 Hello and welcome once again to the rugged Rockhound. It's another Monday, so it's going to be another week of just whenever I can get out rockhounding after work. Today, nice day, a little windy, about 70 in the mid-70s. Great day for it. So I'm parked in a little different area. I've gone further down the road and I saw this nice little area out here, this valley, and I was like, I'm going to go check those hills. You can see them coming out there and we'll explore this area. See if we find anything in this spot. Wish me luck. So I'm up on the hill here. Apologize for the little bit of wind. That's where I parked. So I'm getting better feel for this and I thought I'd stop and kind of help instruct on how I'm finding the bearite. So you walk across and you're trying to find where you see the calcite, right? Now a lot of places will have already been dug, but if you see any good evidence of calcite, then go ahead and maybe scratch a little bit, get into the surface a little bit. And if you can find any decent sized vein of calcite that hasn't been dug up yet, there's a good chance that if you keep following it, it'll get into one of the nodules. I find that these areas usually aren't just like, here's one nodule and then there's one nodule. Usually they come in like groups. That's what I've been seeing anyway. And so some people, it looks like they'll dig and find a big one, but then you look at it and you're like, wait, there's a calcite vein over there. And then you go dig it and low and behold, there was more. You dug into it and then boom, you find some bearite. So that's what I'm kind of learning and figuring out here. So if you ever come out here, that's what I suggest. Go around and even look at the ones that have already been dug and take a look and see if you can find a nice vein of calcite on the side somewhere or whatever and be like, hmm, maybe I should follow that. Here's a good example of what I'm talking about. Here's the main hole somebody dug. You can see the calcite all over there. And then I came over here and there's a bunch of calcite coming down, but I didn't really see a dug hole. And then I saw, look, calcite vein in the rock itself. And then I've been moving some dirt and here's some dirty ones coming out. And there you go. Look, there's a vein right there. And there's some of the calcite. So this is a good spot to check. So I'm going to go ahead and dig this. It may lead to something. It may not, but this is the stuff you want to check. So I was following kind of the vein. It was kind of running along like this and it was kind of here and then it was gone. And a lot of it was pretty thin, but I just kind of kept going and even after digging through this dark stuff, which is what you don't want. Okay, see that dark limestone? That's not what you want. What you want is this red color. And there you go. All of a sudden kept digging and there you go. Not far from the surface. We're hitting some calcite and what may be some buried in there too. Not very thick yet, but that's okay. There's the crystals that I saw originally, but I didn't see this. There's a whole thick vein right here. It's kind of dark still, but it is mostly buried. I've been pulling it out over here. I don't know how you can see it, but it's mostly buried. And I can tell because of how heavy it is, you know, and the crystal faces are much cleaner usually. They're more clear than the calcite typically. So yeah, so I'm gonna get all this out and see if we've got any nice, nice crystals. So far, nothing that's really terminated. It's like just broken with a few faces here and there. All right. Things are going really well, but I want to point something out. A lot of the times I've been fun, you know, since I've been here that some of the best crystals are tiny and you'll miss them if you're not going slowly. Now, there's a bunch in here. You might not even be able to see them because they're kind of dirty and they're small, but yeah, I've already pulled out about half a dozen that are like this. So go nice and slow and careful and really look at every little bit that comes out. Just slowly move everything. Just take a close look, anything that looks suspect. Put it in a pile so you can take a closer look at it. And sometimes, you know, you look at it and you think, oh, it's nothing, you know, but if you have any inclination that it might be, then keep it. Take a closer look at it or take it home when you can clean it off. Here's this crystal cleaned off. Very small, but nice and clear. This is just a bunch of the crystals. I have quite a few, but these are some of the nicer ones. So end it up with a good dozen or two smaller crystals, all terminated, all nice and clear. Really cool. So I've continued digging into it and this is just fun. The majority of what it is is actually barite. It's a vein of barite mostly. So you're just pulling out pieces of it. The only ones that are really fully terminated so far have been really small, but still it's really cool. And the busted pieces, some of them are just nice and clear, just beautiful, you know. So just, yeah, worth keeping in my book. So I'm just grabbing every little piece that looks somewhat decent and thrown it on the pile. Pulled off some more rocks and exposed more. It just keeps going. Still small veins, still mostly mess, you know, just a vein that just falls to pieces. Occasionally a little crystal, but still fun. So I've been digging for quite a while, getting a bunch more stuff. I just, I have tons of stuff now, but I wanted to bring you in because I just pulled this out. Look at that crystal. Oh, that's beautiful, terminated. You can see right there