Sean strikes a frontier scout pose at the top of the little bluff where the first feldspar prospect was found.  The outcrop is massive feldspar and quartz riven with fissures, where slightly more crystal forms of feldspar, quartz and mica formed.  There is a decent spoils pile along the base, and a little adit where about 5 feet of rock was mined.  Sean explored the topside and said there was a lot of similar rock laying about there.

More of the same.

At one point Sean said, hey, there's something back here and reached into a fissure near the little adit.  I thought he would pull out a cool rock, but instead it was this geocache.  Sean is a good finder, even when he's not looking for something!  He left his name and the date in the book and replaced it as he found it.  The fissure looks to have been enlarged and connects to the little tunnel.

Around a bend in the trail was an unexpected bonus, a little homestead quartzite quarry cut into the crest of a gentle rise.  The rock splits nicely in a variety of thickness.  A little ways further down the trail sits the ruins of a home place.  We took photos of each other goofing with the nearly tumbled down wall.  And here's Sean walking along the rock wall built from the quartzite.

Great report and pictures.

We only took a few hand tools, rock hammer and small chisels.  If I had been at full health I might have walked back to the car to haul out the heavy artillery.  Even so, because of the local park setting I would feel unethical doing much more than casual digging, prying and surface collecting.  High up the bluff a few spots looked like a cannonball shaped mass had dropped out, and the hollow spot left behind showed a fractured mess of the larger, more crystaline feldspar.  I think if you could move a lot of rock (or nature did it with an earthquake or the last straw of weathering),  more of these could be uncovered with a better chance of finding crystals -- if those were indeed once hollow.  The rock in and around the vertical fissures was pretty uniform no matter how wide  the crack, but yes if you chased those back, who knows?  Even in person it was difficult to trace out pegmatite boundaries.  Sort of a bland pegmatite, I suppose.  The folded band over the adit was interesting.  That void could have been a better section of pegmatite, but what old timers left is wall rock.  Opening the fissures would be heavy work in fractured but hard rock.  I raked through a good portion of the dump piles, and it was very uniform -- a mix of small chips of feldspar and quartz, with plenty of small mica flakes.
Even so, someone might find beryl tomorrow two inches deeper in the dumps or fissures, or in another outcrop down the creekside!  It has to get in the creek somehow.

Wow-beryl-beryl is good! It got me real excited - nice pic of a nice specimen.

and congrats to Sean on the geofind - that's almost as good as a rock!

Nice report with good pics, Cuz.  Thanks for the trip.

cheers,
r