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January 11, 2009  Joe and I went to check on a spot Dave clued me in on last weekend.  We were finding lots of crystal faces here but nothing whole and nothing great.  This was our sand box for the next 3 hours.

There had been a lot of rain here so the wash outs were plenty.  We could see many veins of smokey quartz running across and along the road.  Much of the quartz in these veins was broken up and cloudy.  Every once in a while there would be a face or two that would show up.

Later we stepped off to the side to check out the gravel in the creek.  Here's Joe (below) investigating the gravel bar.

Next, we decided to head over to the tourmaline and quartz spot that I visited last weekend with Dave.  Joe had not yet been to this spot and was interested in checking it out.

The whole side of this rock had faces.  You can see the small mica books still attached.  This was laying in the middle of the creek.

This is the spot I dug at for the bulk of time we spent here.  This was what I could only describe as saprolitic saprolite.  The earth here fell away so easily that the digging was relaxing.

The darker area in the center was a vein of what looked like baked quartz.  This was an iron rich vein as I could see some iridescence on the blackened and baked quartz within.  Just above this vein there was an area of grey clay that produced crystal faces and many specimens of tourmaline included quartz.

The specimen above is one of the clearest tourmaline included quartz I found.  Shame it was only part of a crystal.  The crystal below was in the creek.  It had been there very long and was so frosted and scratched up that I had to put mineral oil on it to show that it wasn't opaque.  Too bad it too was busted all up.