September Rock Hounding: Amazonite, Goethite, Quartz and more

Forest Service Road winding its way through the fall colors at Lake George, Colorado

 I will document 3 different finds in this post.  First was a goethite find, second some amazonite and finally quartz on another trip to Ouray, Colorado. I also snuck in a trip to the Denver Show as well.

My persistence digging this year was not paying off.  I went from one new discovery to the next with little to show for my efforts (see this year's previous posts).  I decided to return to an area where I had found goethite and amazonite in a prior year. I noticed a lot of pale but large amazonite pieces in one area and decided to give this area a second look. There was a lot of feldspar topping a large quartz blow where others had dug previously. I decided to attack the quartz and see what if anything i could find.  I intently worked the boundary between the feldspar and the quartz. In order to get anywhere I had to dug and pull out some massive quartz boulders. I gave up on the idea of finding amazonite due to the overall poor color and lack of completed crystals. Most of the feldspar was encased in quartz. I was however, finding goethite. Nearly every time there was a void between the contact area between the quartz and the feldspar, I would find smoky quartz shards with goethite. It seemed the goethite had preferential growth on smoky quartz shards. Here you can see goethite wedged in between layers of quartz and feldspar in the center to the photograph. I was hoping to find some fluorite or onegite, but was unable to locate any of those specimens in my dig.

Nice little spray of goethite from the area with a flat of specimens in the background.

More goethite on quartz above, I think I've had enough here and it is time to move on to something else.

Next up the Denver Show.

I spent a little time at the Denver Show this year. 

Fairly large crystals on many of these specimens

I like to help out at Austin Cockell's booth when he is busy, but it was a slow show from his perspective.  I'm more into digging and finding my own minerals unless I can get a deal. I was tempted by some faked citrine crystals, they looked nice, but no sense in getting involved in owning faked material. I did see some nice dioptase minerals from the Congo and purchased a couple of those. The dealer was absent from his booth when I arrived.  I noticed a few twenty-dollar bills on the ground and pointed that out to some coworkers. They got on the phone and the dealer showed up fairly quickly.  The dioptase crystals were of fairly large size, and I liked the contrast between dioptase and associated blue shattuckite. They needed a little cleaning, but i have no problem with that. Next up was a trip to Ouray, Colorado.

                                            Molas Pass, near Silverton, Colorado  

The colors were near peak when we arrived at Silverton. While I had promised my wife this would be a color tour, she knew I had my digging tools along. After all, how much leaf peeping can you do?  Rain was forecast for most afternoons, so color tour in morning, rock hounding in the afternoons.

Since the weather was less than ideal, I decided to hit up the crystal cavern in Ouray, CO.  After a couple wrong turns and trying to guide some lost tourists onto the correct trail I finally found my way to the crystal cavern. For anyone interested in the geology of this area, i took a picture of this sign.

Well, you get the idea, not so easy to read....  Anyway, my spot this day was near the Box Canyon in Ouray.  I understood the cavern was mostly dug out, but with rainy weather I decided i might give it a try. I am standing at the entrance of the cavern looking inside.

As you can see, much of the walls have been dug out.  I spent an hour or so exploring the cavern hoping for an unexcavated nook or cranny, but it was pretty well played out of crystals.  The crystals here are small druzy quartz growing over calcite crystals.  The calcites are mainly habits of rhomb and dog tooth crystals. At the entrance of the cave I decided to dig down and see what i might find in the excavated rubble, maybe some nice discards?  I was pleasantly surprised to dig out several small plates of exactly what i was looking for... quartz over calcite crystals.  I found one grouping that really surprised me and wondered who would not have taken this nice specimen home?  Below are some of the pictures of the specimens I found in the rubble pile.  I also show the one outstanding specimen.

I unearthed these discards and took many of them home for cleaning

Here was the prize of the day and the trip, of course there were also the invaluable leaf pics.

The whole point of collecting these is to place the specimens in hydrochloric acid and etch out the calcite leaving only the eggshell like quartz behind. Below is a movie showing part of the process (done outside of course). What you have left is an epimorph.

 

Once the calcite is etched out and the quartz was cleaned I ended up with this!

Note the shell of a double terminated calcite crystal in the foreground of the specimen.

😮🙀😵😘😊

Digging in the debris definitely paid off.  This ended the fall color/rock hounding trip.  I found one nice quality piece for my collection.  One more story for the month -- amazonite.

After recovering from a week's worth of leaf peeping, I decided it was time to spend a little more time at Lake George before winter closed the rock hounding season down.  I had noticed some interesting granite outcroppings near a spot I had dug before and made a note to get back and explore that area.  

We don't see moose that often out at L George, so I was hoping for a special day. Center of picture (small and fuzzy) but I make it a practice of not stalking animals

I got back to my spot and sure enough under the granite outcrop was some amazonite.  All the amazonite was embedded in the host rock, so nothing collectible there, bvut the rock going down looked promising.  Soon i was digging in some white quartz in what appeared to be a narrow seam between a pegmatite.  Sure enough, there was more amazonite and this looked a bit better in both form and color than the pieces above.  Not too many complete crystals. There was also a bit of fracturing. 

I continued to follow the quartz seam with amazonite until it ended in solid quartz.  I was 5 feet down and really not finding much to collect.  At the very end of dig I found some small onegite.  Onegite is a discredited term that we use locally to describe quartz infused with needles of goethite. 

Cleaned pieces after acid bath

All in all, September was a fun month with several nice finds.