Ray returned from vacation the first week of August and rode down to MFQ again with Missy and I on the tenth, recharged and ready to again see what we could find there. We ran into some full and running creeks….no water was over the highway, but they had definitely had some heavy rainfall there the night before. I found out later, about seven or eight inches of rain had fallen throughout the night time hours and had ended just before our arrival.

As we entered the main river valley from the west, we stopped at a scenic overlook to check out the heavy fog rolling across the valley below….

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…since we had gotten up early to arrive early, the sun was coming up over the higher layer of the fog as we were about to head on down the road….

…we arrived a few minutes later to a pretty blue sky filled with fluffy white clouds….sure was a nice cool temp when we started there, too….

…prob largely due to the storms that had cleared out just prior to our arrival….this quarry always drains real well…I have never seen more than a few water puddles there…and only water puddles, no mud…which suits Missy just fine for when she gets thirsty and hot….

…well the knob was still there, looking much the same as last week. Ray poked around it for a bit, climbing up on the other side to see if he could locate any pockets up there, but didn`t find much and so then he grabbed his hammer and chisel and headed east down to the other end in search of boulders to cob down…..

…and pretty soon, I could hear him working on some boulders. I began working on finding more pockets in the cove wall…and by the time he had finished cobbing down some boulders filled with pockets of…get this…ivory snow colored druse quartz….I had found and cleaned out two pockets…he let me know that he was ready to head to the new druse spot anytime…I had just taken a water bottle break and was walking back to the cove wall, wanting to take another look at one area before calling it quits…I put my mini mattox into the dirt and pulled back one swath of dirt and rock…and OILA !!!….. there was a beautiful chocolate brown dogtooth crystal sitting there in the dirt mixture….if I recall, the first words out of my mouth were HOLIE COW…loud enough that Ray, who was walking back to the pile on the east side…heard me and turned around. Then a second later, I found yet another and said it again, loudly, and he came to see what I was finding…and by the time he got there, I had found a pocket of them and they were rolling out of the pocket into my hands…literally….he decided to stay and help me dig it out and one turned into at least two or three….enough to fill two bags….THEN we headed to the new druse spot.

We arrived about a couple of hours later, and although they hadn`t had the same amount of rain up there…the clay mud on top, at least, was a bit soft and gooey. Luckily the construction crews that had been working there the past few months, had likely experienced the same thing and brought some white rock in for traction…

….it was obvious they were no longer excavating the clay dirt now and I drove up the hill to search the south side since we had searched the north side the last time there.

I didn`t get the camera out but suffice to say, we found a ton of bubbles in all different sizes in all colors…my favorites there are the citrine yellow and the smokey colors…Ray even found a lot of pink colored bubble pieces. After collecting for a couple of hours, we headed home with lots of pretty goodies.