Three Pockets of Crystals at Lake George

While I found 3 pockets of crystals in one day, another visitor to Lake George did not fare as well as me. For some reason a driver with 4-wheel drive capability and nearly bald tires decided he could go off road and use his vehicle to dig up crystals(probably not). Personally I use a pick and shovel to find crystals and not my $20K vehicle ;-). The owner of this vehicle won’t be going anywhere until he gets a tow out of the mess he dug himself into. There is always something new to see at Lake George and it’s not always minerals.

Glad this wasn't me, dude will probably have to drop $400 to a tow truck to get himself out of this remote predicament

Back to prospecting… I had a bit of a dry spell the last few times out but made up for it with a 3 pocket day. The first pocket was near the top of a hill down the slope from someone else’s dig. I was pretty sure the float I was finding was from the previous dig but when I dug down I hit red dirt/clay and surmised there was a second pocket down the hill from the prior discovery. The pocket contained some nice specimens of smoky quartz crystals. The second pocket branched off the first and formed within the same pegmatite as the first pocket, I thought the second pocket would be better than the first as there was a lot of well-formed quartz with the second pocket but not a lot materialized into collectible crystals with the second pocket. The third pocket was some distance from the other pockets and was more interesting with smoky crystal plates, double terminated smokys some goethite, fluorite and some baveno twinned microcline. The goethite was quite massive with some blading but also showed some minor occurrences of attaching itself to the smoky plates. The smoky plates had some nice size and were quite numerous.

Fresh out of the ground after a 1 billion year wait for me to dig em up

Well I ran out of time to finish the third pocket but I will get after it on my next visit to Lake George.

Day 2: Got back to Lake George just as our latest heatwave is beginning. Just means an extra 32oz of fluids and a little more sleep for me. Anyway back at the dig I continued to dig up small plates and goethite. Many of the plates turned out to be combinations of specimens with fluorite and goethite clinging to the quartz crystals or matrix. This should be quite a time consuming cleaning project, but I'm definitely up for the challenge.

My wife said this looked like a dead fish

Fluorite front, goethite behind, iron stained smokys and microcline makes for a very busy mineral plate

Hopefully in a couple of months I will post some after cleaning pictures.
Examining the "dead fish" (pic above) in some detail gave me pause to think about how all these mineral deposits took place on the quartz crystal. After examining the specimen with my microscope it appears that after the quartz crystal was formed it broke, rehealed a little and then some fluorites were deposited on the quartz. Subsequent to that occurence a layer of iron was deposited on the quartz to include the goethite which coated just about everything including the initial fluorites. After the goethite formed there was a secondary hydrothermal infusion of fluids which formed the yellowish fluorites and then I dug it all up :-). I better be careful or I will transform my interests into micromounts or paragenetic mineral analysis or worse yet learn some geology terms.