I had a earned day off on Friday of Father’s Day weekend and so I decided to go crystal hunting. Hunter and his friend Trevar have always wanted to go with me so I figured with they being off for the summer it was a perfect day. We left at 7am and headed up to Devilshead. The plan of the day was to try and find a hole that had long been abandoned and check out the bottom to see if there was anything left. Then once it got warmer we’d head back to where I had luck last year. Well, that plan never worked out…

We never found the hole I was looking for and we hiked quite a bit, so I decided, since it was on the way, to hit a spot where we could likely pull some “scraps” from other digs–give the kids a chance to get “in the mood” and then get them digging! While they were checking out the tailings, I decided to check out a pit where I found my first two crystals ever to see if there was anything. The hole had been worked since last year so I figured it was stale; but after about 10 minutes I hit a little “mud”. That is where I stayed all weekend! 😉

I worked in some mud and was finding some interesting crystals; nothing “perfect” but definitely 2 or 3 faced smokey quartz and somewhat large. I had some hard rock in the way of a crystal I found so I excavated that section and discovered the pocket was larger than I thought. I started to work on the right side of the pocket and discovered some flat sides on a “rock”. I worked this side of the pocket for the next couple of hours.

For some reason the big crystal wouldn’t move; I finally was able to get it to move slightly and found that it was hung up on something behind the crystal.  I removed some mud back there and discovered another crystal attached.  I was able to pull the crystal out of the mud finally, and to my surprise there was a point on the other end!  Wow, a huge crystal (I never dreamed I’d find) in my hand!

After pulling this out, I figured out what it was caught up on, another small little crystal fell into my hand when pulling this huge one out.

The kids were pretty impressed too but they decided to continue on their fort made with sticks and a hole. There were a couple of large (one larger) crystals in the same pocket so I with renewed energy started working on those. Ended up the biggest crystal hit the bottom of the pocket after about 4″, so it was huge in girth but didn’t do anything as far as a point.  I have that in the rock garden out front as a momento.  The other crystal in the back of the pocket looked promising and I worked on that the rest of the day; but didn’t get it out by the time we had to leave–working in that pocket mud/clay is somewhat difficult and you have to be extremely careful so you don’t break any other crystals.

I found a couple of cool Microcline crystals this first day and also some neat double-terminated flat crystals.

The pocket continued…Saturday AM.

We had a birthday party to go to at 2pm, so I woke up early and headed back up the hill to see what I could excavate in the 4 hours I had.  Not messing around, once I booked it into the hole I started by excavating more area to work in so I wouldn’t have to lay down like the day before.  That ended up being a good 30 minute investment for sure.  I ended up pulling out a lot of the pocket and found some great smokeys and microcline crystals, including several funky double-terminated ones that were great.  The large crystal ended up terminating into the granite so there was no point; but it was worth the effort for sure as I pulled out some great other crystals in the process!

This microcline is the coolest one I’ve ever seen.  This was sitting below the granite dividing the two sides of the pocket.  Ultra cool crystal!

This is the second big crystal that took a while on Saturday to pull out.  Even though it isn’t terminated, it is really neat with lots of detail in every side!

Here are a couple of the double terminated crystals I found immediately behind the big crystal #2.  It was time to head back, but there was a lot of cool stuff behind this crystal…ended up still home early so no damage done! 🙂

I was pretty excited when I pulled this big guy out.  Like a lot of the crystals I pulled out, they do not have very straight sides but instead have a lot of character.

This one was nice and gemmy, but obviously had another rock at its tip…

Here is the collection of nice microcline crystals I pulled out and cleaned.

There were several more really nice crystals, you’ll just have to pay a visit to take a look at them 🙂  I also found more imperfect crystals like this one that were way cool; several that were thinner than glass and in a small “pane”.

Between the success at Devilshead, the Saturday birthday party and the Sunday BBQ, this was a great father’s day weekend!  Thanks everyone, including you, mother earth!