June 21, 2009.  It was a great day to go crystal digging in Wake County. The sun was out bright and warm but a cool breeze graced us capriciously before we became too overheated.  In this report I wanted to focus more on what the quartz crystal producing veins look like.  In almost every case here in Wake County we find mica present in the vein where quartz crystals are found.  We are so confident in this mica relationship that we always follow the mica to find the crystals. 
We had two or three days of good rain recently so everything had been washed off for us and ready to go.  Our first stop was a construction site where I had previously found facet grade smokey crystals.  It was not difficult to locate veins of quartz that the rain had exposed for us. 
Joe inspects some quartz for signs of crystal faces in this washout.
This is one of the veins we were working on that was producing some small crystals.  All of these veins were iron stained as evident by the dark reddish brown contrast.  There were very thin mica veins that were present in and around the crystals that we pulled out.  
This is where the vein pinched off at the bottom.  We are always stifled in our pursuit of crystals here in Wake County because of the frequency at which the veins seem to appear and disappear.  We might pull one or two crystals from a crystallizing vein only to discover after one more inch of digging that the vein pinches off completely leaving no clue as to where to dig next.    
I was in a playful mood.
Just as Joe and I were finish with the first place Bob called me up and said he was getting into some crystals at another construction site.  It was great timing so we headed straight there to continue our crystal hunt.  The above picture is a section of the ground I scraped clean with my shovel.  The foliation of the layers of clay look just like grains of wood.  The black vein on the right produced a few small crystals.
Here's a close up of the foliation.  Below is a picture of one of the crystals that came out of the black vein pictured above.  
Next stop was another construction site known to produce crystals.  Bob directed me to a wall that he was pulling crystals from.  The mica was clearly present so we knew this was a good spot.  
After a few minutes of digging into a mica rich section I found some quartz running with it.  So I dug on each side of the vein and popped it out.  This crystal was right in the middle of it.    
This is the same crystal above cleaned up.  You can see the mica crystals attached to the outside of the crystal. Below is one of the mica crystals that came out of this small pocket.