Thursday, up early and off to Creston. A spot of thrifting planned.
Off the ferry and behind an Alberta plate. Yeah, they drive the BC economy, now if only they could learn to fucking drive their cars...
You forget, over the winter, what it's like in the summer to forever be behind some half-witted Kootenay-struck Albertan.
I'm in a bit of a hurry and alcoholic rage and haven't the patience to drive 100KM at 30K/HR - the winding road around the lake is a double line the whole way, and Herb and Marge are driving slow to gawk at every fucking seagull and lake view they spot along the way. Albertans, they deserve their own special rant which I'll come back to after this....
I overtake. It's dodgy - big ticket - but there's no cops out here and if there were they should really be checking Herb & Marge's fitness to be on the road, not mine to pass.
Get to Creston. Check the thrift shops.
Check 'em all out, lots of new stuff, I pick up an old beat-up tile saw for $10.00 - useful, if you have a lot of rocks that need cutting/polishing. A gold Cross pen for $1.00 - I despise them, but I know they generally sell for a lot more than that. And a masterful example of grandma's quilting:
A mere $1.00. Now I have no clue as to what I will do with it - regift it? I have friends that Crochet - god-damned, how old am I? Fucking hell. Or - get one of those friends to repurpose above throw into a onesie for the upcoming rave season...
Let me think about this...
Up the pass to check on a spot I'd been hoping to get back to for aquamarine and black tourmaline. Nope. Still snow, fresh bear tracks. Bears are fine, but the snow, these tires, nope. I'm a slow learner, but eventually even the dumbest dogs learn.
Back through Creston and up lake. Too early for the ferry so I pull off on a logging road, the east side of the lake is dry some 3, 4, 5 KM up. A new road, and a ways in and I spot some features, get out to explore.
Sure enough, large blocky quartz boulders, and I'm digging through them, in the forest floor, finding smoky quartz crystals. Not many, very few, they seem to be shedding from a quartz ledge above. I fill my pockets and return to the Jeep. Empty pockets, time now to leave, only the jeep isn't starting.
Damned. After I'd been so cautious and all.
The jeep, perched on a bluff overlooking the lake, it's got cell signal, and Chris is texting me. He's like a jealous wife, "What are you up to", I'm evasive, "Car broke down East Shore", He's helpful about coming to pick me up, I'm pretty sure that sooner or later the jeep will start, it just needs time, but I grudgingly give him my location...
I feel guilty about this, off prospecting alone, what I fucking love most to do - but now he's coming down, on the 2:50 Ferry to join me.
I continue digging, and go back up to the ledge - I'm getting some blockier quartz, traces of silver,(Galena), and going around a corner of the mountain find a shallow adit.
Now it all makes sense.
And digging out the adit floor, better and better crystals, bigger crystals, there's vugs here for sure, and - while I've yet to find anything great there's a definite trend towards finding stuff that's better and better...
Quartz boulder with slight crystals.
Blockier and blockier crystals...
Crystal points in a pocket
Good signs
Things get better and better, but the sun gets lower, the light's disappearing and we're done. We go up the road to check things out - beautiful granite bluffs, high cliffs, it's own beauty, very promising, make a note to self this area has potential.
Then - to the jeep - it starts - and we're off on the race to the ferry.
The Gloaming, that time of the day when you see it all, deer, elk, caribou, one of those dumb pheasant-type birds that does a beak-foot-beak-foot slow walk across the highway and doesn't speed up for even a second when it sees you barreling down on it at 120K an hour...It's not in my bumper, so I'm guessing it survived - but how?
This is one race we don't win. Pulling into the landing you can see the ferry pulling away - we missed it - by 7 minutes. Damn, damn, damn. Should have left that reconnaissance until another day.
Back to Crawford Bay, Newkeys, the pub, is still serving on the patio, they've a gas BBQ, we settle in for a beer and fish and chips. A few of the local alcoholics are dropping by, bitching about the COVID mandates, I'm just fucking glad we've got somewhere - anywhere - to wait for the ferry. The landing is a destitute place.
It's a beautiful night.
And who's here but the redhead I gave a ride to last time we were on the East Shore?
So we all sit, chat about her meteorite hunting, we give her some of the crystals we picked up, she runs to the trailer park and gets us some pieces of her meteor collection - too kind - me and Chris each get a small slab - and she invites us off meteorite hunting and we invite her crystal hunting and it's a proper Kootenay love fest.
And she's telling us all about what she does - back from hunting meteorites in Africa, now here for the Boswell one, and she's telling us how much she'll make if/when she finds it, $10/gram, an estimated 50 KG of debris, HMMMMMM...
She knows what she's doing with her share...."I'm gonna buy myself a VAGINA".
This is too good. Me and Chris make a pact - we've got to find a way to introduce her to Ken.
All in all a pretty damned perfect Kootenay day.
***
The finds, cleaned up:
Large (4 inch) crystal showing some transparency.
Abundant crystal shapes and points.
flattened crystals - "Memory Keepers" or some "Record Keepers" - smaller crystals flattened into a larger one.
In the end - nothing in & of itself too worthwhile, but lots of indications that we should keep on digging...