 Hello and welcome to the Ruggered Rockhound. This week I am not doing a rockhounding video because I've been too busy moving things in the apartment where you were cleaning out the basement apartment to rent it out. So busy with that, busy with schoolwork, so I didn't get a chance to make a rockhounding video. But I thought I'd at least show you some of my collection by showing you a place I'd like to go collect stuff that's just beautiful. It's kind of got a special place in my heart and it is a private claim so I'm not gonna show you where it is and if you do know where it is just understand it is a private claim and do not go out there unless you get permission from the owner. Now to talk about the really cool specimens from this location. Okay you can probably see a whole lot of yellow. So this is mostly yellow. It's got a few other colors and things in it but the yellow is a mineral known as Crandolite. Crandolite is actually a rare mineral that is formed as a phosphate. Now a phosphate is a mineral that has phosphorus and oxygen in it as part of its chemical formula and it'll also have a lot of other things in it all kind of all kinds of other elements based on what mineral is. In this case we're looking at Crandolite and Crandolite is pretty common in the spot where you go look for this stuff but the reason people really go out here is not so much for the Crandolite but for the blues and the greens which is Wardite the blue and green is known as varicite. This is the little green monster mine claim that has world-renowned specimens of varicite and other minerals from an area called Fairfield Utah in the Clay Canyon. So if you hear any of those names Clay Canyon Fairfield or little green monster mine it's all the same thing and so the yellow is Crandolite. There's other colors and what I love is the patterns it makes. It gets these nice little bubbly pockets in them sometimes and other times it's solid and you can see nice little layers bands going from the center outward. So a little bit about the history of this. So this originally started all green as varicite and as over time other minerals came in they replaced the varicite leaving voids and gaps and stuff like that. I'll show you some green ones here in a minute that really show that very well. This drawer has a bunch of purples in it as well as some blue some of that blue Wardite. So this stuff is beautiful. I love this stuff I've gone out there many times. I probably won't get out there a whole lot more because most of the tailings have been dug through. I got permission from the claim on where years ago to go dig through the tailings. I stopped going out about a year or so ago because it just became too difficult to find the stuff and I like to explore other areas too. Now while I'm showing you some of this stuff I actually want to turn this into kind of a Q&A. So what questions do you have about geology or rockhounding or Utah or anything like that that you would like to ask me? Go ahead and put it in the comments down below and I will try to answer as best I can. Alright I'm just gonna keep showing you some of this beautiful stuff. I just love how it chambers and all the different colors that I will get in it and the blue likes to form circles. So I really like the blue. The green though is the prize. The green varicide is the hardest thing to find out there and it's the most desirable. So as we go up through these I'll just show you parts of the collection I have. So they're so beautiful and each one is unique. It'll come with its own variety of colors and patterns. Each one has its own personality. I guess you could say has its own story to tell. It's just beautiful stuff. I do hope that the claim owner does eventually get back out and start digging it again. That would be awesome. But until then I'll just enjoy what I have here and maybe I'll go back out again. I don't know. It's getting really hard to find anything. Here we go. Now we're getting into the green varicide. So the green varicide is what you really want and sometimes you get the dark green which is really desirable right in the middle. Sometimes you just get the light green. But as you can see with a lot of these ones that the green, see how it has a separation between the green and the outside and it's showing you how the varicide was being replaced by the other phosphates. These used to all be green and then a different composition of water came up through and the condition was such that the varicide was no longer stable in that environment and was getting replaced by the other phosphates. So just a quick reminder the yellow is called Crandolite. Green is varicide. Blue is Wardite. You've got Millicite and a whole bunch of others phosphates in there. When this was first discovered back in the late 1800s, Ed over in Arthur Montgomery are the ones who made this kind of a well-known area. And then they had somebody come out from the Smithsonian to do a geologic study on it. And as it turned out, oh I was going to show you this one. And as it turned out, there were somewhere around 80 minerals that had never been discovered before that were found in this location. Now this one right here is a beautiful large nodule that's been slabbed that my friend found. Tim, the one I go out with most, he found this several years ago about three years ago, I'm going to say. And this is one of the best pieces we've ever found. Just beautiful. The green, the blue. And I love how the blue makes these gorgeous circles. It's another piece of the slab. And this is just beautiful stuff. Beautiful stuff. All right, I'll go ahead and show you the last drawer now and look at that. Beautiful. Beautiful greens, blues, purples, yellows, all kinds of stuff. And so why this stuff is so beautiful is because of the variety of color and the patterns that they make on them. I just love this stuff. Okay, that is it for this episode. Like I said, just didn't have time to do a rock hunting video. I'll get back into those next week. I actually went out with my friend digging. We just, I just haven't had time to put the video together. So that'll come out next Friday. I will continue to be putting out rock hunting videos weekly as often as I can until the weather maybe changes. It actually has already started changing. It's getting kind of cool. But yeah, I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you enjoyed looking at these beautiful varicite, wartite, milcite, crandalite, phosphate minerals that come from the little green monster mine in Fairfield, Utah in Clay Canyon. And there's been reports of other places people have found some cool phosphates like that in the area. And it just goes to show that even though amazing things were found in the past, there's still things to be found. And who knows if we keep looking maybe one day find something really cool. Remember there is treasure everywhere.