Club Member Outings with Mike! Options

[MikeS]

I invited all of the Colorado Prospector Club Members to join me on my claim last weekend and we found some nice Goethite, Fluorite and Quartz crystals!
Thanks everyone for coming! A special thanks to those who helped with transportation and to the CP Club for making this possible.

On Saturday most of us attacked an older dig that has produced some large and unique Goethite in the past. I found a few nice smokey quartz crystals and Dave found a nice blue fluorite cube but it was mostly unproductive. Determined to find big Goethite specimens I went uphill and started tearing at a newer dig that has also produced large Goethite. After digging for the last few hours of the day in the newer spot I found a nice combo of Fluorite and Feldspar on a nice Goethite plate. So on Sunday we attacked that spot and by the end of the day many very nice specimens we harvested.

I only took a few pics in the field and my pictures of the specimens didn't turn out but I will have video edited soon and I will get some good pics of my best finds from the outing.

Here is the few pics I took to get it started.

James, Crusty, Jason and Ian working 3 individual pockets of crystals.






The weather was fantastic besides the haze of smoke coming from the wildfires out west.



More pics and video to come.

[Dave S.]

Here are some pics of the minerals from above, cleaned up a bit.

Here is the Fluorite. It has a few cleavage cracks and some inclusions. On the back (pic #4), it has a few micro-minerals and a chunk of host feldspar (pink), that block some of the light passing through the cube.













This is the Goethite spray(s) on a chunk of included quartz, after a careful brush cleaning.











And a complete tipped quartz crystal with several inclusions, including Mica(several types), Goethite, Hematite, and some red inclusions other than Hematite( I suspect they are Bastnasite-(Ce), and Florencite-(Ce)).

And I am pretty sure some of the black needle inclusions are not Goethite, but instead Plattnerite.













I did not have this piece in the original post, I did not see it till later, after a "cleaning check" for micro- minerals.

I am not sure but I think this little blocky metallic crystal growing on Quartz, is a Columbite-(Mn) crystal. (Formerly known as Maganocolumbite)

I may have to add these pics to the Rare-Earth forum later. I may wait till the Gem show when I can get it identified by a pro.