I have not posted to my rockhounding blog in some time due to studying for tests and a large fire here in Colorado Springs which some of you have no doubt heard of. Many roads were closed, temperatures were near 100F and the smoke was unbearable. Yesterday I got out again and looked for smoky quartz near Lake George CO. We had been to this spot before and dug out a fairly large pocket of smoky quartz crystals. We checked out an area down hill from this spot and found a lot of float crystals, but no pocket. At the end of the day we surmised that the float had been coming from the pocket of crystals we had already excavated. Still, many of the float crystals were keepers. Normally I don't take broken crystals home, but I made an exception for the specimen pictured below. It is about 7 inches long. With a proper termination it would have been at least 9+ inches and the biggest crystal I had ever found. It probably broke when the pocket that it formed in broke millions of years ago. :(
