Mar. 8, 2009.  Today Bob and I went to go check out one of my favorite spots in Wake County, NC.  The creek here produces some nice crystals ocassionally and crystal producing veins are all around the place.
We took two basins and filled them with water from the creek before lugging them up the hill where the veins of quartz and siderite were.  This turned out to be very convenient for cleaning off the stuff right on the spot.   The thick red clay at this spot is very stubborn and the water helped out a lot. 
Here's a shard of quartz with a needle of rutile or schorl and a limonite pseudomorph after siderite rhomb at the end of it.
Many of the dikes of quartz I have dug on in Wake county have places along the side of the dike that are crystalized.  This is how the pieces above and below were formed.  This is why the other side of these pieces are either fractured (above) or blend directly into part of the dike itself (below).  Most of the dike, however, is just regular milky bull quartz.  Ocassionally there will be pockets either within the dike itself or around the outside of the dike where well formed crystals can be found.
After an hour or so of pulling out broken crystal faces and shards I finally find a decent whole crystal (below).
I got a huge bonus when I washed it off in the basin and found that it had a nice cluster of limonite pseudomorph after siderite coating one side of it (below).  
I also found a couple chunks of siderite buried in the red clay.