I have not posted to my blog in 2021 because I did not go rock hounding much. Normally I might go 40 times a year, but this year only about 6 times. Many trips I had planned were canceled. A number of factors contributed to my inability to rock-hound. The worst thing that happened was a severe accident for my wife which caused me to be her caregiver for nearly 3 months. She is back to 90% and healing well.
I did not take any notes during my trips, but will rely on a few pictures I took to refresh my memories for this post. Despite Covid, I did attend 3 rock shows. All shows were downscaled considerably from the normal events. I attended the Tucson Show (Apr), Denver Show (Sep) and Colorado Springs (Oct). I would say I had the most fun at the Tucson Show, plenty of interesting material and smaller crowds. I always purchase a few items for resale at this show and picked up some nice amethyst clusters from Veracruz, Mexico. Purchased a garnet from Brazil. Got an aquamarine on matrix from Pakistan along with some other fluorite specimens pictured below.
Both of these fluorite specimens are from Mexico and were purchased at the Tucson Show. The fluorite pictured to the right has a layer of hematite encasing the cubes along with some associated barite sprinkled along the edges.
Austin Cockell cornered much of the market on some interesting fluorescing fluorite and so I purchased one fluorite from him seen below. Under longwave light the fluorite produces a brilliant red color.
This area had probably been remediated more than 10 years ago as there were small trees growing in the area. It was an older claim we had permission to be on and after not finding anything I was walking back to my truck and saw this smoky in the dirt. A nice 3 inch smoky with rehealing and some onegites attached to the sides. A keeper in my book.
Next few times out in June, I went with my friend Bob to various places in the Lake George area and found one pocket of smoky quartz crystals. Years ago I found a pegmatite that yielded some twinned microcline and quartz crystals so I walked down the hill along this pegmatite looking for sign of a crystal pocket. I noticed some shards of smoky quartz and dug in. It didn't take me long to find some larger smoky shards up to 5" in length, but no complete crystals. I continued digging up the hill at about a depth of 1 foot. I noticed a slight change in soil color off to the side and dug into that. I was rewarded with about 10 crystals. Many of these crystals have issues like overgrowth, fracturing and damage, but the fun is in the finding. I continued digging and found a few malformed microcline, but the quartz had really dwindled. My next find was more substantial and included some amazonite.
Not the most desirable smokys :-) |
My hog turd--big hog |
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