Well we returned this morning for another attempt to find the ever elusive poker chip calcite crystals and today minimal efforts were rewarded ten times over with several goodies found in the first twenty minutes alone !

I arrived to find that the road had been graded even wider and smoothed out as well. The machine was sitting a bit closer this time,  it appears they have worked the lower end of the slope this week.

The machine operator, bless his pea picking heart, had exposed the lower end of the slope and uncovered several nice size pieces of poker chip calcite crystals crowning drusy quartz and matrix pieces, some of them were basketball sized pieces too.  Docia and Floyd arrived shortly after I did,  and we were joined by Ed and Sandy around noon.

I found this one pictured on my tailgate after about five minutes of searching the exposed piles, and mainly by surface collecting. Now dont get me wrong, we did alot of raking thru the smaller piles, especially after we spotted a small crystal laying around or a crystal poking up out of the rocks, and believe me, after a few hours of that and walking back and forth to the truck with bags loaded down with goodies, and carrying the bigger ones to the truck, you get worn out fast.

Everyone always asks me, what do you look for so you know where to dig. Well in this case, we are looking for either nice druse or poker chip calcite crystals poking up or just sitting on top, which several were today, but the following few pics will show you how I found one nice one today, what I saw initially, and what popped up as I was digging it out and out of the dirt and rock afterwards.

Look above the hand rake and to the right slightly and you`ll see some crystal sticking out of the rock field. This is the big picture, so you can see what we are trying to look for.

The next photo shows a little closer up view of the crystal sticking out of the rocks and dirt. This one is showing alot more than how much we usually see.

Now I start digging it out carefully, using the hand rake around it to bring it out without chipping the crystal, hopefully, or knocking any loose rocks down on it which could further damage or chip it, and up pops another smaller loose crystal, this happens alot if you are in a pocket  and can provide motivation to continue digging here to find others, which I did.

Here is it completely dug out, little larger than a grapefruit and very nice when cleaned up later on. I continued to dig here and found two more crystals, a bit smaller but just as nice.

Ed walked around up on the rim and cleared the rim and overhang of the big boulders for us, so we didnt have that threat hanging over us of falling rocks and boulders. Some of them boulders were quite large and heavy. Thanks Ed !

After about four hours of searching, Docia and Floyd decided to retire early Sandy and Ed left about fifteen minutes after,  and I loaded up and left about thirty minutes later. I decided to take one more walk around and located three more nice pieces before loading up the truck and heading home.

All in all tho, a very good day of rockhounding, nice warmer weather and way ahead of the next snowstorm, too.

and here are some of the goodies I collected today….

That will give you a good idea of some of the goodies I found today….:)