Thanksgiving Day Pocket of Quartz Crystals at Lake George CO

Platte River north of Lake George Colorado

I keep finding small pockets but not enough material to warrant writing a post into my blog until now.  I thought my digging season for 2017 was over after the Lake George area got 4 inches of snow last week but the weather warmed up and off I went. I actually found some of the pocket I'm blogging about before Thanksgiving Day, having found the pegmatite and a nice small pocket with the pegmatite a week earlier.  I had named that small pocket “windy pocket” as the winds were blowing near 45mph.  That was the first time I’ve been driven off the side of a hill digging smokys due to high winds. I think it took me 2 days to get all the dirt out of my ears and sinuses. Some folks think you can drive out to Lake George, dig a hole and gather up a bushel basket of crystals in a few hours but it doesn’t normally work that way.  This particular pocket was in an area I had prospected and dug all summer.  The mineral signs suggesting I dig in this particular spot were quite weak.  We had dug a number of test holes in this area but hadn’t found much.  As the frost had killed off the seasonal vegetation I noticed a couple pieces of fairly large grained granite which I hoped suggested a nearby pegmatite and not just roll down from up the hill. I decided to dig in and that’s how I found the “windy pocket” a week earlier. A friend of mine (Austin) was back from college and wanted to dig crystals so I invited him out to the spot I had found the previous week and mentioned I wanted to pick up where I left off with the windy pocket pegmatite. He was fine with that and I mentioned if I found another pocket on the pegmatite he could have a few crystals.  He asked if it was okay to dig a few feet to my right and I mentioned it was as good a place as any.  There was little frost in the ground and it was nearly 50F when we got to my spot and the sun was warming up the area quickly.  The snow from the prior week had melted as I dug into my old pocket and began to expand the dig up the hill.  Austin plunked down and broke through some ground and immediately scored a plate of smokys.  I told him that might be the best thing we find that day not realizing how wrong I would be.  Austin found a few more float crystals while I was finding quartz with faces but no gemmy crystals. I continued to use my pick and shovel as I was moving up the hill.  The rock and scree looked good with sizeable quartz shards interspersed in the material but still only a couple small smoky quartz fragments were observed.  There was a small bush in front of me and I decided that needed to go so I took a pretty good whack at the base of the plant and bingo, quartz pieces everywhere.  I put my pick axe right through the center of a small crystal plate… L  Oh well I was pretty sure there was more where that came from and hoisted out the small bush and found numerous small crystals with a quartz vein heading down into the rock.  My mentor Ray told me you’re not digging hard enough if you don’t break a crystal or two from time to time.  My digging partner and I agree it’s okay to break the first crystal especially when prospecting for a crystal pocket but after that care is needed to keep the crystals intact.  I followed the quartz until it led me to a sizeable root.  The root had many more crystals around it along with a few crystal plates.  Austin started getting interested in my finds and figured the pegmatite continued in a southeast direction right across the line he was digging.  While Austin dug up the hill, I pulled out crystal after crystal after crystal.  There was a bit of damage to many of the crystals as they were so near the surface and many of them appeared to have odd terminations suggesting a pocket rupture with some re-healing of crystal terminations.  The crystal pocket was anywhere from inches to about 2 feet below the ground and nearly a foot wide with a length of approximately 3 feet. The problem with near surface crystal pockets is that all the protecting pocket mud has eroded away long ago so that annual frost heaves can cause damage to the crystals. While I found this near-surface lenticular pocket near Thanksgiving Day it was no turkey.  I asked Austin to take a short video of how work was progressing which he did.  This video is not staged in any way. (Sorry for the watermark and ad but this blog can only host videos of 100MB so I had to edit the video and shorten it to show it)

I picked this one out at the end of the video

 

I was a bit disappointed that there weren’t any secondary minerals on the plates like fluorite, microcline or goethite with the quartz but many of the quartz crystals are terminated at both ends so that is an attractive attribute. Some of the crystals also have some limonite with them but for the most part I don’t find that an enhancing feature. Some have suggested my digging technique is a bit rough in the video but if there were amazonite in that pocket I’d still be digging it ;-)  After digging up a number of crystals Austin thought he should be given a turn in the pocket so I acquiesced and let him have a go while I packed some material. Austin forgot to take any packing material but fortunately he mentioned this at my house so we had some extra newspaper to go around. I had no idea I would use nearly all of my newspaper wrapping crystals!  Austin picked up where I left off and pulled out a few plates and some singles.  I told him he could keep what he found unless it was extraordinary.  

Earlier in the video--this cluster displays rehealed terminations

Austin checking out some crystals

I had to make two trips back to the vehicle due to the weight of the specimens and decided I certainly had a successful day.  I pulled down the sides of the dig and was still seeing some good crystal fragments up the slope so I may return if the weather holds. Good weather, company, crystals--life is good!  Two videos below show some of the crystals. I’ve posted a couple videos and will accompany them will some stills of the cleaned crystals. The first video of about 150 crystals shows the crystals taken through step 2 of the cleaning process (see below) the rest of the crystals are being sorted and going through their initial cleaning as depicted in the second video. 

