Pocket #3 at Lake George

Noticed a turkey vulture on the way to our claim at Lake George today. It's hard to get close to these large birds, but this one seemed intent on holding his ground. On the way back home we passed the same area and our truck was mobbed with ravens. As we drove off we noticed a fairly large fresh deer carcass, so that explained the vulture earlier in the day.

Best weather day of the year so far up at Lake George and the digging wasn’t bad either. I returned to the same site I’ve posted about and started digging in an area I had left off last year. I hadn’t found anything but float but where there is good float there normally are crystals. I had stopped digging at a fairly large tree root last year and decided to continue up the hill on the other side of the tree. I continued to find good float crystal pieces and became concerned that I might be gleaning through debris from a previous dig. A shallow depression in the ground about 3 feet up the hill concerned me as a possible old dig, or was it a collapsed pocket? As I neared the depression in the ground my digging partner Bob stopped by as I was swinging my pick into the sod. I flipped over the sod chunk and the dirt underneath was swimming in quartz and microcline. The depression in the ground was a collapsed pocket and not an old dig. This makes 3 pockets in 3 consecutive visits to this site. Every pocket seems to have different material (see previous posts). Pocket #1 contained smokys, white microcline and cleavelandite and goethite. Pocket #2 was nearly all plates of beige microcline and smokys while Pocket #3 had fluorite, amazonite and smokys. While smokys and microcline were in each pocket, the amazonite was a bit of a surprise.

Amazonite shows up for the party!

I’ve dug this area from time to time in the last few years and never run into even a chip or shard of amazonite. While Bob watched me dig for a bit I pulled out a squarish lump which turned out to be some fluorite. I finished up this pocket and started prospecting in another area. Bob seemed busy, so I stopped by his spot and watched him dig for a bit. Bob was down on his luck during our last few outings so I was glad he hit some crystals. Bob found a number of smoky quartz crystals and a couple plates. I started digging out the corner of his dig and ran into some calcite and goethite. I gave Bob the crystals I found as it was his dig but he allowed me to retain some goethite. While this hill has been dug up around a central strongly mineralized pegmatite there seems to be plenty of minor pegmatites running in different directions from the main seam producing crystals within a foot of the surface. I’m guessing we’ll return again soon

Two inch amazonite with sidecar ready for cleaning

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