I returned from my Florida trip on Monday, somewhat rested up on Tuesday, tried to catch up by editing up  photos while working around fire calls, then returned to work Wednesday night and Thursday evening, I drove into work and stayed til 2 am, then drove from St Louis to  Marion, Kentucky, as we were scheduled to start the dig at 8 am Friday morning. Since I was leaving from work Thursday night, I opted to leave Missy at home and my parents would pick her up, on their return from Florida Friday morning and take her to spend the weekend with them.  It turned out to be a great decision due to the weather we experienced down there over the two days, rain and lots of muddddd…..the type of mud you get on your boots and cant get off easily…take a step and get a six inch thick glob of mudd on your boots…yeah that kind of icky mudd. Missy would have been a muddy mess and I would have been an unhappy camper.

I arrived about 6 am and drove out to the mine, finding someone had been thoughtful enough to leave the gate open for me,  so I drove on down the hill,  crossed the creek and parked at the mine. I cranked my seat back and took a 45 minute nap, the sun waking me up just short of 7 am….I knew Mike and the guys would be arriving shortly, so I got out and walked around a bit to see if I could find anything and see what changes had occurred since my last visit……

…I saw the pit looked relatively the same as the the last dig that I had been to in October last year…but alot of dirt and mud had fallen down from the walls on the high side and accumulated in the pit,  on the west side especially. This was the high wall that I had dug into, at the base last fall and found some beautiful crystals, next to a couple of nice gentlemen from Indiana. I looked around the edges and located some nice small clusters just sitting on top of the dirt where they had apparently weathered out of the older tailing piles. I snagged a few of them and placed them in my truck…here was one I found hiding in the dirt, I placed it up on top of the high bank for someone to find…

and these two that were just hanging around….

..so if anyone asks me if there is really fluorite that can be found there anytime, I`m going to point them out to this story as living proof that YES, one can definitely find some nice stuff there anytime.

About twenty minutes later, Mr. Crider and his son showed up and fired up the track hoe and bulldozer, and shortly after that, the rest of my crew drove in as well…Mike, Bill, and Thomas from North Carolina, and Jeff from Georgia…having arrived the day before, they were freshly rested up and ready to explore and free more beautiful fluorite crystals from captivity…in other words, we were
” READY TO ROCK ” !!!!!

Mr. Crider got together with Mike to find out what we needed him to do and then he began his work. ..while his son operated the bulldozer….we widened the pit a little bit, digging out part of the old shaft area, and dug out about twenty feet of dirt and rock in front of the vein area to the north…..resulting in this newer pit at the end of the dig…

..and then just pumping down the remaining water from the pit….

….Jeff worked the pump while Bill assisted in the pit moving the hose around to get as much water as possible out….Mike and Thomas worked at finding some pockets to work while this was going on and liberated a few large chunks of fluorite while waiting for the water level to go down…

and as this was going on, Mr. Crider created some new tailing piles, one huge pile full of goodies behind the pit and one row of piles between the pit and the logging road…

After that I put my camera away and we concentrated on finding pockets of beautiful fluorite crystals, many of them laden with calcite crystals, some with greenockite, and all over the place…pry bars were used and several large plates were liberated from the fractures of limestone…the following photos will give you a good idea of what we found last Friday…

…..here is the floor of one of the fractures we worked Friday and in the next image, I am standing on the floor of that fracture…

…….here is a close up of those pockets at my feet….

….as you can see, pockets of cubes all over….it gets better though….

…. here is  a photo of the bigger of the pockets up close…

Bill is shown working on a pocket off to the side about ten feet away from us here…

..here is one of the nice chunks that Bill found later Friday and liberated….with a large calcite crystal sitting on top, something we rarely see at the Eureka Mine….in fact have never seen before or again since….

…..here is yet another specimen of beautiful deep purple fluorite we found…

..and a close up of it…….

this next one is what Bill found in one of his many pockets Friday….several chunks with galena lead cubes all over them….

…this was a large heavy chunk found with cubes all over one side of it…

Weather wise, we started out with cloudy skies on Friday, but by mid morning it started sleeting but changed over to all rain, all day, as the temps warmed. Saturday was a bit of a repeat, starting out cloudy only, then the rain settled back in about noon…we would have rather had the sleet than the rain…

One of the nicer pockets that Mike found along the way, resulted in this beautiful chunk coming out….

and resulted in this next photo when he brought it up on top of the hill….

and shown here with a few other pieces that came from the same pocket….

all in all, we found a lot of deep purple this year and several encrusted with calcite crystals like these….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

..and even large pieces, talking 180 to 200 lbs each, with alot of calcite and galena cubes on them…

We had a great time, despite the weather, and found a lot of nice material, and spread even more of it around the sides of the pit for everyone to find. I received a call Saturday about noon from home, my Mom letting me know that they were getting hit with a major winter storm, thunder sleet and thundersnow falling, two inches of sleet on the ground and now the snow coming down with flakes as big as your hands…and more coming…so I decided I had better get on the road soon…I called one of my meteorologist friends at Channel Five News in St Louis and was told that the storm was due to hit St Louis anytime and that I would likely hit heavy snow and sleet around Mt Vernon, but the roads should remain just wet since we had warmer temps the last few days…

So we split up the finds and I took off about 2 pm and headed north toward Missouri….and sure enough, just west of Mt Vernon I started west into heavy snow and some sleet falling…the farther west I went, the bigger the flakes and the prettier it looked, heavy wet snows always make everything look pretty…

 

 

 

..I crossed the river into St Louis with the snow having moved out of the area and the roads still wet…

 

 

..and traffic was so heavy at the turnoff to I-44 that I just continued west to Big Bend and then went south to I-44, crossing the tracks in Webster…. I had to stop on the bridge anyway so just shot the scene down the railroad tracks…

and then I started up the grade at Antire Hill and shot this one…

..and as I got closer to home, I figured I would stop at Shaws Arboretum in Gray Summit, and photograph the neat little lake over there…

 

Luckily everyone arrived home safe and sound last weekend, and now we are preparing for the weekend and group dig this weekend. I look forward to seeing everyone at the group dig Saturday.