Box full of Thanksgiving Day Pocket Smokies Cleaned Up

Smoky Hors D'ouvres

The steps I take to clean crystals are as follows (procedures vary based on cleaning required):

1    Carefully unpack crystals and soak for at least 24 hours in warm water with calgon or liquid soap

2   Scrub crystals with a toothbrush to check for accessory minerals and possible fits

3    After any fitting is accomplished I soak in Iron Out for 48-72 hours and re-scrub.

4    After Iron Out treatment (depending on minerals) I heat in acid to remove additional/difficult iron staining.

5    Iron staining is usually removed after 48-72 hours in a warm 20% strength phosphoric acid bath

6    I usually then rinse and neutralize the specimens for 48 hours changing the base solution 3-4 times, usually once after 15 minutes, 2 hours then again after 12 hours at a minimum

7    Some white residue often accumulates on the specimens but this can often be cleaned by either using a needle gun(fabric cleaning gun) or pressure scrub with baking soda

Quartz and Fluorite in the San Juan Mountains

I got invited to Ft Lewis College in Durango, CO to give a talk on the Pikes Peak Batholith and prospecting to their geology club.  I have given numerous talks to the Colorado Springs Mineralogical Society including the Crystal Club at a variety of venues.  I usually give my talks in Senior Centers, VA Halls or church basements so it was a real treat to return to academia and give a talk in a classroom hooked up with real audiovisual support.  The professor managed to bribe the students with pizza and extra credit for the classes he taught so we had a standing room only crowd of about 60 students. The talk went well and when several geology students came up to me afterwards I felt like a rock star The College was kind enough to put me up for the night at a local hotel so I was able to get some rock hounding in the following day near Silverton CO. One of the Geology students (Austin), instrumental in getting me to Ft Lewis as a guest lecturer, wanted to go rock hounding in the San Juan Mountains the following day. "Part of the Southern Rockies, the San Juan Mountains were created as two enormous continental plates slammed into one another, folding and faulting the earth’s crust. Volcanic activity associated with the tectonic mountain-building process produced rich mineral veins—the silver and gold deposits that drew miners to the region in the 1860s and 1870s." [https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/san-juan-mountains]  
Austin had been to a few mining sites along CO 550 in the San Juan Mountains though first we went to a rock shop in Ouray and then we stopped at several mines to see what we could find in the tailings. The Million Dollar Highway (CO 550) is a very stimulating drive especially when snowing over the passes.  Our best success was near the Mayflower Mill just east of Silverton. “The Mayflower Mill was the single longest running mill in the history of the San Juan Mountains. In its 61 year milling career from 1930 to 1991, it was shut down only a total of 12 years, resulting in 49 years of actual milling. The total amount of rock milled is estimated at 9,700,500 tons. The Mill produced 1,940,100 ounces of gold; 30,000,000 ounces of silver; and 1,000,000 tons of combined base metals -- a remarkable record for hard rock mining” http://www.sanjuancountyhistoricalsociety.org/mayflower-mill.html. Austin had garnered some intel from a local rock shop on where he could find some collectible quartz and fluorite and had some success there in the past so we checked out that site.  The temperature was 40F and a few snow flurries suggested winter was almost upon us as we parked and checked out the site. We dug in an area that had country rock surrounding a seam of quartz and fluorite.  

The seam is right in front of Austin, slope of the hill is close to 45 degrees

I was surprised at the amount of clay between rock surfaces.  It almost seemed like a Lake George pegmatite with all the sticky mud. The difference here was the quartz was not growing out of the rock as in pegmatites, but lodged in an old hydrothermal seam. We dug for about an hour or so on that seam and both got several small plates of quartz with green fluorite.  Both the fluorite and quartz crystals were fairly small but make for interesting combinations for display.  We walked a little further down the road and looked through some of the tailing from a mine above us.  There were some very interesting druzy quartz plates along with pale green fluorite. There was also some other worm-liked druzy quartz specimens which I gathered up. I really didn’t think I would find much in the way of collectible crystals from the tailings lying on a 45 degree slope flung out of a mine shaft but the damage to the specimens we found was minimal. The snow had now changed from flurries to heavy snow showers and visibilities were obscured to a half mile or less at times as the wind picked up and the temperature fell to 32F. 

Snow and cold shuts us down

We were more than satisfied with our finds so we decided to call it a day and head back to Durango. Unfortunately the Silverton bakery was closed so we had no funnel cakes that day. During our prospecting trip we also visited an amethyst site (mostly massive) and found a little pyrite and sphalerite at a couple other spots

Clay Covered Plate Fresh From The Seam

Still A Little Cleaning Needed For This Quartz Plate But Close To Finished

Plate Of Druzy Quartz Over Octahedral Fluorite 

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