Since it is a rainy day today I thought I might catch up on my blog. I had a fairly nice find on 31Aug with crystal extraction and cleaning continuing til today. I was prospecting north of Lake George and found some quartz fragments with faces. Looking around for any recent digs, I did find one but it was below the float quartz I was finding. After a few shovel fulls of dirt, I started finding small but gemmy crystals. These smaller crystals also had albite and/or cleavelandite (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albite) around the bases of the crystals attached to the pegmatite. I also found some grainy fluorite pieces. Some of the crystals also had small phenakite (see http://www.reference.com/browse/phenakite+?s=b) Phenakite is Greek for deceiving. I guess it can be mistaken for quartz or topaz. As I dug down through reddish dirt the crystals become more frequent with considerable quartz shards. I finally hit some firm quartz about 4 feet down and followed this for a few feet til I hit some plates pictured below. While the plate came out in pieces it is still quite a find (at least for me). Since I found these plates on 31 Aug, the second full moon of the month (colloquially described as a blue moon) I will henceforth describe this find as my blue-moon pocket. Perhaps you only find something this nice once in a blue moon. Next blue moon won't occur til 2015. Hope I find more nice specimens before that ;-)
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| A sign of good things to come a very nice chubby crystal |
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| Carefully scrapping dirt away reveals the beginning of a nice plate |
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| Blue Moon plate washed and ready for reconstruction and further cleaning |
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| Cleaned and stable, needs a little more TLC |
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| Crystals reattached and cleaned. |
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| Extracted these crystals for later reconstruction | . |
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| Crytals with albite or cleavelandite near bases |
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| Phenakite on smoky |
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