There's more! Want to see all that we found and the crystals after they've been
cleaned up? Relax - that is perfectly normal! Just pop on over to PAGE
THREE!
There's new pictures (July 11) and I'll add even more later in the evening of July 12th.
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even buy crystal/mineral
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Montana Quartz & Amethyst Scepter Page 2
Updated July 12, 2018
9:10 PM Eastern  (photo announcement added)
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Click here for info on the Georgia Rock shop : The Mineral Gallery in Mcdonough, Georgia. Just South of Atlanta
Be sure to check out Page One to get up to speed on the back story on our trip to Polaris, Montana where Jeff
Lennox and I were digging.................
On the second day of digging I decided to start a brand new hole at the crest of the Mountain.  I wanted to see what
the crystals from other areas of the locality looked like and most importantly, I wanted to be able to follow veins and
pockets laterally without having to move huge amounts of overburden!
Since this area is heavily dug over, it can be a challenge to find a fresh area that hasn't been dug up to some
degree or another.  You can't tell at a glance if someone simply sifted through the upper foot of the surface topsoil
or if someone has dug down really deep.    One trick is to find a sizable tree stump which will indicate that no one
has dug there in 30 to 40 years and probably ever!    While digging any hole can be a chore, digging up a stump or
simply digging beside it is double or triple the initial effort.   Plus, there are no guarantees that the test hole that you
start will yield any crystals at all.
Since mining is my middle name and with experience digging on the North American continent as well as in Africa,
generally when I decide on a spot it is golden.   And so it came to pass that the second hole that I sunk had some
nice crystals in it that were even better than the first hole!
The photos show the start of the second hole on the crest of the mountain. There was a large tree stump and someone had dug very small shallow holes around
the roots.   We dug a ring around the stump and then I dug a deeper test hole at the most promising spot.  This turned out to be dead over a pockety area with
vugs loaded with crystals!    Initially this was a really tight hole and at times I was upside down reaching as far back as I could.   We found a lot of crystals, some
quite large, so on the second day of working on the second hole I decided to widen the area beside the stump to give us much more room to work.
Below shows some of the crystals we were finding once we started hitting
pockets in the rock.  These were big enough to get us excited about
digging deeper and wider!
And scepters! We started finding them one after another, and some
pockets had almost a dozen and some had even more!
Below right shows us beginning to expand
the hole beside the stump.
After 3 hours of very hard digging at high altitude, the wall of dirt beside the stump is now gone. This
gives some elbow room and safety.
Now things are moving at a rapid pace and crystals of all types and
sizes are coming out. A dozen scepters and then a bigger crystal, and
so forth and so on!
The photos below show the bottom of the hole and a look inside at a crystal pocket with
hundreds of scepters in it! It's worth expanding the photo 2x to get a good look at the pocket!
This crystal pocket photo was taken by
Jeff with his phone. (BELOW)
This (below) is a 'bird's-eye view'
looking down on Jeff from the stump
above. Directly in front of Jeff's feet is
a crystal pocket filled with hundreds of
crystals, many of which are scepters.  
A close-up of the pocket is shown
under the photo of Jeff in the hole.
Crystals shown "in-situ" in the breached vug or
opening in the rock.
Note the "rust" or powdered hematite. This is a
common pocket filling. Any "rust lines" should be
followed as they often culminate in a view like
the one seen below:
The stump (shown at left and below and which was filled with red ants - which is another story
itself) turned out to be a pretty handy resting spot for any second-class citizens (crystals worth
keeping but not wrapping quality).
Shown below is a nice long amethyst scepter. The color isn't
really evident in this photo but I'll post photos of it cleaned
up to where it'll show the color more accurately.
One quartz crystal that we found had a nice complexly terminated pyrite crystal inside as an inclusion.  What makes
this one especially interesting is that the pyrite is not your typical run of the mill cubic crystal, but rather a very
complex crystal with many faces!
Shown below is the biggest equant
smoky quartz crystal that we found.
Also shown is a very typical scepter.
The scepters all were uniformly well
formed with amazing geometry.