After a few friends visited over the weekend with Docia, I returned to the secret spot to see how they did with the pocket I left them. Docia had told me that a few of them were as calcite crazy as I was and worked it pretty good, for about five hours in fact, and pulled some nice crystals out of the pockets there and filled several bags with poker chips.  Missy and I walked over to check out what was left of it….Docia figured there might still be a few inside it as well as some plates of poker chips attached to druse plates under heavy rock that they were unable to hammer out….

 

…and after cleaning it out, I discovered they had left behind a few nice crystals, including a nice twin or two….

 

…I cleaned out the pocket on the west end and pulled a few nice crystals out that had been overlooked and tried to hammer a few plates out, but let me tell you, that rock above was thick and heavy, and hard as a rock, so to speak. 🙂

 

You can see in the next photo, inside the pocket and how thick that layer of rock is on top of the crystals…

 

Despite not being able to pound any plates down due to the extremely heavy rock layer above the crystals, I did manage to liberate this nice poker chip on top of soda straw druse….

 

…this and a small pile of crystals was all I could find in the west end pocket, so I decided to move over to an area that I had dug into the time before, when I was finding shallow pockets all over the place, but no entry into any of them short of hammering and chiseling one out…

 

..within a few moments of digging in one of these spots again, a hole opened up at what appeared to be a dead end….

 

…and I pulled a few small plates of druse out….

 

..and the hole opened up even more….

 

…and I was hoping the pocket wouldnt require me moving this pile of rock above it….soon a crystal could be seen down in the pocket….

 

I decided to see if I could expand the opening more and see just how big a pocket I was looking at here….

 

…and soon I could see even more crystals inside the pocket….

 

…and soon I was pulling this nice druse plate out as well as some loose crystals…

 

…and pretty soon the pocket was expanding even more at the base of the lip of rock surrounding it inside this trench….

 

…and off to the right and above my mini mattox you can see a shallow hole opening up where yet another pocket was found….

…I dug around the base of the rock walls inside the trench and then dug down and found that other pocket off to the right, and found a large ledge of bubbly druse with poker chips attached at the base of it, a curved wall at the base I should say, instead of a vertical wall…

 

…located on the right side of the new pocket wall…and from this curved druse wall, I was able to dig out a beautiful small druse plate with two poker chips attached to it, one on each side of the druse plate….

 

…after that, I was able to connect the two pockets by digging out the middle section……and then I took a closer look at the nice plate of druse with the two poker chips attached to it….

 

…very pretty….I took a short break and then grabbed my hammer and chisel, and chiseled out an interior cluster from the pocket….

 

Mercifully for me, the pocket ended at this point and I didnt have to start chucking big rocks out of the way to go any further with the expansion…I was glad as I was just approaching worn out stage…

 

….here are some of the crystals and plates I found, all cleaned up….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and…