I received a phone call from my buddy Jim regarding recent activity at MFQ about mid week, and since I had already arranged to take Saturday off to go rockhunting, it made perfect sense to drive down there Saturday morning and see what could be found. After a relatively calm night at work Friday night, I drove home and changed from my uniform into comfortable jeans, picked up Missy, and headed out. Jim was right, it was a short wall that came down…the smallest and shortest wall there yet.

 

The last time I had seen activity in this area, you could walk from the parking lot up the slope of the pile and come out on top of the upper bench, but one look at this pile, and I knew that wasn`t gonna happen, it didn`t even go halfway up. It was evident they had already removed some material in the past few days and were working on some boulders, reducing them down with the hydraulic hammer. Missy and I drove around to the back side of the new pile and began looking around back there first….

 

…walking around the front of the pile along the edges and then walked up the pile next to the back wall….

 

…well I didn`t find much, other than a few shallow pockets, so I drove back around to the other side and decided to check out the pile where they had been taking some material out….and soon discovered a huge boulder with some pockets at the base of it chock full of light green colored poker chips….

 

I decided to wait til later to see if could liberate them and walked up into the center of the pile and made my way toward the back wall, looking from side to side to see if I could spot any crystals. I found a couple of calcite druse pieces until I got close to the back of the pile…then I started seeing small black poker chips with black center dogtooths laying all over the pile…I finally looked up and around for the source and spotted a HUGE boulder, half the size of my truck, with many pockets of huge black poker chip crystals with the black dogtooth centers, many of the dogtooths exposed even….

 

..including this pocket that was located at the bottom of this huge boulder, containing several black dogtooth crystals, many that appeared to be four or five inches in diameter and about six inches long….

 

…and this one next to it, with a bit of damage, most likely from the blast or the fall afterwards….

 

…and this next one was underneath and to the side of both of the other pockets, a single large dogtooth crystal in this vug….

 

…well needless to say, I was stunned and happy at the same time…and after picking up a few more loose crystals in the pile below, many of which were unblemished and just plain beautiful, I walked back down to my truck to retrieve another bag of wrapping cloths, a bottle of water, and my hammer and chisels. After drinking half a bottle of water, I walked back up and started filling one bag with all the loose crystals around the base of this boulder that I could locate, some were even down below in a few drop holes, and I pulled them out and wrapped them up and bagged them as well. Within moments, I had one bag filled and was working on the other and still hadn`t even touched the boulder vugs. It was about this time that my buddy Jim drove down to visit a bit. He was enjoying the weather on his day off and waiting for his wife to get home from work.

I soon returned to the boulder and began to see what I could successfully chip out of the vugs. Luckily for me, everything was coming out just fine and pristine, and soon I had two more bags full of goodies…here are a few….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

here is the cluster that I chipped out of the bottom of the HUGE boulder at the back side of the pile….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

….and the last thing I did after cleaning all those black beauties out, was try to liberate some of the green poker chips in the boulder on the front side of the pile…but like most green poker chips, that tend to shatter much easier than other colors, I was only able to get these two out somewhat intact….

 

 

I did manage to find a few pockets on the back wall that were full of calcite druse, some with poker chips attached and liberated some of them as well, however I have no photos of them, maybe I can add some later. It sure was a Dandy Dogtooth Crystal Day. 

James 🙂

jwjphoto7@gmail.com