Spent the weekend with my folks at Red Feather Lakes and had a wonderful time. It was too windy to fish, although the lakes/ponds were recently stocked with 12-18″ golden trout I hear; but instead dad and I took a walk to a previous spot we had found and dug in a small quartz vein.
Dad started off the day prospecting a little and came up with a nice set of binoculars that someone had dropped a ways off of the trail. I’d say he got the best crystals of the day! LOL!
The vein we worked had graphic quartz with more course larger quartz chunks away from the seam. I am new to this type of digging, I’m used to digging in pegmatite so I was digging around testing out the whole area. The whole area was filled with sticky red clay making it slow going.
Right away we found the seam that we ran into last time and the largest crystal was one of the first we pulled out. Gave us false hope for others that size; but kept us digging for nearly 4 hours. The clay made finding crystals a little more difficult than normal as you had to work each rock that came out. The seam appeared to pinch out on each side of our two foot hole; but I suspect there was more in the area.
The crystals are white/drusy quartz and some started to get clear, but nothing to get over-excited about from a specimen perspective, but we did find many single euhedral crystals and several smaller plates. No amethyst that the area is world famous for unfortunately; but we’ll continue to prospect the area and maybe someday hit some purple crystals.
Over all, an outstanding day digging with my dad, looking forward to the next time!
I’ve been up to red feather lakes a few times but couldn’t locate any crystals…do you have any locational pointers for a fellow rockhounder in that area?! There obviously there but some how I keep missing them just alot of white raw quartz everywhere.
Howdy. I am actually planning to do some prospecting there later this summer. There are the claimed areas that are obviously off limits, but beyond that I am not overly familiar with the geology of the area. On hikes I have run into some signs; I’m used to pegmatite prospecting and the quartz up at RFL is different structurally; but you’re still looking for the typical signs, flat sides, quartz, etc. Happy prospecting!