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.