Good question about the "elestial". I've been wondering, too.
Seems like someone says, "That's elestial quartz." And people go, "Oh."
So, the final word on all things quartz,..."The Quartz Page".
here's a link to the elestial page, http://www.quartzpage.de/gro_text.html#elestial

As for your other little question, that's a lot of question.
I'll bet Scott could sum it up in a few short sentences.

Finding minerals will be different depending on the location.  Even if you narrow it down to just one type of mineral, quartz for example.  Sometimes you have to mine it from iron hard rock, or if you're lucky, from soft clay. So your tools mainly reflect what kind of matrix material you have to work on to get to your minerals. Pry bars, chisels, sledge hammers, feathers and wedges for hard rock matrix.  Shovels and mattock for dirt and clay matrix.

Where do we start?  Here in NC we generally look for alpine-type fissures.  These are miniature faults caused by previous mountain building events millions of years ago.  These fissures are usually accompanied by mica, a shiny silvery to black mineral, as well as crystallized quartz.  We look for patches of mica or quartz on the surface that indicates a fissure.  From there we scrape around with our shovels or mattock until we find the fissure and expose it.  Sometimes the fissure is impossible to miss and completely exposed, others may be hidden under layers of dirt.

Dude wrote on Jul 17^th, 2017 at 11:56am:


You're welcome!    As they say there is no substitute for experience. Getting out in the field will always be your quickest way to learn.