A friend of ours has a few claims north of Lake George and he has been sick for awhile. He asked us if we would be willing to restake his claim this year(what are friends for?). Well this turned out to be more work than we thought. Thank god for GPS. We found the first claim marker quite easily, but converting between coordinate systems and searching for vandalized posts was not what we expected. We got two claims restaked, but the weather set us back so that we will have to try again next week. We set out to restake the second set of claims only to be turned back by the weather. We thought there would be snow on the claim but didn't realize the depth and extent of the last snowstorm up in the mountains. Often a snowstorm will hit the front range mountains of Colorado and leave interior mountain areas like Lake George high and dry. Not so with the latest storm as we found out. Our trip was not totally wasted. We determined a field trip near Wilkerson Pass (9500ft) should be cancelled due to snow and instead of restaking claims we rockhounded on a sunny unclaimed area near Lake George (elev 8200ft). Elevation makes quite a difference with spring storms. I even managed to find a pocket of smoky crystals. By midafternoon over half the snow was melted and this helped me find a pocket. The pocket was small and the crystals were beaten up for the most part. Still it was my first find of the year.
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| Doing the forest service work, this tree has been across the rd for 6+ months! |
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| Marker was thrown by someone into this brush pile. Supporting rock caron was about 50ft away down the hill |
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| Pretty small crystal cache from pocket discovery, couple good ones I think |
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| Still snow at Wilkerson Pass. Temperature was 23F on west side of pass near Hartsel. Time to go back to Lake George where the sun is shining and find those crystals depicted above! |
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