And stumbling through the forest, close to old haunts and scouting for new ones I find a narrow seam of quartz, silver ore, too small to be of any interest to the miners, but of some interest to me. Mainly for the abundance of quartz crystals, pretty, I'm pretty sure I can sell these in a gift shop someplace....
Early finds:
little beds of calcite crystals embedded in the reefs...
Great promise showing, needs to be cleaned and separated, this piece, maybe fifty pounds, 18 inches long by 10 inches wide...filled with ore, quartz, calcite, and some other minerals I have to identify...
a cross-section of quartz plates....
quartz
Some of them aren't so pretty before they're cleaned up. The black stuff is degraded Galena, or silver ore...
a tiny cluster of calcite flowers or plates...
Dirty Calcite Rhombus on quartz.
A few notes, a few perfect Calcite Rhombuses, small, but like the Icelandic Spar or Sunstones, cool, but too small to be salable. And cleaning these things up with acid gets the quartz clean but dissolves the calcite and fluorite and other crystals - have to be careful how I clean them, and there's more work in the cleaning then there is in the finding. I have a theory, that the best rocks in the shops all come from third world countries not because they have the best rocks, it's because they can afford the abundant cheap labour and time required to make these specimens spectacular.
And that's been the week, I worked that vein out, got about 300 lbs of material to clean up, now to write up a few notes on the specimens and shop them around. And get back into the woods and start searching for the next big find....