Our next stop that afternoon was at the fluororichterite road cut. The roadcut consisted of a small section of hard rock composed of mostly fluororichterite and biotite in pink and white calcite. This gently sloping face has been extensively worked with hammer and chisel to remove chunks of rock. There were even numerous saw marks and a large boulder laying at the foot of the cut that had been sawed off. I quickly whacked off a nice chunk of rock form this boulder. After that, I soon discovered that it must have been my lucky day, as I found a large section of rock containing large fluororichterite crystals where it appeared that someone had spent a great deal of time and effort trying to remove. They must have had to give up on account of darkness or for some other reason because they were almost there! It took me all of about 25 minutes to remove the whopping specimen shown below.

Click on the above picture to enlarge

Our last stop on Thursday was at the Wilberforce Road Cut. This location is known for unusually large crystals of diopside. This tiny roadcut didn't show too much potential at first glance, but when we checked the rip rap from the cut that had been deposited next to the highway, we were able to recover a few crystals of very large diopside. As you can see below, they sure are homely but big.

It rained for the first time Thursday night but let up by Friday morning. The break in the rain allowed us to visit the last place on our list: the Quirk Lake Occurrence where hornblende, feldspar and apatite have been found. We were told by our friends, Ron and Faye Burke, that they had found quartz crystals at this location on their July trip, but they must have taken every one because we didn't see any. This small location is a series of fissures that run at about a 60-degree angle to the road. Some of the fissures were quite deep and very narrow. It would take a very skinny and brave man to crawl down into one of these openings. I am definitely not skinny and an unabashed coward when it comes to crawling into confined underground spaces, so I spent my time on the surface digging out one of the fissures that appeared to have been purposely filled with rocks. It looked to me like a former rockhound had gone to way too much trouble to fill this particular hole, so I thought that I would help him out by emptying it. Chrissy scratched around along one of the fissures seeing what she could uncover. After several hours, I had cleared the bottom of the hole but the rain had returned and I was too tired to make a serious attempt at moving rock on the bottom. We did manage to find a few representative specimens just to say that we had been there and done that.

By early afternoon, the rain had let up again and we were able to play tourists in downtown Bancroft. We finally found out what it was like to have lunch from a "Chip Wagon". We feasted on burgers and some of the best short-cut fries that we had ever had. While we were waiting, Opal had her ears expertly massaged by a nice teenage girl who was waiting for her order to come up.

That evening, we met and shared supper with our friends, Arnim and Betty Walter, who had driven up from London, Ontario to spend a few days collecting themselves. Arnim's severe arthritis has put his best collecting days behind him, but he and Betty still managed to get around to pick up a rock or two during their time in the area. During a lively after-dinner discussion about politics, I thought for a minute or two that Betty was going to get up and whip my ass, but we finally agreed to disagree when the rhetoric died down.

We were up early Saturday morning. The rain that night had, again, conveniently stopped to allow us to get our things together and bring down the camper. We were anxious to hit the road and to get back to our beloved United States. The Canadians were very gracious to us, but there is no place like home.

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