where it kind of ran up against the pocket. It's beautiful. So cool. So clear. Love it. Here's this one washed off. This was really nice. Beautiful clear crystal. Nice termination to it. Look at what I just pulled out of the clay. Look at that crystal. Oh, it's beautiful, isn't it? I'm a fractured. I'll be careful not to touch it too much and I'll try and protect it. Hopefully keep it from cracking anymore because it's beautiful. Here's this crystal all cleaned off. Really nice. Once again, wish it didn't have the fractures, but it's a nice terminated crystal. So you remember that one I pulled out? So I think I may have finally hit a pocket for the first time. I think these are crystals here even though they're just covered in mud. It looks like rock, but I pulled these out and these are crystals. These little ones. So yeah, exciting. I'll have to get them out and eventually get them cleaned off for you. Here's this crystal cleaned off. I love this one. Look how sharp the tip is. It comes to a nice flat wedge. Really cool. These two are also quite nice. This has a nice termination to it. This one is two crystals. They're broken, but I like how they come together there. And it's Tuesday. So day number two of the week. Today I'm actually off work, but I've got a lot of stuff to do. So once again, it's only going to be about two hours out here, but I am joined with my wife. Say hi. So I'm going to go back up to the pocket I was digging yesterday. I feel like there's still more there. So I want to go check it out again, which was that hill right there, really close. Back at the hole. So this is where I was digging yesterday was in this. And then I went ahead and cleared all this off to try and get back into here. And as I was clearing, found a little bit of calcite here and tiny bit of berry, but it wasn't very good as broken. Then I found some more right there. I've been pulling stuff out. No full crystal yet, but those are definitely pieces of berry. So we're going to keep searching in here. See what else we can get out of it. Here's this crystal berry cleaned off. It was very dirty and cracks in it. So it didn't come out the best, but it's still buried. The pocket that was here, while the stuff I was digging ended up just being a vein and I kind of just piled the stuff here. I don't think I got any crystals out of it, just broken pieces. And then as I kept digging back, there's this little pocket here where it's just a bunch of tiny thin crystals like these, just like fibrous crystals. I doubt they'll survive, but I'll try and see if I can't get a few of them to survive. So we dug down a little bit and look at that. It's a really cool vein of calcite. I mean, it's really clear, so it makes you think, oh, agate. But it's calcite. Still kind of cool, though. And this is what you want to follow to hopefully find the berry. So after digging a well, well, that's a bunch of calcite. No berry that I could see. So I think if you kind of get deeper when they get all solid veins of calcite, it might be that there just wasn't space for the berry. So maybe the berry is further up. So I'm gonna forego going any deeper here and instead go that way, which is where I was finding stuff yesterday. Here's this piece of calcite cleaned off. It was just very clear. So I just wanted to kind of showcase a nice piece of calcite that was really clear. So you can go out there and look for this stuff. And I think it's worth keeping a few of these pieces. Beautiful. Okay, so we weren't digging over there. And I searched around a little bit because that was kind of disappearing. So I dug there and there. I hit some calcite veins, but after digging for a while, didn't really hit anything. Came to this whole pit somebody dug here and off to the side, starting to see all this calcite. You can probably see it here. But I dug this, just pulled this out and boom right there, berry crystals. They're really dirty out in the way. You can see them. But these are all berry crystals in here. How do you spot those? So look at the way calcite is, how it's faded, and then look how clean that berry is and how smooth that surface is. That's a good way to tell them apart. So here you see a close-up, how nice that crystal is. And then you can see there, these are berry crystals. They're just really dirty. So when I get them cleaned off, you'll see better. Here's this crystal cleaned off. This is a pretty nice one. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the full termination. It broke, but that's the way it is sometimes. And here's this thing cleaned off. So we have this berry crystal here, broken, didn't terminate. You have another nice berry in there, a bunch of smaller ones aside, and a beautiful terminated one right there. Yeah, a bunch of faces all through here. So it's a lot of crystals in here. And overall, it is really nice. It is hard to see everything in it, but I'm happy with that. Uh-oh. So I got down here and it turned into clay. See that? Clay. When you hit clay, that means you hit the edge of the natural and you won't get any more going that way. Let's do that. And we're back at the vehicle, so I'll get ready to head out. And yeah, overall pretty good day. Found a few more barites, that one specimen. I'll wash it off. It's probably going to be pretty cool. And that's probably all I'm going to get out this week. We've got a lot of work of a job going on. Sorry about the wind. It is windy today. I don't know if you can hear me. But yeah. So that's it for this week probably. So I'm going to go ahead and end the video here. That's barite again. So until next time, hopefully not as windy. Remember, there is treasure everywhere.