On the 9th and last full day of our New Mexico adventure, we returned to the area that Eddie had given us a tour of two days earlier. Chrissy wanted to collect some smithsonite that we had seen while last there and I took the opportunity to poke around to see if I could locate some purple fluorite like what Eddie had shown us in the monster vug.
As we hiked along a trail, we came upon a large hunk of rock that we had noticed previously. It contained some small vugs with perfectly formed fluorite cubes on drusy quartz, but the fluorite had been bleached to colorless having been exposed to daylight for who knows how long. Since there were vugs on the outside of the rock, perhaps there were more on the inside, so I decided to give it a few whacks with hammer and chisel. It didn't take long to discover that the rock was indeed full of larger vugs, so I retrieved the proper tools from our truck and began working it in earnest. Naturally, Eddie was there to lend a strong hand and we performed some heavy-duty pounding and prying until late afternoon.
Photos by Chrissy Streeter
As it turned out, what we had thought was a rock outcrop was actually a very large boulder. We dismantled as much of it as we were able in what time we had. Since most of the fluorite was covered in a layer of dirt, there was no telling its quality when we were collecting, but we recovered and brought home a bunch of specimens because we'd rather error on the side of bringing home marginal specimens than leaving behind killer ones. After cleaning, about half of the specimens are what most would call B-grade, but there are also a bunch of nice ones in the lot - of course, having spent two days inside Eddie's mine may have made me a tad bit jaded about the quality of any specimen. The following pictures show a couple of the better purple ones we recovered from the big boulder.
Click on specimen pictures to enlarge
In between helping me and taking pictures, Chrissy and Eddie snuck over to the smithsonite area and brought back a few nice specimens. The following one is the best.
I slabbed and cabbed one of the smithsonite-bearing rocks and was pleased with the results.
(Cabochon pictures do not enlarge)
Late in the day, Chrissy climbed up the slope to a nearby open cut mine; one of Eddie's former claims and where he has maintained the right to collect. As I was cobbing and gathering specimens recovered from the boulder, Chrissy came back all excited about something she found but was way too big for her to carry back. After we wrapped, hauled and loaded the boulder specimens and with the sun getting very low on the horizon, I hiked up with her to see what she had found. Little Chrissy, with her uncanny rockhounding radar, had discovered a large rock that appeared to have mostly bladed barite on the outside, like the ones from Eddie's mine. She had split the rock with a hammer and chisel to reveal an interior choked full of classic blue fluorite cubes. Yowzer! That Chrissy had managed to find this smack in the middle of spoil pile rocks that had been walked over and picked through by countless others is amazing.
Chrissy's rock was too large for me to carry down a loose talus slope back to the truck, so we drove up and around to pick it up. We were only too happy to let Eddie have the other half of the large rock and went about pulling it out of the ground for him. When we did, we discovered that it was much bigger than we had thought and I had to pull out a prybar to extract it. Neither Eddie or I could have carried what remained of the boulder, so I went about cobbing it thus producing many fine specimens. Even though it was Eddie's rock, he insisted we keep a few representative specimens - did I mention generous? It took us each about half a dozen round trips of about 200 yards to carry all the rocks to our vehicles.
The sun was setting while we were hauling pieces of the boulder.
I don't believe that I've ever known a dog who could pose better than our Opal.
An incredibly vibrant sunset was a fitting end to a fantastic day of rockhounding with our buddy, Eddie.
The tenth and final day of our rockhounding adventure was a half-day affair on another of Eddie's Socorro County claims. He showed us a hilly desert area ripe with chalcedony, agate and drusy quartz, mostly in shades of white, but also some red, brown and caramel. I didn't take any pictures in the field or of the mostly-cabbing material that Eddie has named "Blue Ghost Agate", but there are some cabochon pictures of it on the last page of this report.
We bid farewell to Eddie that morning as he had to get back home. We could not thank him enough for his incredible generosity, so I'll give it one more shot - THANK YOU, YOU ARE DA MAN!
Just before noon, we had collected quite a pile of rocks, so we drove back to camp to begin preparations for our long drive back to North Carolina. We were up and on the road well before dark the next morning and made it home by 6:30 PM the next day. It was LONG drive, but the experience we had in New Mexico was worth every second.
The following two pages show pictures of all the cabochons I have so far made from rocks collected from the many locations detailed in this report - lots of pretties!
Report continued . . . . . . .
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