Well I went back last Saturday, to take another look around and make sure there was still some material to look for…have some friends coming up next week and wanted to make sure it would be a worthwhile trip for them. Docia couldn`t join me, she wanted to get her rocks ready for the Kentucky Rock and Mineral Show which will be held the first weekend of June this summer…we are both going down to see if we can sell some of our rocks this year. The weekend after that is the Park Hills Show and we will be there as well with our druse quartz.
Missy and I took off Saturday mid morning and arrived around 11 am. As we were driving down the hill, I was taking it fairly easy and looking for any sparkles along the sides of the road and all of a sudden, about thirty yards ahead of me, the biggest gobbler I have ever laid eyes on, darted out across the road in front of me like his tail feathers were on fire. I had my camera in the floorboard but there was n time to grab it and focus, he was moving on from right to left, and when I got down to the crossing spot, I paused to see if I could spot him again, but he was gone. I had forgotten it was the first day of turkey season too.
We drove on down without spotting anything else, and Missy took off to explore one way and I the other. It didn`t look like anything had significantly changed from my last visit, pile wise…so I walked up and made a exploratory look at the pockets and found a few pieces left over from our last trip there with Scott and Bill, that had been washed off from recent rains and cleaned up a bit. I collected those sparkly pieces, and one was big enough to carry to the truck, and on the way back, I found a few more that appeared to have just slid down the slope from above. So I stopped and made some cursory swipes with my hand rake to see if I could find another pocket. I didn`t find any but there seemed to be indications that it might bear checking out the next time.
I walked over to the pocket where I had found the bubbly druse plates and as I knelt down to take a closer look at a few pieces I had left behind, I spotted a few poker chips poking up out of the rocks and dirt about three feet away. I crawled over and brushed the loose ones away and found a few embedded in the dirt. I started clearing back the big gray rocks that surrounded the poker chips and digging down.
The bare looking spot to the right of the big gray rock, is where I spotted the loose poker chip crystals laying around on top…
and embedded in the dirt under the rocks….
I started digging carefully here and didn`t have to go very far down to start finding loose crystals laying all over the place, but imagine my surprise, pleasant surprise I should say, when I started finding large plates of druse with small soda straws on them as well…not very far down and most were upside down when I first discovered them. As soon as I found the first one, I took a closer look and figured out that they were all over the place right there….
So I dug down a little deeper and found some even nicer plates of druse, some bubbly sparkly stuff with tiny soda straws…
The pocket appeared to be going to my left and behind me somewhat so I followed it and started clearing ahead…I was finding some small plates of druse mostly, wasn`t seeing any crystals to speak of, and pretty soon, the pocket dried up…
..and ended right here….
I had been digging for about an hour scrunched down and my knees were starting to hurt, so I decided to get up and walk around a bit, get some water, and do some surface searching to take a small break, before coming back and looking the other direction.
I wanted to take a look at the two large chunks I have had my eye on for a few weeks, and see just how heavy they really are…yes I`m still considering trying to bring them back for a spot in my flower garden…while over there looking them over and rolling them, I found a few smaller chunks that were pretty too…one covered in a yellow druse…..and on the other side of the pile from it, was a chunk of yellow chips on druse…
You know it, I liked them both and picked them up and carried them to the truck, gave me a good excuse to get another bottle of water, too…then I came back and was nosing around the other side of the pile again, and besides finding a wasp nest between a few rocks and very quickly smashing it along with the one wasp that came out, I also spotted this pretty lurking between the rocks…
this one and a few others, smaller, and so I carried these to the truck and decided to hit the pocket again and see what more I could find. I was already pretty happy with the druse plates, but wanted to see what else might be there…so I walked back over and started clearing off square one again.
So I started digging down a little bit and if you notice in this pic above, right down from the left bottom corner of the white canvas bag, there is a little ridge of rock there, or shelf, and that was where this pocket actually started, I started finding loose crystals and plates in this area right way…
From this pic to the next, you can see the progress I quickly started to make and things started taking shape very quickly…
and then the pocket started taking shape even more and I had to clear more debris away as it expanded…
In the area to the left of the bag, I started finding alot of loose crystals again, some that had that honey brown color to them and some little twins and triples too…and some druse crystal plates with poker chips attached to them…and then I saw some large embedded clusters, embedded into the rock below…I was dumbfounded…
well you can see one cluster here on the bottom side of the photo, then there is an area of loose crystals above it and then another large cluster above to the loose pocket that you cannot see yet….but wait til you can…wow….no let me rephrase that…WOW….that`s better…and you should see what I found in the loose pocket of crystals between the two clusters…
Once I dug this out, I discovered this shelf behind it and so I concentrated on exposing more of it and moving around to the left for awhile, finding more shelves and loose crystals and plates of druse and poker chips attached….
and out of this shelf I was able to remove these two huge plates of druse and poker chips that were hanging upside down…
and here is a closeup of the one on the right side….
and a pic of the loose crystals found in front of and under the shelf as well…
and then I concentrated on the floor of the pocket in front for a few minutes…exposing the other cluster finally….
…and here are the clusters up closer….
and then I moved to the left side to see what more could be found…there were more plates hanging upside down to the left of the clusters and right hand shelf…
and I kept clearing to the left side and came across this large chunk hanging upside down…
and this thing was awesome…I wasn`t sure what I had at first, it could have been just another gray rock…
and then I turned it over and was amazed…
at the end of the pocket, I turned my attention back to the embedded clusters, but I wasn`t able to free them…so I had to settle for pics only…
I was pretty tired after all of this, and packed up and headed home soon after…here is one of the druse and poker chip attachment plates up close as well.
This was one pocket that I was very satisfied with after working it for about five hours.