300+ Smoky Quartz Crystals in 1 day at Lake George, CO! Updated 22 Dec w/ cleaned crystals

Crystals piling up by the dozens, excavation in background

Thinking the cold weather and frozen ground were here to stay I packed up my rock hounding equipment a few weeks ago. This past week the temps have been near 60F for several days, so my rock hounding buddy and I decided to head out and check the pegmatites at Lake George. When we got to one of our normal sites the ground was quite frozen, down to a depth of nearly 18 inches. The frozen ground made prospecting almost impossible. I thought I might try a southerly facing slope to see if that was any better and sure enough, the ground was completely thawed out. I found some white quartz dribbling down the hill and decided to follow it up the slope. The white quartz was fairly small and without faces, but I still followed it about 50ft up the hill. Suddenly along a rock I found a large piece of white quartz with several faces on it. I decided to dig the surface and see what was there. Bob joined me and we dug about 10 feet up the hill finding more quartz pieces with faces. As the sun was going down we both started unearthing smoky quartz pieces and even a few whole crystals. Everything we found was just an inch or two below the surface. Since the following day promised to be just as nice with no wind, sunny and temperatures in the 50Fs, we stopped and planned to return the following day to continue our search up the hill for the source of the quartz. Here is a short video from the following day showing quartz crystals coming out of the newly discovered pocket

Next visit found us back at the site digging up hill through the scree. We kept finding pieces of crystals and some nice floaters, so we were encouraged to continue the dig. Within a half hour larger crystals began to show up with more frequency and the pocket was discovered. Red dirt and mud surrounding multiple crystals made this pregnant pocket one of the largest I’ve ever found. Crystal after crystal kept popping out the dirt and while I kept hoping for some plates.

Plate showing a couple smoky crystals with lots of mud

Nice sized plate with a few 3"crystals should display well once cleaned

I was a little surprised at the number, size and completeness of the crystals. I spent 3 hours digging out crystals and finally did manage to find a few plates (pics above). The crystals mostly measured 2-4 inches. Near the back of the pocket was a fairly large quartz blow, so I will eventually go back (next spring) and tear that out to make sure nothing is hiding in the back of the pocket. Next up is cleaning the crystals. There were over 300 crystals not including the plates. I left about 30 crystals behind as they were too broken up to bother with. I gave my digging partner Bob 85 crystals and brought the rest home. I think I had about 40 pounds of crystals on my back to carry down the mountain that day. Next up is sorting, putting a few together and cleaning. I'll try and get a few pictures of the cleaned crystals in a couple weeks from the date of this post. Here they are, looking pretty good!

Dark Smoky foreground with lighter one on left

Nice plate with up to 3 inch smokys

Backlit Smoky, quite gemmy

See you in 2015!