I decided to return to the secret spot yesterday and see if I could find another pocket, whether in the blast pile or on the floor again. I didnt get to bed as early as I wanted to Friday, and then got up early to beat the projected heat in Saturday`s forecast. Missy and I arrived about 7:30 am and started looking around. I made a short sashay up on the pile but didnt locate anymore pockets in the slopes, so I climbed over to the pocket that the loose rock had been cleared away from and found a nice plate of crystals that needed to be busted free with a hammer. I walked back down to my truck and retrieved my hammer and chisel and after about thirty minutes, was able to liberate it.

I then walked it back to the truck after wrapping it up and as I was climbing back down, I came across a short stack pile that seemed to have some potential for a pocket. With my mini mattox in hand, I walked around and did some exploring, found a few small loose crystals, embedded in the dirt but no pockets at all. I walked over to the waterhole that Missy was wading in and started seeing some calcite signs at the edge. After making a few scratches and working my way back toward the water, I finally located some low spots and dug in to see if I could find anything…

…in the photo above you can see where I set my blue bag down, thats the area I saw some signs of chips up on the top of the small ridge there…the next photo shows where I found the potential pocket on the floor by the waterhole…

…I started scratching around with the mini mattox on the left, finding only solid rock, and then after moving back toward the water, found the low spot and started digging in….

…those low spots can be a good sign all on their own, specially if there are small tree or plant roots doing down in them…or a sign of a depression indicates with water rings indicates the water had to go somewhere…course occasionally it will just be a drill hole that opens up underneath, too.

This time though, I dug down and hit shale and then started pulling up small poker chip crystal pieces….

…which is always a good sign of things to come…if you can find the pocket…the next thing I turned up with the mattox were a few druse plates….

….yet another good sign, and when they are upside down as these were, you know you are on top of a pocket….how good the pocket is remains to be seen from there though…..

I decided to take a few minutes and clear back some big rocks and loose dirt and gravel and give myself some room to work on this one.

I wasn` far from the water`s edge and the ground there was pretty saturated, but it was beginning to warm up so I didn`t mind getting muddy and wet at the same time. I started digging down and the first thing I came up on was this nice druse plate hanging upside down….

 

…and figured if I found nothing else, at least the druse was pretty enough to take home…I have been skunked a few times before with mainly druse pockets, but I like druse too. I continued to dig down and pulled out plate after plate of druse, but was seeing some smaller poker chips too so figured it would work out just fine…..

 

…so I`ve laid the mattox down now and I`m pulling one druse plate after another out of the hole and the next thing you know, I pull this out….

…and I`m like HOLIE COW !!!!!!  has to be the largest single dogtooth crystal I have ever found, let alone seen….Docia and I have hit pockets of little ones, but never seen one THIS size…

…its every bit of at least five or six inches long…and pretty as can be…

…and then for the next hour…I`m pulling smaller ones out of the pocket right and left, so I pulled a white cloth out of the bag and placed them on it, just so I wouldnt lose any in the gravel there.

Well the pocket started expanding back toward the rock pile in the form of a trench, so I figured there wouldnt be a deep pocket, and would have to see how far back it went before ending to see what all I would be able to harvest from it…

..some of those trench pockets wear out fast….this one did not…it kept going and going and going….for awhile there I thought I would be moving some big rocks but fortunately that didnt happen…here is a photo of the dogtooth crystals I found initially, sitting on the white cloth…..

The next thing you know, I`m pulling several single poker chip crystals out of the  hole, and I start to notice that they are dark colored…pretty soon I pull a large one out that isnt covered with mud all over, and it appears to be a blue color….

…I was pulling several of them out, a few at the start of the pocket but now several are coming out in the middle of the pocket and kept on as the pocket trenched backwards toward the blast pile….

…and the pile of crystals and plates just kept on expanding right along with the pocket size….

…and by noon, I was done…the heat was coming on fast and I was ready to wrap and get out of there…it def was a nice morning for collecting though….

…as soon as I finished wrapping and switching out from my boots to my street shoes…I decided to go take a look at the rock wall that was formed up the clay dirt road that leads to the druse plate location up the hill….the rock they had removed from the pile was used to form an erosion blocker and they led it right up that old road to the top of the hill…

…luckily I was able to find some nice chunks of bubbly druse in the rocks, even a few that had poker chips attached….all in all, another great day of rock collecting at the secret spot…bout stepped on this guy in the rocks…

 

…and here are some of my finds all cleaned up….