Rock Hounding the Rockies in May 2020

One of the big tents at the Tucson show.  Worked a couple deals and moved on to Mineral City

I managed to go to the Tucson Mineral Show again this year just prior to the known COVID-19 outbreak.  While at the Show a few folks including my wife told me to stay away from the Chinese dealers which I thought was a bit over-the-top at the time.  Many were worried about getting sick at the Show.  I managed to pick up something, I'll probably never know for sure what it was.  Several folks were sick at the Show and called it the Tucson crud. Anyway, I purchased a couple fluorites, some tourmaline and filled a couple orders for folks back in Colorado Springs while shopping in Tucson. 

By the time the snow melted in the mountains for me to get out rock hounding, we were under a "stay at home" order from our Governor.  Finally a new "safer at home" order by our Governor was declared near the end of April and rock hounding was on! I was eager to get started as I had a promising spot scoped out just as the 2019 season ended with a snowstorm.  I got to think about the potential for that 

Digging partner Bob trying to get out in April, but 

there was just too much snow to do much

spot most of the winter. Prior to departing for my first foray of the 2020 I spoke with my friend Austin who said he had been out a couple days earlier and found the roads passable.  He mentioned he had found a spot that somebody had been digging and it looked good, but was just mainly amazonite frozen in quartz. Yikes! After a couple questions I quickly surmised he had hit my spot. Good thing he was only able to spend an hour at my dig and didn't have enough time to find anything. I visited my dig up at Lake George, CO a couple days later and within just a few minutes I was finding amazonite. I decided to following the pegmatite in a southeasterly direction. I figured I would work this pegmatite a bit and see if the peg got any better.  Sure enough it did.  There was a lot of broken amazonite and a few smoky quartz crystals

Pale amazonite along with  fluorite

but no combinations.  Near the center of the pocket I did find a couple sizable amazonite crystals.  Many of the stones were also sprinkled with small clear quartz crystals.  While this pocket was not large I did get a couple specimens to add to my collection.  Two fluorite, and one large amazonite were even good enough to add to my display case. Got the monkey off my back early in 2020 by hitting a pocket and bringing home some fine specimens.

The following week I found 2 pockets of crystals. Both of these small pockets were found up hill from my previous find and equally rewarding.  Actually anytime I find a pocket of crystals, good or bad, it's a rewarding day.  Neither one of these two pockets had any crystal float leading to the pockets.  I had found crystals by digging along a well-mineralized  pegmatite and checking for discontinuities within and along the structure. I dug along the peg for about an hour or so and then found some pseudomorphs of limonite after a carbonate. We normally consider these to be goethite after siderite, but I lean towards calcite as the carbonate.  After removing the pseudomorphs I noted some looser material around that spot and decided to probe the looser material in the pegmatite.  The soft spot along the pegmatite looked worth persuing as there was a bit of yellow dirt behind the pseudomorphs. I decided to take the overhang of dirt off the top of the peg with my pick axe. One smack with my pick axe and little quartz shards rolled down into the base of the trench I was digging.  Well, time to put the pick axe away.  I carefully began to remove the over burden with my hands and sure enough a pocket

                 Got a nice keeper                

 of crystals began to show itself. I called Bob, my digging partner over--he always likes a little entertainment. There was little to no clay within this pocket and while the pocket was only about 6 inches from the surface there were no typical float crystals. There were several well formed smoky quartz crystals from this pocket and a few small amazonite crystals as well.  The amazonite crystals from this pocket were small but of better color than the previous pocket. My second pocket of the year also had a couple of small combination specimens of smoky quartz and amazonite.  My favorite find of this pocket was a manebach twinned amazonite crystal.  It was cleaved along the twinning plane,

Manebach twin

but nothing a little glue couldn't fix. The smokys were dark, gemmy and well-formed though a bit on the small side.  The smoky quartz crystals varied in habit from chisel point, drill bit and multiple terminated crystals.  A couple of doubly terminated (DT) crystals were also collected. Some of the  smoky quartz crystals also had prominent additional faces above the m-face indicating they are right turning crystals  http://quartzpage.de/crs_intro.html

Fresh out of the ground, Bob's Pocket! Mud in this pocket was extremely sticky

The next pocket of crystals I found #3 was only 5 feet up the hill from the previous pocket. This was another shallow pocket and probably would more aptly be called a seam.  Nearly all the crystals I found were damaged. Most likely due to the fact that it was shallow.  While none of the crystals I found here were exceptional, there were a few unique pieces that will make it into storage at home.

Next time out I searched an area surrounded by digs. The area didn't have any surface rocks that suggested underlying pegmatites. Since there were many digs in the area I decided to pull a few tufts of grass out and see what lay underneath.  Peeled back some sod and sure enough scatter quartz shards underneath.  The Pegmatites run in a near north/south direction on this hill, so I decided to dig a small trench east/west along the hill and see if I could intercept a pegmatite. No pegmatite, but the quartz shards kept getting bigger and better defined. I knew this was probably coming from somewhere up the hill, but where?  I expanded the width of my shallow trench and tried to follow the most dense area of quartz float.  After a couple hours Bob came by and offered some advice.  I decided it was time to take a

Large etched float quartz crystal

water break and stretch my legs and let Bob dig in the shallow trench.  One minute later Bob pulled out a complete 8" smoky.  He kept saying your not going to believe what I just found.  I said oh fudge frickity frack and told him to find some more. Well, no more could be found.  The quartz float immediately dried up. I dug up down and all around and that was it... ridiculous! I theorize the quartz may have been from a long ago eroded pocket up the hill. Well, I returned to my previous plan and continued to dig up the hill. Finally I hit a pegmatite.  The rock wasn't great but about 2 feet down I did start to find some quartz. I veered right or south along the peg and began digging it out. Quartz kept getting better but no crystals! Finally some small amazonite were observed along with some quartz shards... oh well, gotta keep on this.  After another hour of carefully removing the pegmatite I found a loose spot, some mud, and a few small crystals. I returned to the spot of the big quartz crystal a couple of times but never found the source of the smoky beast.  I did get a doubly terminated smoky quartz and some crystal points from this area but no big pocket.

Doubly Terminated Smoky ready for a cleanup

In the meantime I guess Bob got tired of me finding crystals and decided it was time for him to find a pocket too. He found the best pocket of the season scoring a number of microcline smoky combos.  Can't wait to see how these clean up. See pic above (Bob's Pocket)

Next time out I went with my young friend Austin. His schooling got delayed due to the virus and so he has some time to dig crystals. He is learning the digging ropes quickly and is coming into his own as a prospector.  He was into a small pocket of crystals before I even got to the dig site. Austin found fluorite and some smokys.  There was sign of amazonite, but no complete collectible crystals. I spent the day prospecting and was only able to come up with one float smoky crystal, the rest of my finds were too small to take home.  We tried a different area later in the day but this area appears to have been fairly worked over in the past.

This finished off the month of May 2020. A fairly busy month with many small, but nice finds.  June looks to be a promising month as well with a large pocket ready for harvest... stay tuned!