Rockin the Rockies

Rockin the Rockies
Rock Hounding

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Prospecting a hill at Lake George for crystals

Will Winter Ever End???  (Couple weekends ago)
Feeling cooped up a bit as of late with springtime rains, wind and cool weather keeping me indoors.  Bob and I have a lot of prospecting to do this year as we don’t have a favorite spot yet.  Many years we find a productive hill and stay with it for a digging season or two.  This year we have found a hill that has some promise but we are still prospecting it to see if it’s potential merits our time.  We have noticed a number of old digs near a ridgeline leading into the hill and also noted the top of the hill has been heavily dug.  The slopes seem fairly virgin of prospecting digs, so we will concentrate there first and work our way up to the top.  I started on the side of the ridgeline and Bob, my digging partner, hit the side of the hill.  Soon we were both finding good sign, but not much in the way of keeper smokys or amazonite.  I found a well-formed quartz pegmatite with only small float smoky quartz crystals and some goethite chunks but no crystal pockets.
Goethite
  Bob dug into a nice crystal pocket, but it primarily contained microcline plates.  The microcline plates are well defined and Bob will clean them up and check for twins.
Lots of microcline plates with a little quartz... hoping for amazonite
 Due to the occasional amazonite chips above where Bob was working I decided to climb the hill 50 or so feet above him and try my luck near a promising looking quartz formation. The quartz was associated with some blue subhedral amazonite and after digging down into the pegmatite about 2 feet down I found a pocket with yellowish mud and a few smokys and amazonite crystals. Unfortunately the crystals were fairly small. I continued the dig until I had exhausted the crystals in this smallish pocket and then decided it was time to tear down the sidewalls and fill up my dig with dirt.  While pulling down the sidewalls a rather large double terminated smoky rolled out of the dirt. This float crystal may have traveled a bit from it’s origin and is a little scuffed up, but still collectible. My next job is to figure out where that floater came from.  There is another dig up the hill so I will work my way up the hill looking for more float. Bob finished his microcline dig and was poking around in some quartz nearby.  After I showed Bob my double terminated quartz floater I noted a few feet up the hill from where he was prospecting there was a recent dig with some grey quartz with well-defined faces. I mentioned I wasn’t sure why someone would stop digging there and so Bob gave that spot a try.  Soon he was pulling out small smokys but nothing too big yet.


 Next trip we hope to expand our searches in that area and with a little luck find a smoky pocket or two.


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