Rockhounding at Lake George

My rockhounding buddy (Bob) and I went to Lake George yesterday to see what we could find.  It was fairly easy to find a pegmatite (gem bearing granite formation) but harder to find any associated crystals.  I took a few pictures with my new camera.  My old one got too much dust in it.  The pictures show a pegmatite being dug in progress and some crystals found.  The pictures are of smoky quartz and amazonite. 

This picture shows a portion of the pegmatite.  I dug away the scree, roots and misc country rock from the pegmatite and then began to carefully pick away at the quartz bearing rock.  Although somewhat hard to see in this picture, there is considerable quartz in this pegmatite.  I also found some small amazonite crystals while digging into the peg.


This picture shows a large piece of the pegmatite in my hand.  You can see the faces of crystals on the portion of the rock being held, especially in the lower right.  There was a layer of this type of rock and below it was a more concentrated area of quartz with some crystals (see next)

Here is some nice colored amazonite and smokys. Too bad much of the amazonite was sidewall and damaged, the crystals growing  in the pegmatite seam touched the sidewall of the seam while they were growing and prevented the amazonite from being nice classic shaped crystals.  The smokys were few and far between and somewhat small with the biggest being only 4cm in length.  No combinations of amazonite or smoky quartz were found.  The smokys have yet to be cleaned.