned to my old pocket and explored a little more there, and in a few minutes located just a few more single crystals.

I moved off to the side to a conspicuous looking area and began raking around, finally hitting a small depression that appeared to be soft and started digging down into what appeared to be a drill hole…sometimes these amount to something but often times they dont…within a few minutes, the bottom dropped out and a hole appeared….

I went back to the truck to get my chisel and hammer so I could chip it out more, make it big enough to get my hand down into at least….left my flashlight at home unfortunately….

When I came back, I found Missy guarding the hole…and I began chipping the base and sides out so I could reach down in…..

I cleared out the muck at the bottom and put my camera down as far as I could and snapped this photo above…then reached down in and felt around…it felt like a small cavern down there and I could feel nice druse on the walls and roof and poker chips attached….the first thing I pulled out from the bottom was this nice triple poker chip….

and in the next thirty minutes, I pulled out the following crystals….

and this nice plate with a poker chip attached….

..well I pulled what I could out of this pocket and then decided I would come back at another time with a rock saw and see if I could enlarge the opening enabling me to pull some of the bigger feeling stuff out…

I moved over to another spot and found what appeared to be yet another pocket….